Bah, Humbug? No, That's Too Strong.

I hate decorating for the holidays.

On the surface, this may be a very misleading statement. Truth be told, I love Christmas trees and Christmas lights and Christmas decorations. I love them so much that I start decorating for Christmas literally the day after Halloween, the earliest point allowed by law. By the time they start playing Christmas carols on the radio, I've already had my tree in the living room for a week and a half. That's how much I love the Christmas season.

The actual process of decorating is a serious drag, though. Lugging those big, heavy plastic totes out of the storage shed and up the stairs. Packing all our trinkets away for two months and switching them out with the appropriate seasonal décor. Applying all the window clings. It's a fairly long and involved process and it takes the better part of an entire day. Sometimes two days, because I have small children and they are time vampires by nature.

The worst part, by far, is the lights. I am now convinced that taking 200 tiny wax candles and successfully lighting them with a match would be easier than the electric lights I deal with every year. Oddly enough, I don't have the stereotypical problems that you see all the time on TV and hear about in radio commercials. I don't have jumbled balls of light strings that I have to untangle. (Indeed, my Christmas tree is artificial and conveniently prelit, so one of the biggest headaches of dealing with a genuine, authentic, live-until-you-chop-it-down tree are nicely circumvented.)

I seem to have the same problem every year. I take the lights out of the box, test them to ensure that they work, but as soon as I go to the trouble of wrapping them around the bannister or framing them around the window or hooking them to the deck railing, as soon as I plug them in under real-life conditions, they invariably will not work. The whole point of a test-plugging is supposed to eliminate the frustration of going to all the trouble to hang them only to find that I've completely wasted my time, but apparently the lights available on the market today are far too smart for that. They see right through my clever ploy. They wait until I've spend half an hour arranging them just so before they begin their annual, formal protest.

Determined to outsmart a string of electric bulbs, I will painstakingly and systematically remove and test every single tiny bulb. Each one is only about 0.4 watts so I am operating on the premise that they are not significantly brighter than I am. I will replace fuses. I will, if so inclined, drive to the store and attempt to find a replacement that is identical in length and color to what I am currently using, because I picked the decorations I have for a reason. (Multi-colored lights are the bomb. Clear lights are boring. Anyone who tells you differently is delusional.)

I've even gone so far as to purchase a light tester, which is a gun-shaped device that makes little beeping noises if your lights are good, and makes little beeping noises if your lights are bad. You can also tell which lights are bad because they're the ones that don't light up. The use of this device frequently culminates in me pointing it at my own head and pulling the trigger.

I go to all this trouble, and in the end it's just temporary anyway; at the beginning of January, all the Christmas stuff goes back in a gigantic plastic tote and goes into storage for another ten months. That's usually about the length of time required for me to forget what a hassle this all is, in preparation for doing it all over again the following year. (In some ways, putting the decorations away is even more tragic, because you spend an entire day and don't even have anything to show for it. You do all that work just to make the house look... normal and boring.)

I acknowledge that planned obsolescence is all around us, but I despise that we live in a disposable society. Things should be made to last forever... or at least should be made to last more than one Christmas season. Maybe everybody else throws out their Christmas stuff and buys it new ever year, but this is not something I can comfortably fathom. For me, the only thing worse than putting up holiday decorations is shopping for holiday decorations!

An Open Letter to Teenaged Children of Adult Parents

During the course of your infancy,

I changed 2,788 of your diapers.
I fed you 3655 bottles.  Always by hand, never once did I prop it up with a blanket.
I missed 1444 hours of sleep.  Probably too late to get those back now.
I let you vomit on me 11 times.  Nobody else holds that honor, not even my cat.

During the course of your childhood,

I played your "The Best of Elmo" CD for you 491 times.  I still have all the songs permanently burned into my brain.
I sat through 515 hours of Cartoon Network.
I administered 93 Band-Aids, even to boo-boos that weren't actually bleeding.
I read Dr. Seuss's "Hop On Pop" to you 154 times.  I read the entire thing, even when I wanted to skip pages.

During the course of your teens,

I spent seven hours on the phone with your mother trying to make plans to see you.
I spent 23 hours talking to you about being respectful to your stepmom.
I spent 14 minutes reading your diary trying to figure out why you were so mad at me.

During the course of this year,

You called me on the telephone zero times.
You e-mailed me zero times.
You came over to see me zero times.
You told me you loved me zero times.

When Will the Madness End?

The lengths that some adult men will go to acquire toy cars is absolutely unbelievable.

So, let me paint you a picture. Here's the scenario: We're having a "pre-Black Friday sale" at work, which I think is just a way of squeezing a little bit of extra money out of consumers before the sale day proper. (Thanksgiving falls on different calendar dates every year, and yet the corporate offices want the retail stores to make the same amount of money this year that they did last year during the same fiscal week. When this isn't practical or realistic, I think they invent new occasions like "pre-Black Friday" to try to compensate for this.)

What this means for me, as manager of the toy department, is that I was positively inundated with customers looking to gobble up all the underpriced merchandise that they don't legitimately need (which, I suppose, is a nice switch from the usual behavior of buying overpriced merchandise that they don't legitimately need). It was a crazy morning, compounded by the fact that I was running around trying to hang several hundred signs in the department to show off the new pricing, only to be interrupted constantly by customers calling the store all morning long. It was basically the same questions over and over again: When does your sale start? Do you have x product in stock? Can you hold it for me? What do you mean there are five hundred and twenty-seven other customers who are looking for the same items?

Now, don't get me wrong. I expect to be busy at work, particularly during the holiday season. Indeed, I prefer it to being bored. I've had jobs where the days dragged on endlessly because I wasn't feeling particularly engaged or challenged, so I think it's fantastic when the hours just speed by. Given a choice between looking at my watch and grousing that I still have two or three mind-numbing hours before the end of my shift, and looking at my watch and being upset that I only have two or three hours left to get all my work done, you can guess which one I prefer!

So, toys were flying off the shelf. (Which is weird, because I thought you had to put batteries in them first before they did that.) They were selling faster than I could restock them. In addition to all of the above, I was also trying to deal with a couple of pallets' worth of freight from the previous night that nobody had bothered to get around to taking care of. It was all stuff that I could have been selling, if it had actually been stocked to the shelves. All this on a Friday, the last day of the week, which meant I couldn't work longer than my regular shift without accruing overtime (which, right now, is a big no-no).

This is the time that Hot Wheels Guy arrives and demands that I go to the back room and sell him a shipping case of toy cars. (Let's call him Egon, because his real name is also the first name of one of the Ghostbusters.)

Wait, let me amend that slightly. His story, and I use the word "story" in the sense that it's a completely ficticious tale, is that his workplace is running a toy drive for less fortunate children, and he wants an entire case of Hot Wheels... but it needs to be a sealed shipping case, because otherwise he won't be reimbursed by his employers. Does this seem right to you?

Keep in mind that I keep my department well-stocked. There were probably about 400 individual Hot Wheels cars for this guy to choose from——the two-hundred-and-something that could fit in the regular "home" plus another display that I built in the main aisle of the department to try to catch some extra sales. There was absolutely nothing stopping this fellow from buying 72 cars (this is the quantity of a full shipping case) and, presumably, producing his sales receipt to his employers as proof of payment.

Of course, you and I know better. What Winston, or whatever ficticious name we're using here, really wanted was to get a sealed shipping case so he could get that one collectible car inside. The other 71 cars are barely worth the aluminum-zinc alloy they're made from, in his eyes.

I explained to him, as I have several times before, that I'm not in the habit of letting collectors dig through cases of freight from the stockroom. When there's room to put more cars on the pegs, that's when I put more cars on the pegs. It's as simple as that. Naturally, he demands to speak to one of my supervisors.

I explain the situation to a manager and she agrees to back me up. She says that if he needs a case quantity in a box, we'd be happy to put 72 cars in a box for him, but it's not fair to the other customers if we let him get dibs on a shipping case before anybody else. His response is smooth and rehearsed. "The cars aren't for me; they're for the children. What, are you saying you don't want my money? That you don't value me as a customer? I want the phone number for your corporate office!"

(I should mentioned parenthetically that this is not the first time I've dealt with Peter here. He introduced himself fairly early on in my tenure as manager of the toy department, trying to establish a rapport with me. From what I've heard from previous managers of that department, he was in the store literally the day it opened, and has been trying to befriend the various toy department managers ever since. That was three years ago.)

So he makes an elaborate show of getting on his cell phone and registering a complaint. He makes sure to ask for the name of the manager who crushed his dreams and ruined his chances of ever making any children happy again. A little while later, that assistant manager gets a phone call that goes something like this: "This is the corporate office. We got a complaint that you're refusing to sell to a customer. Please make that customer happy and sell him what he wants."

I found out a little while later that there was no call from the corporate office. This isn't actually how they deal with customer service issues at all; they typically e-mail the stores so the store managers can follow up on the problem. My store manager says that in 12 years, he has never once heard of an instance of the corporate office following up on a complaint with an instant phone call. So, the entire thing was an elaborate scam.

I didn't know this at the time, of course. All I knew was that I was being directed, apparently by the corporate office, to do something that I didn't really agree with. It's my job to do what I'm told, though, so I dropped everything and went to the back room to find a case of Hot Wheels cars. Even though, you know, the Hot Wheels were already fully-stocked, but other items were empty on the shelf and I was losing sales as a result.

I brought out the little square-shaped box with the Mattel logo prominently emblazoned on the front. Naturally, he was hovering right by the stockroom doors, waiting with bated breath. Apparently the tape had already been cut, though, so he demanded that I sit there and count the cars inside to ensure there was actually a full case quantity. Just then, I got a phone call, so I told him I had other customers to help (I'd been dealing with Janine here for about an hour, and that's a huge chunk of time to be wasting on a childish, demanding customers with a self-entitlement complex) so I took my leave and went back to my job.

After he made his purchase, he took the time to confront me yet again, waving his receipt in my face as though it were some sort of badge of honor. He went on this rant about how he doesn't appreciate being labeled as a "collector" just because he buys collectibles and that I need to treat my customers with respect. What's funny about this is that, the entire time I've been dealing with him, I've been trying to treat Slimer here like every other customer. Which means I'm not about to be his friend or try to do him any special favors. By this point, I had also spoken with the store manager, who told me that the so-called call from the corporate office had been a fake. I called him on it. I said, "You know, it's fortunate that the home office took the time to address your complaint so quickly. You must be a pretty lucky guy."

At this point he shifted tactics. He professed that he was really a nice guy and that I'd given him no choice but to act the way he did. When it comes right down to it, though, we all have a choice. He wanted to just put this whole incident in the past and he tried to shake my hand. Now, I strongly dislike handshakes. They're an antiquated form of social interaction (people used to do it to demonstrate there were no concealed weapons in their grip) and every time someone offers a handshake I can't wait to find a restroom and wash my hands. (There's no telling whether this person picks their nose, recently used the toilet, etc.) I shook his hand because it's the polite thing to do.

I was angry at this guy for wasting so much of my time and concocting this elaborate, cockamamie scheme just to get his grubby mitts on a shipping case of toy cars. Getting upset, I think, was my mistake. I should never give anybody the power to ruin my entire day, especially somebody I barely know (despite his efforts to buddy up with me). So, I've decided that he's going to be part of my own, private game. I'm going to have some fun with him. Instead of dreading the thought of spotting him swarming around the Hot Wheels aisle like a starving vulture, I can't wait to see him again, now.

Watch this space for details.

How Many Toys Is Too Many?

I am not shy about the fact that I own something like 3700 toys. That works out to be, on average, one new toy every 2.96 days for the past 30 years. It is entirely possible that there's something very wrong with me and that I'm suffering from some kind of undiagnosed clinical illness. If that's the case, though, then there are untold hundreds of thousands of people suffering from the same sickness, so at least I know that when they wrap me in a straight jacket and send me to the loony bin, it's very likely there will be people there that I know.

I have occasionally stopped to ask myself whether I really need to own these things. After all, probably only ten percent of it is readily accessible to me (the rest is in boxes stacked on top of each other in the storage room; digging for a specific box to locate a specific toy can be a decidedly unpleasant task) and I have so many of them in my possession that it's really impossible to give them all the quality time they deserve (more often than not, after I take them out of the package, they sit at the computer desk for me to admire for a few days and then they go in a box with similar toys from the same toy line). In the end, I've always reached the conclusion that I'm not hurting anybody, that what I do with my disposable income is my business, and it's ultimately a better investment than frittering away my earnings on booze or drugs (toys can be resold, sometimes yielding a much greater return than what I paid for them).

I am no longer a completist. There was a time that I bought one of every different Transformers toy in stores, one of each Star Wars action figure, etc. and I felt my collection was woefully incomplete whenever there was one that I hadn't yet bought or managed to miss out on. The problem with this approach, besides being financially draining, is that toy companies often reinvent their licenses to keep them fresh and exciting, which means that if they created a universe or characters that I disliked, I was "stuck" buying toys that I hated. I was allowing my collecting to be dictated by the whims of the toy companies—they might decide to cancel a given toy line tomorrow, or they might keep it running for ten years. You'd think this would be an obvious and foregone conclusion, but it took me a long time to figure out that I should only be buying toys that I actually liked and wanted to own.

I'm much more selective now. One of the benefits of being very picky about what I buy is that I can concentrate my disposable income on more expensive collectibles that I really enjoy tremendously. (They say that when you're an addict, you need a bigger and bigger stimulus to get the same rush. Well, when gobbling up ten-dollar toys no longer does it for you, try buying hundred-dollar toys instead!) I used to say that I could never afford expensive Japanese collectibles, and I was right, inasmuch as I couldn't possibly do so while sustaining my completist habits. So, not only have I freed myself from making purchases just for the sake of owning a complete set, but I'm enjoying each individual purchase much more than I used to.

So, here's the problem I'm having right now. (Clearly, if the biggest problem in my life is that I'm fretting over my plastic toy collection, my life as a whole must be pretty good.) There are a finite number of characters in a given fictional continuity. Once I buy, say, a Star Wars action figure of Myo or Dice Ibegon or Hem Dazon, it's arguable I'll never need to buy another one (and they're such obscure characters that it's likely Hasbro will never address them again, but that's not really the issue here). It's a little different with, say, Trade Federation battle droids or Imperial stormtroopers. They call toys like these "armybuilders" because you can potentially collect dozens of them and build you own little miniature army of identical soldiers. There really is no limit to the number of plastic stormtroopers I would need to own to possess a "complete" set, though. There is arguably no canonical number of how many stormtroopers were in service to the Galactic Empire, but even if there was some large, hypothetical number (like, say, 1138) that would still be considered essentially unattainable. I really do have way too many stormtroopers. I don't quite know what the exact count is, and I don't even consider some of the earlier toys to be part of the army proper, since the older Kenner sculpts (like the one from the Power of the Force 2 toy line, or even the slightly better CommTech edition) don't compare to the accuracy of the more contemporary version (from the Vintage Original Trilogy Collection). I do know I probably have enough to clear off some space on my bookshelf and do a diorama featuring an entire battalion of stormtroopers. It would not be an unimpressive display.

As an aside, I quite enjoyed the Smurfs toy line released by Jakks Pacific several years ago. I was very fond of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon as a youngster, and the toys were readily accessible, affordable, and made it easy to amass a large number of Smurfs toys. There were one hundred Smurfs living in the Smurf village (plus a handful of "lost" Smurfs who showed up later), but only a fraction of them were ever identified by name on the show. Most of the toys were sculpted to represent specific characters (Brainy, Jokey, Handy, etc.) but occasionally a toy in the assortment was called simply "Smurf," effectively allowing it to represent any of the nameless, faceless background fillers who were never identified by name in the cartoon show. The toys were usually sold at retail in a two-pack, but by a stroke of luck, Target stores were, for a while, selling single-pack baggies of Smurf figures in their dollar section, and the unnamed "Smurf" figure was among them. I could theoretically have bought enough of them to have one hundred Smurfs! I managed to buy a handful of them before they were no longer being sold, but I've always regretted that my collection of Smurfs is, and will likely remain, forever incomplete.

It seems that every toy line has its armybuilders. Besides the aforementioned stormtroopers, Star Wars also has snowtroopers and biker scouts (I grew up in the 1980's; I refuse to use the term "scout troopers") and battle droids and destroyer droids (or droidekas, if you prefer silly nonsense names). Ninja Turtles has its Foot Soldiers. Even the original Transformers toy line had generic troops in the form of the Sweeps (who were all identical to Scourge) and the Sharkticons, though building such an army would be cost prohibitive, since even the unlicensed knockoff versions can run about $50-60 a pop.

The reason I'm writing about this is because I got some Mousers today. Well, actually, they're M.O.U.S.E.R.S., which has apparently been retconned into an acronym for the Nickelodeon version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but the sculpt is amazingly accurate to the Mirage Comics versions as well as the ones that appeared in the 1980's cartoon, so as far as I'm concerned, they're capital-M-lowercase-everything-else Mousers. They're available in stores right now in a 7-pack, which is pretty cool, since the last time we got Mousers, you only got two of them in a package and you had to buy April O'Neil to get them. As of this writing, I have more than seven Mousers. Specifically, I have twenty-one of them. I've bought them every time I see them in stores, sort of like what I was doing with Imperial stormtroopers for a while. In each package, you get three silver ones, two gunmetal ones, and two weird black ones that I assume are stealth Mousers or something. (It's like they're turning into Isz from The Maxx. But I digress.) The silver and gunmetal ones are very serviceable as oldskool Mousers, but I tend to reject the black ones as largely worthless. So, maybe I "really" only have fifteen Mousers. I'm not sure how many I will need to buy before I'm satisfied. (In "A Thing About Rats," Shredder created a dozen Mousers to send after Splinter and the Turtles. Well, that was only the first batch, actually. He later cited a production run of 1200, which works out to be about 171 Mouser 7-packs, or 240 if I ignore the black ones, which would run me between $1518 and $2131 before taxes and employee discounts. It's unfortunate Playmates Toys is only shipping the Mousers 7-pack one per case.(Suddenly, that Sharkticon army isn't looking quite so expensive.)

So, I don't have any answers. Obviously, when there's a huge group of Mousers or Imperial stormtroopers or Sweeps or whatever, it's impossible to amass a toy collection that represents all of them. It's so difficult to define when the stopping point should be, though. (It's even harder with Mousers, since the final number has to be a multiple of seven. What if I want twenty-two of them?)

Everything Everywhere Should Cost the Same

Every once in a while I talk to customers who seem to be confused by the fact that the store at which I work does not have items that are identically priced to other locations in the greater metropolitan area. Along the same lines, I've observed people complaining on message boards about how their local store never seems to put anything on clearance but other locations much farther away have much better deals. It absolutely boggles my mind that this is such a source of confusion for people. It's like picking apples from an orchard and then driving ten miles in a random direction and then complaining that there isn't an identical grove of trees with exactly the same kind of fruit.

I'll let you in on a little secret, kids. Not every store is exactly the same.

Or, to elaborate in much greater detail: There are two different kinds of markdowns, at least for the purposes of this discussion. The home office, which makes a vast majority of the pricing decisions for the stores, sends down direction to the store computers. They're basically instructions like, "Put this assortment of $4.97 toy cars on clearance for $3.00" or "bump up the price of these action figures from $8.47 to $8.97." The department managers have to go find the product in question and perform the necessary labor (execute the price change by telling the handheld scanner how many items were found, print new shelf tags, move deleted merchandise into a clearance section, etc.) but there's almost no decision-making involved. The new selling prices are already decided in advance, and clearance items usually conform to a fairly rigid set of existing price points (almost without exception, merchandise at my store will fall into price brackets in odd-numbered multiples; i.e., $17, $15, $13, $11, $9, until you hit the lower dollar amounts at which point we nickel-and-dime you to death: $4.00, $3.50, $3.00, $2.50, etc.)

Or, to provide a practical application, the aforementioned action figures normally selling for $8.97 will most assuredly go on clearance for $7.00 when the manufacturer stops producing them, or when the store decides to stop carrying them. You can pretty much count on this.

Then there are store-initiated markdowns, which are a completely different animal. You see, when the home office sends down the price changes, it's the company that's paying for it. Retail math is kind of weird because money can just disappear. Suddenly, that case of 12 action figures used to have a retail value of $107.64, but suddenly its value has diminished to $84.00. It's the exact same case of toys, but now they're selling for less than they used to. Well, there are situations where the stores can decide to bring the prices down even further, but it's on their dime. Let's say there's a store that doesn't just have a single shipping case of 12 of these slow-moving action figures, but they have ten cases still in the stockroom. They recognize that they will be sitting on this merchandise forever unless it's priced to move, so they mark the toys down to five bucks a pop. Of course, that store has also just spent an extra $240, and it's coming right out of their own bottom line. Is it worth it? Depends. Sometimes it's either take the loss and get rid of the product while it's still marginally relevant, or sit on it forever as it continues to become shopworn, packages are damaged, pieces are lost, and the stuff makes zero revenue for the store.

What's fun about being a department manager is that you get to spend money that isn't yours. If the store manager provides you with $500 of markdown dollars, then it's up to you how you want to distribute it. When I managed the Furniture department, that sometimes meant I only marked down five pieces of furniture at a hundred bucks a pop, or maybe ten units got marked down fifty dollars. Five hundred bucks sounds like a lot of money to play with, but in truth, it's really not. Even marking down a toy by one dollar can cost a lot if you still have a couple hundred of them in your inventory. Frankly, I would rather take a bigger hit on a handful of really slowly-moving items than distribute markdown dollars so evenly that everything in my clearance aisle is reduced in price by only fifty cents or a dollar. Customers aren't even going to notice that, honestly.

You know what I still can't figure out, though? People who come into the store at the end of the summer season and wonder why we're out of pools and can't order any more of them. And, in the same breath, want to know why our remaining water toys aren't on clearance yet. (Am I the only one seeing a contradiction here?)

Toy Cars Should Go "Vroom," Not "Cha-Ching"

So, I've been the manager of the toy department at work for about two months. (This statement, on the surface, suggests a certain degree of inexperience that should not be inferred. I've been in retail for 14 years, three of them at a toy store and eight of them as a department manager.) Anyway, my point is that I supervise and manage about 2400 different products, but there's only one of those products that people seem to really care about. You can probably guess which one I'm referring to.

So, when are you putting out some new Hot Wheels? Do you have any cases of Hot Wheels in the back? How come you haven't ordered any more Hot Wheels lately? The other stores are getting new Hot Wheels; why aren't you? Do you know when you'll be getting more Hot Wheels?

Never before have I seen 40-year-old men get so excited over ninety-nine cent toy cars.

Now, I really don't disparage people for collecting toys. I'm a collector myself, and I plan to be one for the forseeable future (which in itself is kind of a funny phrase—none of us is clairvoyant so the future isn't actually forseeable at all). I have a collection of over 3700 toys and I'm proud of that fact. I've long outgrown the phase where I was uncomfortable taking a Transformers or Star Wars character to the cash register and dreading the usual cashier interrogation. Is this for you? Do you, like, actually take them out of the package and play with them? (Look, honey, I don't ask rude, probing questions about what you do at home with battery-operated toys, so I'd appreciate the same courtesy.) The point is that I'm comfortable with my level of childishness. (I don't even employ the euphemisms normally associated with the hobby, using trade jargon like "collectible" or "action figure." Nope, them's toys. Toys toys toys. The place is called Toys "R" Us, not TRU. It's a place that sells toys, folks.)

Now, I don't necessarily expect every single customer to understand how retail works. The fact of the matter is that most of the inventory replenishment is governed by computers. The store's system tracks the rate of sale and orders new merchandise accordingly. If there are 72 Hot Wheels cars in a shipping case and my store is only selling about 20-30 cars on an average week, then we're not going to be receiving a new case every single week. That's just not the way it works. Yes, I have the authority to create supplemental orders as needed, but let's say that all the pegs on the salesfloor are full and I order a new case anyway. Once it comes in, where am I supposed to put it? The stockroom in the back of the store isn't some magical infinite storage facility maintained by elves and unicrons with shelves that ascend to the heavens. There's a finite limit to how many boxes can fit back there. Besides, you and I both know that the only reason you want first crack at that shipping case is so you can pull out that one specially-painted car that will sell for five or six bucks on eBay and that you have absolutely no interest in the other 71 cars. I'm not an idiot.

What I encounter about half the time is angry collectors who, by the time I am confronted by their unshaven, smelly visage at the crack of 7:23 in the morning, have probably already been to four or five other stores in the immediate area and have still come up empty-handed. I should like to point out that by this point in the day, I still haven't had my Mountain Dew Voltage and was probably sound asleep about half an hour before you showed up. Okay, though, I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. Every customer deserves to be treated with courtesy and respect, at least until you give me a reason to the contrary. Really, though, I don't have any control over what the night stockers do. Maybe they dig through the boxes and cherry-pick the Treasure Hunts. Maybe they just do their job and stock the shelves, and the other unshaven smelly guy who showed up at 7:06 beat you to it. I really can't say. When you accuse me of being part of some grand retail conspiracy to prevent you from getting your tiny little 1969 Camaro with rubberized tires, though, that's when I switch off. Really, dude, if it means that much to you, get on eBay and spend the $4.95 like everybody else.

The pendulum seems to swing in both directions. The alternative is people who try to immediately buddy up, frequently referring to me by my first name (it's on my name badge; how clever of you to notice), laying on the phony charm and trying to establish some kind of repertoire. I guess it must be every collector's dream to have an "inside man" in the retail industry who can give him an advantage over other collectors. Here's the thing, though. I really, honestly, emphatically do not want to be your friend. I will smile at you and respond to your questions politely because I am in the customer service industry and I get paid to do this. Don't mistake this for some desire on my part to become your pal. Along the same lines, bank tellers and waitresses and prostitutes will all smile at you and make small talk, but it's all part of the package. You are purchasing a service, nothing more.

Not all collectors are like this, of course. Some of them are genuine and sincere and do not make my life difficult. They don't accuse me of hiding overstock in the back room. They don't "helpfully" stuff half the pegs full of Hot Wheels and leave the other half completely empty, as if to demonstrate to me that I have room for another case of cars and that I should really bring them out right away. (You know what I do as soon as you leave? I put those cars right back where they came from. Systematically rearranging merchandise on the pegs like some kind of die-cast Tetris game doesn't magically make the computer order more stock.) It's a handful of people who really ruin the image of collectors as a whole, and particularly Hot Wheels collectors, who seem to be an entire breed unto themselves. I love my department and I love my job, but I absolutely dread spotting somebody in the Hot Wheels aisle. Almost without exception, he is male, he is alone, he is there very early in the morning, and he's about three or four decades older than Mattel's target audience. Stop fitting the stereotype so precisely, and I'll stop collector-profiling.

I guess what I really want to say here is that I only have eight hours a day to get my job done. At any given time, I've got price changes that need to be labeled and bikes that need to be repaired and out-of-stocks that need to be ordered and a shopping cart full of returns that need to be put back on the shelves. I really don't have the time to debate with you the finer points of Mattel's shipping case ratios or the ethics of scalping. I will help you find what you need, and if we don't have it, then I apologize. That's my job. That's what I get paid to do.

Now, if you'll excuse me, can I please get back to the other 2399 toys that require my attention?

Count Von Count Gets A Job

So, today my store was invaded by a swarm of mindless worker drones. Vaguely humanoid creatures in a disturbingly diverse myriad of shapes and sizes, all wearing matching uniforms, perhaps in an attempt to disguise their grotesque physiques. They were partly technological in composition, with computers attached to their bodies and electronic cables winding around their arms and fingertips like electronic snakes. They advanced upon me slowly, deliberately, with a vacant but determined look in their eyes. They came at me from every direction; there was no escape. Nowhere to run. No chance of escape.

That's right. They were RGIS employees.

I've been in the retail business for a depressingly long time, so I've gone through store inventory with enough frequency that it's become routine. My role in this affair is threefold. First, I spend upwards of nine or ten days in a row, frantically straightening and arranging and carefully preparing every piece of merchandise in my department, culminating in a grand and glorious split shift that ends well after my children's bedtimes. Phase two is to dutifully stand around and do absolutely nothing of consequence, during what always has been, and always will be, the longest and most absolutely boring day of the year. It is a day during which I am forbidden to stock the shelves——indeed, I am not permitted to even pick up a piece of merchandise from the floor that has been dropped by a careless customer. The reasons for this will soon become apparent. Then, finally, after what is typically about eight hours's worth of being paid to do nothing of import, the swarm of drones finally deigns to descend upon my department, yelling obscenities like "SKU CHECK!!!111ELEVENTYONE" at every conceivable opportunity. By this point, of course, I have been on my feet for the entire day without respite, without purpose, and I find myself too beleaguered to be properly motivated by their tactless ways.

I do not fault every employee of this esteemed organization, for they are a very large company who service a wide range of retail establishments, so clearly they must be doing something right. What I take issue with is the people who argue with me when I try to help them. For example, when I politely point out that the blue bicycle is in fact a different UPC than the red one and would they please scan each one individually, for this is, after all, why I prepared two separate shelf tags, complete with two separate bar codes that should be quite easy for them to scan with their little cybernetic Borg attachments. No, says one of the drones, waving his laser finger at me threateningly, the two bikes are the same shape and therefore must in fact be the exact same product.

What I take issue with is the people who choose being lazy over doing their job correctly. Like, say, when I have a cardboard tray of small, random items, perhaps 20 or 30 total, each with a separate UPC and price point, that I have painstakingly grouped together for the singular purpose of being scanned individually. I even make the suggestion to the worker drone that he set each item aside on the floor as he scans them, allowing him to easily keep track of them (leaving me to pick them up afterwards, of course). No, says the worker drone, clearly possessing far more intelligence than I, who proceeds to scan only two or three of these items. Close enough, right?

What I take issue with is people with absolutely no regard for how hard I worked to organize my department, carefully separating products, even going so far as to creating new homes for merchandise just so I can stack it more neatly, all with the ultimate goal of making it easier for them to count everything, only to watch as they push, shove, and literally throw products in every direction, trashing my department to the point where it looks even worse than the day after Thanksgiving.

What I take issue with is people leaving stepladders unfolded in the middle of the aisles, but when I perceive this as a safety hazard and decide to fold them up and prop them up so that they're out of the way and are no longer an inviting prospect for small children to climb on and hurt themselves, I am accused of stealing from you the tools that you need to to your job.

In years past there have been similar episodes. The worker drones are raised from birth to value expedience at all costs, even above such paltry frivolities as accuracy. Hey, what does it matter how many mistakes you make, as long as you make them quickly? You see five items; you type fifty-five. Well, that's pretty much the same thing, isn't it? You count twenty-nine pieces but you write down ninety-two. Virtually no difference! Completely forgot about an entire endcap of merchandise? Well, honestly, what are a few thousand dollars' worth of product in the grand scheme of things?

Would it hurt to show a little common courtesy? How difficult is it to take the blinders off for two seconds and pick up a product that you carelessly brushed to the floor? How much extra effort does it really take to count the different products on different shelves marked with different price labels, instead of just assuming they must all be identical just because the boxes look to be about the same shape and size? Must you litter the floor of every single aisle in my department with those obnoxious sticky labels? And, for God's sake, would it kill you to take a shower before you come to work so the rest of us aren't forced to inhale whatever malignant putrefaction is positively oozing from your pores?

Also, consider this fair warning that the next time you scream "SKU CHECK!" at the top of your lungs when I am standing right behind you, I will clock you upside the head with your own stepladder.