Beyond Selidor

I love (aka don't love) how he had to take the posters down to make the backroom appropriate for a child/customer and didn't think, "Hm, maybe this isn't appropriate."

I KNOW. We all thought this at the time, but because we were a bunch of 15-18-year-old girls, all we did was roll our eyes and talk behind his back about what a pathetic person he was.

I do remember Franklins, and that is messed up that they put you on the checkout on your own on your first day. I also worked at Woolies aged 18 (although only for six months, in between a job in an Italian bakery/restaurant where the owners and chefs were dealing drugs out of the kitchen, and a job in a patisserie/chocolate shop that I ended up doing for the next four years, and loved so much that I worked there over two Christmases when I came back to visit my family in Sydney after moving to the UK ... there is a big bakery theme in my work history!), and your experience chimes with my own. I was put on the register with an experienced, long-term, full-time employee for the first month or so that I worked there, and they did a lot to make sure we were competent enough to be left alone. It was really sobering for me to work with this woman — she was an immigrant from the Philippines and worked full-time doing tedious work on a Woolworths checkout while also raising four kids, and there were a lot of other colleagues from similar backgrounds. I didn't much enjoy working at Woolworths — customers regularly shouted at checkout staff if they felt the prices were too high, which, given the wealthy part of Sydney in which this supermarket was located, was absolutely ludicrous, and it was just really tedious work — but it was fairly harmless as far as part-time work goes.

I personally think everyone should work at least one customer-facing retail job in their lives because working at Woolies taught me skills (the hard way—I love being yelled at by customers and being lowkey sexually harassed!) that corporate desk jobs wouldn't have many opportunities to teach me. I use some of those skills even now.

I totally agree. It's not that I think it's great that people just have to politely tolerate customers being awful to them, but there are a lot of situations where it comes in handy, and retail is good training for it.