Storytime: My experience working in retail

You can open doors with your patience and your hands.

-Chinese Fortune Cookie

        I worked for Old Navy (ON) from April 2011 to Oct 2014. My first two years at ON was awesome. I had several understanding managers who knew that I was in Law School so they scheduled me to work on weekends and allow me to take holidays off to visit my family in New Jersey.

 At the end of my 2nd year at ON, I graduated from Law school and moved to Tampa. Since I did not have any legal job line up, ON transfer me to another store that they had at Tampa.

At this new ON, on my first day there, one of the managers told me she hated my voice. That should of been a warning sign of the things to come. In the following months, I would receive more insults and be humiliated in front of customers. One time, I asked myself if getting a salary was really worth  being treated that way. Did I graduate law school to have those people look down on me because I  was not at their "level?' I never knew why I was treated that way. But being there taught me a lot about people in power and how some people can abuse their power. Also, to value myself more.

The Customers

        At the first ON store, the customers were mostly nice, some were a bit self entitled but majority were tourist since the town I lived in was tourist city. I had a few bad encounters with customers, one of them being when an elderly woman cussed me out in Spanish because the items she wanted was not on sale. Also, since the town had a lot of Haitian immigrant working there, if you were black, EVERYONE assumed that you were from Haiti. I had a few customers come up to me and speak to me in Creole and even after I  told them I could not understand them or that I was not Haitian, some even argued with me saying that my name is Haitian and "why am I denying it" (BTW my name is a French name and I' am from the Dem. Rep. of Congo, Africa).

   The customers at my second store were a bit more bolder, diverse and interesting. Some were rude and treated the store as if it's was their personal home or garbage. A few destroyed the ladies' rest room. One customer threw her baby dirty diaper on the floor of the store and kept walking as if nothing happen. Another let her toddler pop a squat in the middle of the store and pee.

As always the issue of my ethnicity came up with many customers due to my name and accent. Apparently that city had a lot of people from South America and I fit the bill. Some customers assumed that I was Dominican and the Black American knew that I wasn't a natural born American. 

Anyways, after 3 years and a few months, I quit. It was time to move on with my life but I' am grateful that I had that experience to teach me so much about people and life in general.

~xoxo