Worker Bees and Beasts

For a brief time, I worked for one of those soulless corporate giants that returns to its shareholders a very pretty profit which ensures that the executives will get a big fat bonus and that its clients and employees will regret their relationship with them. Or some will, anyway. I did. Ours was the highest-earning store in a very high-earning region. And I was one of their highest earners (I had a friendly competition with another girl for top sales every month which was funny for us since we all shared our passwords and often closed for each other when we were ready to go out back and smoke.) We had a FU attitude toward most of the rule book because we could. They were actually a little afraid of us. HQ was in one of those parts of the country that is about 17 years behind the times, and their edicts reflected that. But for the most part, they left us alone.

Some of the rules were just laughable: gentlemen associates could not have hair that touched their collars and lady associates could not wear a skirt higher than three inches from their knee. Mind you, we were selling glasses. In the early 90s. To men with long hair and women with hardly any fabric covering their crotches.

Some of the other rules were just awful: we could be terminated for meeting outside of work if more than three of us were present. We were denied lawful compensation for travel times to mandatory conferences that we went to from the store. But the worst of all was that we were asked to lie to our patients. We were told to sell them things they didn't need, and that were not in their best interest. It was horrible.

Our parent company purchased stock in a company that made equipment to process a particular lens that is medically appropriate in a few cases but only a few. We were told to sell it to everybody. It's a shitty lens. It causes halos and distortion and visual anomalies, but that was where the company saw its profit, despite the fact that we refused to sell it and made them more money by selling designer frames. They had a business model and they were sticking to it. And we were very naughty. They swooped down on us with exhortations, bonuses, displays, demonstrations, and punishments for the reluctant. And yet we refused to sell it. We still made them a ton of money, but all they could see was lost revenue because we weren't selling this one product. What they didn't see, and what few corporations ever see, was that we had a relationship with our customers. They trusted us. Our subculture was to make sure that our clients walked out of our store looking amazing but more importantly, seeing well. That's why they came back to us and brought the people they cared about in with them. But our corporate culture was 180° in the opposite direction and they won. They fired our General Manager, replaced her with a lovely but terrified young woman who could no more handle our patients (some of Hollywood's biggest names) than she could handle us (a group of really pissed off sales people.)

She was forced to fire a bunch of us. She cried when she terminated me. I ended up comforting her.

It was an interesting lesson in just how bad the corporate world can get. When the people at the top really have no idea what the people at the bottom are doing, they get suspicious and nasty. They start to assume that their employees are up to no good, because that's their MO. (To be fair, one of ours was stealing designer sunglasses to sell on Venice Beach, but Loss Prevention went after the Latino lab rat and not the white sales guy who was actually walking off with bag after bag of frames.) Can you say "projection"?

I recently Googled my old employer, and let's just say the news isn't good. I'm not particularly happy about this. They have a lot of lives in their hands and I would rather those people be secure and happy. But little seems to have changed since those days.

I can say that they are better than these folk.

I don't even know what to make of them. Halloween is a foul mess this year.