22.5 Hours

This story goes back to 2009, so it’s important to remember that the sands of time have a tendency to erode many of life’s edges. This day in particular was probably a lot worse than I’m about to describe at its sharpest point, but 11 years have smoothed it into a mostly pathetic memory. It even makes me laugh on rare occasion.

Hour 0: Thankful for what, exactly

The night before Thanksgiving, I had a plan to stay awake throughout the night that involved a little bit of Dr. Pepper and a lot of Diablo 2, and ultimately succeeded in feeling absolutely miserable by about 11 AM. For Thanksgiving, I groggily exchanged pleasantries with my extended family that arrived around noon, saying it was wonderful to see them all again, and apologized because it was now immediately time for me to go to bed. I had a plan, see, one that simply went beyond the trappings of a “sick LAN party”: If I could go to sleep around noon after pulling an all-nighter, I’d hopefully wake up by about 10:30-11:00 PM, just in time to hit my work shift at 11:30. On paper, the plan was good, but I clearly underestimated how averse the human body is to sleeping in the daylight. It’s been a hard decade, but I still remember all the not really sleep I got, and sadly waking up around 9:00. Oh yeah, I was in big trouble. Still, what do you do, I ate a leftover turkey leg, got another 20 minutes of sleep and another hour of video games. It’s unnerving to just be stuck waiting for something big in your life to happen, but time’s arrow waits and rushes for no one. At 11:15, dressed to the nines, I drove to work for a 22.5 hour shift. On Thanksgiving we say what we’re thankful for; I suppose I’d be faintly thankful that I had a definite job at all, and definitely thankful that I had a car I could faint into.

Hour 1: Here they come

I arrived at my place of work — Fry’s Electronics on Campbell (the one that used to have a giant Sphinx in the front) — and found that we already had a line queuing up on the offline conveyor belt leading to the entrance. It was way too early for me to traipse through the nettle of customers clustered in that fine column; I took the stairs instead and woke up a bit as a bonus. What followed was a 30 minute hustle of non-pleasantries mixed with low energy panic to get ready for a midnight open. And after 30 minutes I was pretty comfortable with the idea of opening. I can’t believe how wrong I was.

Sidebar, around this time there was a story ruminating online about a Black Friday technique that involved being the first in line, getting 2 shopping carts and immediately blocking the front entrance so you have free reign of the store. At this point I was extremely thankful that the guy in front only had 1 shopping cart and that Fry’s had a two-man security team, cause apparently this asshole did his homework. He ran in, slammed that cart to the ground sideways at the entrance…and was immediately escorted out for being a danger to the store and its customers. Helluva way to start the day.

That being said, we didn’t get the shopping cart back. There were too many people, and they were legitimately climbing over it, swarming around it, and eventually someone even picked it up and just started using it which meant the barricade was broken and people would only be entering faster. To make things worse, our first wave of sales wasn’t set to begin until 12:30, so the first half hour of business didn’t involve much actual business, which meant we had a hungry mob of customers that we were incapable of sating. The store was filled at every department with queues, and the line to the register had managed to snake through about 5 aisles. I guess now’s a bad time to remind myself I’m an introvert.

Hour 2 - 4: Would you like a warranty with that fridge

This section is going to be me describing my job; I’m sorry but we’re already in too deep. Two months prior I got forcibly promoted to “sales associate” from “merchandiser”, and that’s a truly interesting conversation but we’re going to put a pin in that for now. What you need to know is that my job was to sell people things on the sales floor, and there’s two particular nuances to that. The first is that convincing someone to buy something doesn’t mean anything alone, because it doesn’t “count” unless I also print out a special receipt that effectively said “Andrew sold this to you”, which they must then procure at the register. The second is that I was positioned in the appliance section of the store with all the washers, driers, refrigerators, stove tops, vacuum cleaners, phones (but I wasn’t authorized to sell phone plans so that was kind of useless), and phone cases, and the only reason my position in the store is worth mention is because it happened to be within a Nerf gun’s range of the register station. So let’s get back to that line that was piling up in our section.

The first sale of the day was for a Maytag fridge that sold for its normal price, but you could buy it with 100% off the 4-year warranty for Black Friday so I guess there were at least 30+ people that thought that sounded like a bargain. On a lesser note, we only had 12 of these fridges, so we were about to make at least 18 people very upset. Part of our job in fact it was to recommend to everyone else an alternative product that wasn’t on sale…during Black Friday. I worked my keister off and managed to get 4 different people on this fridge with the warranty before we ran out and had to start recommending alternative products. The amazing thing about retail and why I recommend the experience to everyone at least once is because you get to see a very different side of people. Some were completely understanding, others were visibly upset, but I got to see a middle-aged woman literally dump a whole shelf of phone cases on the floor because she didn’t get what she wanted. I guess by today’s lexicon, she would be what we refer to as a “Karen”.

Regardless, handling this many customers in such a short time provided a truly unique brand of fatigue in these early hours. You spend so much time running around from person to person, practically sprinting laps around a 3 aisle rotation, and in most cases it’s to inform customers that the sales item they were trying to get has run out and now you get to receive their dose of vitriolic response. And all of this is amplified by the line — specifically the snaking line leading to the register — that was careening through our section of the store like a gelatin battering ram. There’s a burden of performance that quickly follows you throughout this endeavor; by the end of the 4th hour, I could feel my reserves of life leaking into the floor through the soles of my oxford work shoes, combined with a tinge of stomachache from a bit of turkey doing more flying than it may have done in its whole lifetime. And while I’m glossing over some of the nuances of the day (again, this was a decade ago, I’ve lost some of it) I can confidently say that I felt accomplished of 8 hours work by the end of hour 4.

Hour 5: Numbers and heartbreak

Hey, remember that conversation we put a pin in, the one about being forcibly promoted? Let’s pull that pin out: as a merchandiser, I was making $8/hour (at the time in California, this was minimum wage…or possibly slightly under, idk), but getting promoted to sales changed my income to $0/hr with advances based on commission. Those special receipts I mentioned earlier actually tracked your commissions throughout the day; once a transaction went through the register with your slip included, your commission was added to the system, which you could check at any time. You may be wondering what happens if this system causes you to make less than minimum wage on any given day, and I’m so glad you asked that question that I’m going to put a special pin in that one.

For now, the detail I feel most important to share is how commissions work with items that are on sale: they don’t. If you sell an item that’s on sale, you make $0 for it. On a normal day, this might not be a problem, but Black Friday is anything but normal. It’s not just the unending hordes of people that taint the building with absolute dissatisfaction throughout the day, it’s also a factor of motivation. People don’t actually like shopping on Black Friday, they only bother to come in because things are specifically on sale. It’s a mentality baked into the title: It’s the Friday after Thanksgiving in which companies make a “Hail Mary” attempt to get their profits “in the black” by passing the savings onto their customers (maybe also because black is the color surrounding your eyes at the end of the shift). So here we have a bit of a conundrum: how do you make money if the only things people want today are on sale?

Before Black Friday rolled around, I asked my manager how this day was going to work for the sales employees and he said, and I quote, “don’t worry, sale items will grant commission on Black Friday”. Well, it’s hour 5, uniquely an hour of the day in which our department has no sales going on granting us all a brief reprieve. I decided to use this lull in activity to inspect my daily grind, and this is what I saw:

COMMISSION ITEM: $0.00
COMMISSION ITEM: $0.00
COMMISSION ITEM: $0.00
COMMISSION ITEM: $0.00
COMMISSION ITEM: $0.00
COMMISSION ITEM: $0.00
COMMISSION ITEM: $0.00
COMMISSION ITEM: $0.00
….

It became clear that I had been straight up lied to. And, that all my efforts for the last 4 and half hours had been in absolute vain. I hadn’t figured out exactly how I wanted to feel yet, but the best I could approximate was some form of heartbreak.

Hour 6 - 10: Waiting for Daybreak

At the start of hour 6, my supervisor told me to “leave and be on call”. I asked exactly what he meant by that and the closest I could gauge is that I was being given a multi-hour break, but I couldn’t go too far because I needed to be accessible at basically any given time. For reasons that I felt were reasonable, I absolutely didn’t want to be in the store, and I knew that with the traffic being what it was on Black Friday I couldn’t really afford to go home. So, I went to my car, reclined the seat as much as I dared, and waited. Just, sat in the car, and waited.

Such a wash of weird emotions rolled over me. There was an unclenching feeling, but not a good one. My feet quickly slipped out of their shoes, the toes doing the wave as they tried to return some feeling, painful all the while. The small block of tension that had built in my forehead was eroding and falling out my ears, leaving specks of debris throughout. In total, I had managed to convince myself into about 2 hours of uncomfortable sleep. The next 4 hours was a toxic relief, a state of forcing yourself to relax out of necessity rather than pleasure, and it was there that I felt those weird emotions. I was swimming in a sea of dread and pain, covered in sickly spots of bliss, unstirred, and I began to worry about the debt I was accruing. But I’m trying so hard to relax right now, so we’re going to attach that to the special pin I mentioned earlier. Don’t worry, the day is still far too young.

There was one nice solace in this gap, and it was getting to see the sunrise. There’s so much romanticizing about the beauty of seeing the sun rising over the hills, signaling the start to a wonderful morning, but weirdly all my favorite sunrises have been under basically the worst circumstances. The view from my car wasn’t exactly stellar, and the angle was hardly accommodating, but for the moment when day broke it provided a small iota of hope. Almost like flicking a switch, all the pain and dread from this crepuscular era was silenced and gave way to the notion that today was going to be a beautiful day. That optimism wouldn’t last, unsurprisingly — I had to spend the entire day indoors with no windows — but its truly inspiring how much can change in just a few seconds.

Hour 11-13: Flow State

I’m not sure who’s idea it was to stack like 4 different sales in our department in a 3 hour period, but I’m certain it’s a decision that was made by someone not on the actual pulling floor. Among the string was a slightly older model for a Sharp brand blender, a relatively new Dyson vacuum cleaner, some kind of phone deal I wasn’t really attached to, and…good lord, a second vacuum cleaner? And the vacuum cleaner deals were back to back, so you know, when a customer comes up to our collective cluster of sleep deprived staff members, it really improves efficiency when they ask for “the vacuum that’s on sale” and we have to ask for about 45 minutes straight “which one”. To call it psychotic seems fair, but that it’s hinging on the border of torture was concerning.

Yet, for all the very clear suffering happening in our — and likely every — department, I was actually doing alright. I had developed a sort of sick rhythm to the madness ever-present, a process of bouncing from request to request with nary a misstep. I felt like the ideal mail carrier; neither woe nor pain of feet nor doom of wages stays this salesman from his appointed rounds. It’s a sensation psychologists refer to as “flow state”, this sort of arrangement of elements and circumstances in which you not only operate at your highest level of execution, but the process of which is almost rejuvenating. You might be more familiar with its colloquial standard: “being in the zone”. I’ve only managed to enter this transcendental state a handful of times in my life: a few times while playing tennis in high school, a couple times when animating in college, and twice ever at a job.

It’s a weird thing to describe to people, but I actually have ADD (not like crippling or anything), so there’s always a swirl of thoughts and distractions plaguing my brain and I can find it hard to focus. That’s why, when flow state comes, it’s a euphoric state I have a hard time truly expressing. It’s like…the beauty of silence, this era in which your brain says nothing, not because you’re being stupid but because you’ve somehow finished thinking and now all that’s left is pure doing. Your mind slows down to a crawl while your body races to catch up, and despite the fact that you know you’re working harder, it actually fills you with energy rather than taking away. It’s almost like rebooting a computer, except the processor just happens to be between your ears. It’s a trance, self-inflicted and almost arcane, in which you unwittingly hypnotize yourself into being the best version of yourself.

Unfortunately, flow state isn’t infinitely sustainable. It holds you together while you’re driven by a task at hand, but once your spirit feels that you’ve accomplished what you set out to do, your body and mind start rapidly exhausting. I managed to achieve flow state for a period of about 2 hours, but when it was over I just dropped with the sensation of three bags of sand deployed onto my head and shoulders. I went to the break room, hoping to normalize a bit.

Hour 14: It’s not a crime if no one wanted it

Before I explain this borderline stupid thing I did, let me lay out the scene for you. Fry’s has a break room for employees; it’s sad, miserable, and completely lacking in any kind of soul. We’re talking about a room with like 3 fold out tables with no covers, a handful of metal fold out chairs like you’d see at a school assembly, an employee fridge, and a vending machine that you still need to pay for. Dour seems a kind description, but for Black Friday it doesn’t quite do it justice. The chairs were all placed against the wall, and the tables were combined for a “snacking station”, which in the cheap ass Fry’s fashion was just two fruit bowls full of melon and honeydew, and a couple unopened party-sized bags of Cheetos and Lays chips…with no bowls. Oh, and like 1 bottle of Coke and 1 bottle of Ginger Ale. We gained a truly budget friendly Friday night sleepover’s worth of snacks, and lost the ability to lean our heads on the tables for a nap on a day where everyone is sleep deprived. And this was intentional, turns out; they didn’t want to risk employees falling asleep for longer than their break time, so they just removed sleep as an option.

Well, we made it to hour 14 and no one had opened any of the chip bags so I did the only reasonable thing I could. That’s right, I grabbed the entire bag of Cheetos, walked out onto the pulling floor, and hid it inside one of the display fridges.

So, you might have a few questions. I’m not going to answer any of them. I will only say that I was a much younger person at the time, and me being both sleep and turkey deprived left my brain and soul in a state I could only generously describe as addled, and my thought process at this moment in the day was “F*** this place”. It’s not cordial, I know, but I don’t believe it was entirely uncalled for either.

I also had a very brief moment of joy in which I had to display that fridge for a prospective customer, opened it to show them the dimensions, and just completely pretended the Cheetos weren’t there. I stifled a laugh as the customers just had a moment of absolute visual confusion, but I did somehow manage to sell that fridge (which means I needed to hide the Cheetos in another fridge). And heck, by the end of the day, all the other chip bags remained unopened so I really don’t think anyone missed them that much.

Hour 15-16: Defensive Apathy, Broken

Flow state was gone, customers were on the rise, sleep was much desired but made almost literally impossible (I was not sleeping on the break room floor), and my sales totals had escaped the void of 0’s into at least a few successful ventures but was still FAR under minimum wage. I had a customer ask me to help find a hard wood steamer that we “supposedly had in the system” which lead to me searching our labyrinthine storage area for about 30 minutes in a manner I’d admit to being rather unprofessional, only to come back and have them yell at me for taking so long (and not letting me write up a slip for the purchase). This is the point in the shift when your spirit is just barely holding together, in which you are literally being saved from pure dread by sheer exhaustion. This part of the day I liken to keeping an arrow lodged in your chest because removing the shaft would only hasten the bleeding.

Those of us that have worked retail in this condition probably know that one of your greatest tools for getting through this kind of shift is apathy. For the rest of the day, you need to stop treating people like they matter and just get the job done. It’s a horrible tactic, one that I don’t recommend, but there are times when you simply don’t have the mental luxury of being able to care about other people due to a weird mixture of fatigue and desperation. You’re in survival mode. And maybe it’s because I was still relatively young or because this was my first real job, but this practice really didn’t sit well with me.

Hard to believe from the near Zola-esque nature of my prose, but I’m actually quite the emotional fella. I’m the guy that cries during most films, even not great ones. So this technique of stoicism was faulty in my hands from the get-go, I should’ve known really, but it seemed to be working until I got to the end of hour 16 and a customer asked me how I was doing. I said I was doing fine, helped them quickly, asked to take a break and went to my car. For the 15 minutes I was allowed, I cradled my head against the steering wheel, and just completely broke down.

Hour 17: Time has lost all meaning

I can’t really recall the rest of the day, if I’m being honest. I know that we had at least 5 more sales throughout the night, but none of them drew the kind of crowds the morning sales had. I had gotten into a pattern of auto-responding to questions — the same few just kept coming up. At one point I definitely pointed someone to the place where our phone specialist was even though I knew that he was on break. When asked what the selling point of a vacuum cleaner was, I think I may have mentioned that it was pet safe (fact), which meant you could use it to vacuum your pets (fiction).

My supervisor asked me how I was feeling, and I responded “with my heels”. The minutes and hours began to blur, I felt trapped in Dali’s painting, with only the memory of agony persisting. I sincerely thought for a hot minute that I was done for the day when it fact I still had 6 hours to go. Well, I was partially correct: I was indeed done for the day. But before we get to the very end, I want to share just a couple of the funnier moments that didn’t fit in with anything else.

Hour 22: Maybe it was hour 19? What even is time?

I walked up to a customer, asking if they needed assistance, and about 5 words into their answer I straight up fell asleep. As in full on sleeping while standing straight up, leaning ever so precariously like a Jenga tower on a windy day. I woke up after about 4-5 seconds (I hope), immediately realized I was still talking to a customer that had definitely acknowledged that I fell asleep, and opened not with “good morning” but “I’m so sorry”. He was understanding, but I will say it’s somehow the most embarrassing occurrence of my day.

Hour 21: I saw a man drop a television and just couldn’t stop laughing

Wait, shoot, that’s basically the whole story. I guess I did try to stealth around the fridge section so they couldn’t see me laughing though, which looked very strange to one of my other coworkers. Granted, he also started laughing when I told him, and neither of us had laughed in the last 12-ish hours so this was a healthy catharsis I think. In retrospect, I probably needed this, cause the rest of the day was uneventfully miserable.

Hour 22.5: Let’s talk about that Special Pin

Alright, it’s the end of the day. This is the time when you should feel relief at a job well done, that you’ve miraculously endured a feat of preposterous circumstance. I’m going to tell you why the end of this experience gave me a burst of literal depression, and probably left me scarred and bitter towards the concept of Capitalism for the rest of my life.

I’ve slightly alluded to the concept of my position as a sales associate, that I was completely commission based and as a result could make less than minimum wage. And, I’ve mentioned that being an entirely likely outcome since sales items don’t provide commission, even on Black Friday. We’re at the end of the day, so I’ll grace you with all the remaining details of the Fry’s commission system.

It’s obviously illegal to pay your workers less than minimum wage, so if at the end of the day you’ve earned less than minimum wage would have paid you, you are instead bumped up to minimum wage. HOWEVER, all the money you “failed to earn” is accrued on your work account as debt, which means that the next shift you manage to earn above minimum wage, they gouge your extra wages to fill this debt first. I’m sure you’ll all agree, this is absurdly petty and cruel. Also probably still illegal, and after I left the company I vaguely recall a lawsuit being filed along these lines. It also probably wouldn’t surprise you much to know that Fry’s didn’t offer any overtime pay for people working commission, so I didn’t get any benefits on that end as well.

Look, I’m not going to ask you to join me for the rest of that weekend, in which I had to immediately work an extra 12 hour shift on Saturday and a normal 8 hour shift on Sunday. I’m only going to give you a number and let you make of it what you will:

By the end of the Black Friday weekend, I worked about 42.5 straight hours — with the only downtime spent going home, sleeping, and coming back in the morning — and when it was over I “owed” Fry’s over $650.

I dunno, maybe I’m being a whiny, entitled Millennial for expecting a minimum wage job to treat me like a human being, but by the end of that shift I felt entirely pummeled, physically and mentally, and all I had to show for it was a wall full of zeroes and a bag of Cheetos I smuggled out of a fridge.

Hour Beyond: Getting Better all the Time

So now you may be wondering what the point of all that was. To be fair, so was I, for a long period of time. I remember coming home and explaining the whole situation to my mother, and crying in her arms when I felt I had nothing to show for it. I feel bad leaving you with such a somber story, roughly about corporate greed and somewhat about inflicted depression, but a lot of good did come out of this eventually.

For one, what happens next? I actually kept working at Fry's...for a little while. One thing I neglected to mention is that I was actually really good at sales. Empathy is a powerful tool, and I find that customers tend to respond better when you make an effort to care about them, even if Fry’s almost actively discourages it. Over the course of December, I actually managed to eliminate the absurd $650 debt. And there was something to look forward to: my dad was planning a vacation with his entire side of the family to Barcelona for Christmas and I was invited. I asked if I could take time off from the Dec 24 to the Jan 2, and you’ll never believe how that went.

My supervisor said no. Due to expected seasonal business, employees weren’t allowed to take time off between Dec 23 and Mar 28. I thought about it a little bit, and two days after I asking for time off, I just flat out quit on the spot. I was a gentleman about it, said I found a better opportunity elsewhere and worked the rest of my shift wholeheartedly, but if they weren’t going to let me spend a hard earned vacation with my family then screw them. That week and a half was absolutely wonderful. It was sadly is one of the last vacations I got to spend with my grandfather before he passed away, but that meant the decision to go was totally worth it.

And those were just the immediate benefits, the rest was a lot more permanent to who I became as an individual. Despite how soul-crushing that experience was, I think even the simple act of quitting such a bad situation instilled a better sense of self-worth into me. While I will acknowledge that weekend was as pleasant as a root canal, it has left me awfully optimistic and well functioning for all jobs I’ve had since then as every single one of them has been “unequivocally better than Fry’s”. Ask any employee I’ve worked with, they’ll tell you I do quite well in high pressure situations and always bring a good attitude wherever I go. There’s a confidence, however misled, that I comfortably wield in feeling that I’ve endured the hardest thing, and while I do still think my skills have a ways to go in my preferred fields of study, I can proceed knowing that I have the fortitude and attitude to allude that my aptitude has verisimilitude.

And I’m happy to say I’ve never fallen into the trap of tactical apathy since. For all my undertakings since, I’ve allowed myself to continue caring and showing passion in whatever job I take. While that’s led to more than a few difficult conversations, I refuse to let any terrible system break me down into a pattern of apathetic convenience. After 22.5 hours of suffering, I walked away with unreasonable debt, a bag of Cheetos, and the ability to instill that passion into all that I do, and I'm confident that not even the passage of time will remove it from me.