One Employee—Too Many Hats

The one thing common to all my jobs is that I started out as a cashier.  Beyond that, each job took a very different turn.

Woolworth was probably the most diverse of any of the companies I had worked for.  After about a month with the company, I was trained to be a Customer Service person..or as we called it there “the worst place in the store to ever work” (and that was so true).  Later,  I will get into the grittier details of the job.  After about a year with the company, I became a front-end supervisor.  This is probably the second worst position in the store.  Dealing with the whiny cashiers was more of a case of patience than thrills.  I am sort of glad that I stayed in that position for about a year. 

When I wasn’t needed at the customer service desk, I also spent some nights and weekends at the Sporting Goods department, the Camera department, the men’s department and even occasionally in the women’s department.  The sporting goods department was certainly my least favorite as I knew absolutely nothing about the products in the department.  My favorite department was of course the camera department.  Here I played with all the toys and occasionally  played with the Sega Genesis unit when nobody was looking.  I could also play VCR tapes and play the radio and cds all day long.  There was even that rare occasion that I played cashier over in the store’s restaurant, but that was very rare.

HQ, however, did not offer much variety.  Initially, I was hired to work the returns counter, but ironically I never once got trained there during my 7 week life with the company.  I could not even tell anyone where the counter was because I never got there.  The only other place that I ever saw besides the front registers was the tool corral.  I considered this place punishment because I knew ABSOLUTELY nothing about tools.  I was only supposed to work the register in the department, but more often then not I was left by myself to help the customers while the actual employees who were supposed to work in the department was elsewhere.  In fact, one day, both of the people who were supposed to work in the department took lunch at the same time leaving me to fend for myself.  When the manager on-duty found out about this , he was furious and almost blaming me for the whole situation.  This just made the management just look completely stupid.

At Staples, I held one position and that was cashier, no customer service, no cashier, no customer service.  The reason for this confusion has more to do with the lack of consistency that managers had regarding me with the company.  Some times I was considered a cashier, other times customer service.  Since everyone in the store was sort of called “customer service”, this made the title even less meaningful. Even though the store had a “customer service desk”, anybody could do returns as long as they had the proper register credentials. More on that later.  Staples enjoyed blurring the line between cashier and service desk person and it showed.

There wasn’t much fundamental difference between how returns were done at Woolworth and Staples, but the details varied greatly.  In a future post, I will get in to the grit of the return process of both companies.

Now that I have the positions in order, it is time to punch in…

Next Up:  Punching In…Not As Easy As You Would Think!!