Ready To Clothes This Sale

I work at a rather expensive clothing store. My coworkers and I work on commission as well as a fixed salary, so making sales is not necessary to get a decent wage, but can enhance the salary quite nicely. Also, whenever business is slow, we get to leave an hour or even two early to save the store some money.

Since I wouldn’t get home until after 9:00 pm — after having been at work for ten hours — I am delighted when my manager tells me I get to leave early. However, ten minutes before I am allowed to leave, a customer approaches me and asks for help finding some clothes. I am not allowed to say no and I am not supposed to “hand him over” to a coworker when I get to leave early instead of my shift ending.

So, begrudgingly, I put on a customer-service smile and help him find the clothes. Many of the items he wants are either in the back or on a mannequin so I need to ask coworkers to help me locate them or undress the dolls; I have been working here for two weeks.

Some of the clothes I pull for the customer don’t fit, so the customer is happily trying on several items as I watch the minutes passing by, and I finally see that I won’t get to leave an hour early as I was planning to. When they are done, however, they smile and go, “I’ll take them all,” dumping about six items of — very expensive — clothing into my arms. They then go on to ask for several other items and, realising that they are actually going to buy clothes — a lot of people just come in, make us help them find a good size, and then go somewhere else to buy it cheaper there — my mood lightens dramatically.

I put the clothes on “my” table and go on to advise the customer for another half-hour, at the end of which the customer has selected clothes that come to a price of more than 500$. When they are done, I fold the clothes as quickly as possible to get them to the cashier and mark some as my sales, as well as putting down some as sales of the coworkers who helped me locate them.

My manager catches me with over fifteen items on my arm and asks me what I’m still doing in the store since I should’ve been gone for over an hour. When I point to the clothes and tell her that I have to get them to the cash registers ASAP for a customer, her jaw drops and she lets me get on my way.

That is the one and only time I was happy to stay later than planned.