Reducing the Rack

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It was about halfway through my shift yesterday that the manager on duty at Can I Offer You A Coke Classic Fashions announced, with great glee, that we would be taking down the camisole sale rack.

 

“Really?” I asked, eyes going wide. “We’re going to get rid of it?”

 

“Yes,” she replied benevolently. “We will be putting the camis back in wall bays.”

 

“Hallelujah!”

 

“There is, however, one difficulty,” she went on.

 

“Which is?”

 

“We are going to have to disassemble the rack in order to get them to the wall bays.”

 

Dear lord. This thing has been the bane of our existence ever since the Great Big Clearance Sale To End All Sales began. It is a long, rolling rack suitable for moving out the door so that people can be enticed by the lacy sexiness of the spaghetti straps, which are packed on tighter than Tokyo commuters on the subway.  To disengage a cami from this rack requires a great deal of upper arm strength as you shove the hangers away, sending the camis at each end of the rack fluttering to the floor, and then remove the particular cami’s hanger quickly before the two sides expend their energy and spring together again to crush you.

 

And then you discover, to your horror, that the cami you attempting to dislodge has somehow gotten twisted with the hangers and spaghetti straps and folds of eighteen other camis around it in some sort of tangled web of sexy women’s tops. You despairingly tug at it, knowing what will happen when you do, and sure enough: the entire rack starts to move away with your cami as they are all locked in a death grip to each other.

 

“I JUST STRAIGHTENED THIS!” I found myself yelling when I was not in earshot of a customer.  “Do little gremlins come in and BRAID these goddamn things together when I’m not looking?”

 

Finally, after a great deal of effort and ladylike swearing, we surfaced from the last bay we had transferred them to and surveyed our efforts. The camis were just as tightly packed, in three rows, in the wall, only now some were too high for me to reach without looking ridiculous and some were too low and my knees crack every time I squat to attack them.

 

“Is this an improvement?” I asked the manager.

 

She shook her head sadly and walked away.

 

I’m getting a machete.

 

 

In other retail news, I am totally awesome, because I knew enough Spanish to thrill some Guatemalan customers and thus convince the man to buy the shirt he was wavering on and also I could offer their kids a drink. Yesterday was apparently the Day of Accents. My own accent in Spanish is probably atrocious, and aside from that we got the Guatemalans with their heavily-accented, broken English, a woman from Montreal with a strong French-Canadian accent, Louisianans,* Texans, Brits, and various Southerners whose states of origin I didn’t catch. Working in downtown Salt Lake has exposed me to the broad spectrum of people here for a conference and eager to get back to their own homes, although every single one of them “loves the mountains.”

 

That’s enough of the glamourous world of clothing retail for a few days, though.  I’ve got a couple of free days; enough to go get a good discount machete before I have to face the camisoles again.  God help us all.

 

 

*Or possibly Louisianians.