Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail by Caitlin Kelly
My rating: 2/5 cats
sniff – oh, the memories. be kind to your retail workers this season, my fellow holiday shoppers…
aww caitlin kelly, you lookin’ for some sympathy?? i got your sympathy right here: boo freaking hoo.
here’s the lowdown: ms. kelly was a journalist. the economy tanked. she lost her position. so she got a part-time job working retail. it was harder than she thought it would be. so she wrote a book about how hard it is to work retail and how underappreciated companies make their sales associates feel.
did i mention that she started out with a whopping two shifts a week and then had to scale back to one shift a week because it was too much for her?
did i mention that the whole time she was working there, she was still getting paid for freelance writing and taking trips to france?
did i mention that she was living with a man at the time (a perpetual fiancé, it seems – which as an aside – anyone who has a fiancé for more than a year is bizarre – wrap it up already) who had a very lucrative career as a photo editor?
did i mention that she came from money, and got her very first journalism job at nineteen, while the rest of us were probably working retail and other low-paid jobs in order to pay our very first rents and couldn’t afford to get unpaid internships to pump us right into our first-choice career??
do i sound bitter?? i’m not, really. but for this author to have written this book about her experience in the horrorshow of the american retail world, i would like her to have had to actually experience that world. i work retail. i don’t get to go to france every year. i don’t drop $200 on a blouse. reading this book feels a little insulting. do it for reals and then let me hear your complaints.
the book is not a revelation. everyone knows sales associates get treated poorly both by the public and the parent company who sees them/us as cogs. this is a 220 page book which, if one were to remove all the redundancies – even to the extent of repeating the same anectdote- it would shave off about 50 pages.
my first thought was, well – she is a journalist – maybe she just can’t write long form without all the padding. fine. but then in her acknowledgments, she thanks her researchers. wait, what? you hired researchers to help write this crummy little repetitive book because what – your 16-hour a week retail job was just eating into all your time??
ugh. sympathy loss.
and then i tried to make allowances because she is older than me and i’m sure for a fifty year old woman having hot flashes, it is way more difficult to be on your feet for 8 hours, especially if you have never had to do it in your sweet sweet life.
but although she complains about the swollen feet and aching joints a lot, more of her complaints seem to be about her loss of autonomy and how she thinks she could do things better than the corporate mandates and why won’t anyone listen to me and why am i so white and relatively well-off and all these young kids working here have tattoos and piercings and babies and they won’t come to my apartment and swim in my pool???
yeah, i said it: “pool.” where’s my pool, you ask?? hmm, i must have left it in france.
and i’m not saying i could write a better book, but i could certainly write a more authentic book about the retail experience. and i wouldn’t need any researchers, that’s for sure.
i mean – gak – your example of a bad customer is when she called you hostile and threatened to call corporate?? honey, that’s my best customer. five days a week. manhattan retail. and i rock retail. recognize.
