Aisle Not Try That Again

I hate working Halloween and Christmas. The last week of September is when we’d start setting up the transitional aisle with Halloween stuff: makeup, costumes, masks, window clings, and so on. Kids loved this time of year; they’d come in with their parents, and the parents would let them go wild in the aisle. By the end of the day, so much merchandise would just be strewn about and laying on the floor that you could barely walk through without stepping on something. The bottom shelf would have stuff tossed back in there and everything was a massive mess.

We’d have to face the store during the last thirty to forty-five minutes we were open, so anyone not working a register would be working on making sure all aisles were straightened up and products were moved to the front of the shelves. I took it upon myself to be the one that the holiday aisle. I would go through and pull out all items that were no longer hanging on their hooks or sitting on their proper shelves and just throw it all on the floor so you couldn’t walk through the aisle.

I did this for two reasons.

1) I could make sure everything was pulled out that was out of place so we could put it all back properly.

2) With so much stuff scattered across the floor, any customers that came in during that last half-hour or so avoided the aisle because so much stuff was on the floor. 

I would use the same tactics during the Christmas days, but the last year I worked there was the year that everyone wanted the Tickle Me Elmo doll, and no matter how messy the aisle was, people would still wade through the mess and dig around, hoping to find the elusive Tickle Me Elmo doll. My “make the aisle messier” tactic didn’t work; people would still destroy the aisle immediately after I straightened it out, with five minutes left before we closed.

People suck.