Plunging Towards Gomorrah
Posts tagged Retail Stories
retail stories: bling bling
May 4th
This story might be confusing at first, but in many ways it sums up the randomness of retail. It all starts with Bling Bling at Circuit City. I can’t remember his real name now. I think it was Ronny, but everyone knew him as Bling Bling.
He was from Brooklyn and liked flashy jewelry so I guess the guys just started calling him that. Bling Bling had transferred to a different store to be closer to family. I never really talked to him very much because I was in the computer dept. and he was in TVs.
It was his last day at our location when everything went down.I was working my section when a man entered the store. He walked up asked me if we had a USB-to-Ethernet adapter.
I took the man straight to the section of the store where the product was located. My first impression was that the man was clean cut and well dressed. All that changed quickly. It turned out that the item he wanted was out of stock, so I kindly told him we were out and that Best Buy might have it. He listened to me and seemed fine with my reply.
As he walked away I noticed something was amiss. What I had thought was a sharp-dressed man was wearing white sneakers with very dirty black slacks. None of this made much of an impression on me until what happened next.
As Mister Man left the store he started pushing over signs. When he got to the main doors, instead of waiting for them to open he pushed them off the tracks. While this is going on everyone is looking at me wondering what I said to the guy to set him off. While I tried to explain that nothing out of ordinary had happened we suddenly heard a car burning rubber out in the parking lot.
Mister Man had jumped into his truck,laid into the gas, and there was smoke piling up in the parking lot as he burned out. People out in the parking lot called the cops and wrote down his license plate. This is where Bling Bling comes into the story.
When the maniac was driving out of the parking lot dragster style he hit Bling Bling’s car and ripped the bumper off. That’s some pretty terrible luck and things only got worse. Fifteen minutes later the cops finally arrived. They talked to Bling Bling about his car and it turned out that he didn’t have car insurance. Oops! That’s against the law, so the cops gave him a ticket. Talk about a tough day at the office. Who knows if the cops ever found the crazy man? I’ve often wondered what it was that set him off. Did I say something wrong?
retail stories: box cutter blues
Mar 24th
Yesterday while I was writing about Circuit City I had a rush of old memories from retail. I worked in retail for almost four years and I saw a lot of crazy stuff. In some ways I think people would be friendlier to each other if everyone had to work at some point in retail. You definitely learn to appreciate nice people. Anyway, I think I’m going to start a new category here at The Daily Plunge. I’ll call it retail stories. I’ve seen rotting frogs, walls covered in human feces, cars crashing into buildings, crazy customers, and other countless encounters that are all true.
This first story took place at Circuit City. I think this happened a couple of months after I started, but I could be wrong. I was walking back to the bathrooms. At that particular store to get to the bathrooms you had to pass through a door that led to car audio. When I approached the door I noticed there was blood on the door handle, a lot of blood. I used my foot to open the door with no idea what to expect on the other side. When I opened the door a man was laying on the floor in a pool of blood that covered at least fifteen square feet. I’ve never seen so much blood. The man was holding his arm, he was obviously cut bad. Laying about six feet away was a box cutter. I looked down at him and he looked up at me and we both looked at the knife. Mister Man then said “I cut myself on the door.” Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Obviously the box cutter had something to do with the all the blood. I left the room immediately and grabbed a manager. I told her to prepare for bloodfest and we called an ambulance.
I started investigating immediately and followed the blood trail to the corner of the store where I found a half open handheld TV container. This genius tried to cut the TV out of the plastic container and ended up slicing himself open across the arm. Panicked by the self-inflicted carnage he started running for the back exit and according to witnesses blood was squirting as he ran. The ambulance and cops arrived and took him away. I’m not sure what happened to him after that but the memory of floor covered in blood will stick with me forever.
I’m sure the burglar had reason for stealing. It was probably the strain of the Bush administration. The fact is he’s probably the real victim in this story (yeah, that’s sarcasm). I’m just happy I didn’t have to clean up the mess.
