A Peon's Holiday

My name is …well, actually I don’t think I’m going to tell you. You can continue to think of me as just your average peon working for some big department store in some mall. We peons are a pessimistic bunch when it comes to the holidays. Well, at least I am. When you’ve lived through as many seasonal jobs as I have it’s bound to happen, right? I suppose one good thing that has come of my extensive experience is that I have been able to classify holiday shoppers into two distinct categories. I call them the “Incredible Hulk” type and the “Jekyll & Hyde” type. I think it is important that other department store employees be educated about these shopper types. Armed with this knowledge, they will be able to better prepare themselves for the inevitable onslaught of the holiday season. If you’ll indulge me for a few more minutes, I shall be happy to elaborate for you.

I will begin with the Incredible Hulk type. This is the kind of person that seems nice enough - as long as everything is going their way. If, however, something happens contrary to their well established plans, they suddenly turn bright green, double in size, and run around snarling, foaming at the mouth, and destroying everything in sight in a fit of mindless rage.

It is a hot topic of debate among scholars whether this condition is caused, or simply aggravated by holiday “music” (I use the term loosely). It is my professional opinion that stores use holiday music as a weapon of evil. Their plan is to make the customer as miserable as possible by playing songs about things like roasting chestnuts and glistening snow over and over and over and over. They try to trick you into thinking that they are playing many different songs, but don’t be fooled. It’s all the same song - they just play over 600 different “artistic interpretations” of it with different people singing, different instruments, and different tempos. In some stores, the song is sung so incredibly slow, that if they don’t start playing it the day after Thanksgiving, you won’t be able to hear the whole thing before Christmas is over. In other stores, the song variations go by so quickly, that it is humanly impossible to decide whether it is being sung forward or backward, or whether it’s being sung by the Vienna Boys Choir or a brood of tuned chickens. I know these things. I’ve worked at all those stores.

This practice makes most sane customers want to get out of the store as soon as possible. Retailers like this, because the customers are more likely to just grab the first item that they see and make a run for it. This is why you will often see strategically placed merchandise such as plasma screen TV’s, hideous jewelry, or any other type of product that is either really expensive, or that wouldn’t sell at any other time of the year.

But I digress. All things considered, I will grant that this type of person generally has a valid reason (stress, hunger, crowds, music, parking, chickens, etc.) for turning into an uncontrollable monster with the inability to reason. Shall we move on to the second type of holiday shopper?

Through careful observation, I have found that unlike the Hulk type, the Jekyll & Hyde person has no valid reason whatsoever for becoming a monster – they are simply possessed. Also, instead of turning green, they flush blood red and every hair on their bodies stands straight up. After this change takes place, they shove their way around the store like sunburned porcupines with a single goal in mind: knock over as many people as possible.

Since the Jekyll & Hyde Type does not reason, logic is lost on them. Here is an “actual” (I use the term loosely) conversation to demonstrate: