Parasitic Services

Let's talk about Toys R Us for a moment. This is one of those write-what-you-know moments; I know because I used to work there. You know, before they ran themselves out of business.

One of the reasons they went out of business was their... let's just call it their fear of being taken advantage of. As such, they had very draconian return policies and spent huge amounts of time being obsessed with "shrink," which is to say theft, especially employee theft.

I was reminded of this general atmosphere, recently, in dealing with eBay. As I've mentioned before, I've been selling off old collectibles of mine on eBay. Not because I want to use eBay or love eBay or because of any liking of eBay but because they are the best parasite for the job. Sort of like eating a tape worm before going to certain countries. You don't want to swallow the tape worm, but you do it because you don't want worse things to happen.

In this case the worse thing being my garage door exploding because there's too much stuff in my garage.

In theory, eBay is a platform designed to facilitate... I don't know... selling stuff to other people. Not just tangible items, though, so it's not as simple as just selling off your beanie babies (the most popular item on eBay for years after it started). And, you know, it did start out that way. It was even a free service for a while, until the traffic on the site became too heavy for the creator to pay the fees for the upkeep without charging people for using the site.

But that was 20+ years ago. These days, eBay is violently afraid of anyone selling anything without them getting a cut of it. You know, because they deserve it in some way. On site communications cannot include any type of contact information because, you know, you might be trying to solicit sales outside of eBay and that is strictly forbidden. And nothing in an auction post can even hint at requesting communication from a potential buyer, because that could also be a solicitation for selling off of eBay. Not mention the fact that they are now auto-relisting auction posts and charging you for it and not giving you an option to not choose that.

They have become the epitome of a parasitic service that exists to suck as much money out of its users as possible while giving back as little value as possible. Let me put it another way:
I started using eBay back in the 90s, so I've been there a long time. In the time since I started using them, they have not increased the value of their "service." That's pretty much the same as it always has been; however, the cost of using the "service" has increased dramatically: Their listing fees, for example, are seven times higher now than when I first started using the site, not to mention all of the other fees that didn't even exist 20 years ago. Back in the day, it was perfectly fine for me to direct attention to my own website, so eBay could actually be used as a marketing tool (which was cool); these days, I can't even exchange an email address in private communication.

I could go on, but I'm sure you get the idea.

To say that I have been annoyed by all of this would be an understatement. But it did start me thinking about the general tendencies of "platforms" to become parasites. Lyft, Uber, Airbnb, all platforms that started out as a cool idea with the idea in mind to help people, just like eBay, until someone, often not the creator, realized they could make a lot of money from it without really doing anything. Just hang on like a tick and get fat. [I wanted to use a picture of a tick for this post, but the one of the mosquito being so full of blood that it was dripping out was too gross to pass up.]

Then it occurred to me that this is the same thing that Trump (#fakepresident) is doing to the United States, right now, turning it into one big tick to feed him and his cronies. Not that this has not being going on, especially among Republicans, for a long time, but Trump (#fakepresident) has been going about removing any pretense at all of giving any value back. Because, you know, the government is supposed to be symbiotic with the people (that would be us): by the people, of the people, for the people and all of that. Evidently, Trump (#fakepresident) believes that the only humans who count as people are rich, old, fat white guys. Which we already knew, but it's so blatant... so blatant... All you have to do is look at his proposed budget to know how little value he wants to return to "the people."

None of which has anything to do with where all this started out, but this is the way my brain works. Or something.
And you might be saying, "Well, don't use eBay, then." Or any service that acts as a parasite, but, really, it's not that easy. Or it is that easy as long as I'm okay with having all the stuff in my garage, because there is no real better option, and that's how they get you.

No, I don't have any solutions. I feel like this is all a big trap we've gotten ourselves into as a society, including insurance companies, which may have been the first big corporate parasites, companies that want to take in as much money as possible but do everything they can to avoid paying out. Or maybe it just all goes back to the elite, ruling class living on the backs of the serfs, and we're all just still serfs who haven't figured out a way to get out of that tyranny yet. At any rate, it's these kinds of thoughts that allow me to understand the growing hate of capitalism by the young.

And they may be right. Maybe service companies shouldn't be allowed to be "for profit."
No for profit hospitals.
No for profit prisons.
No for profit insurance companies.
No for profit platforms that exist only to suck the profit out of other people's work.

No for profit government.
Or government employees who are only there to make themselves rich.

We've been living by the laws of greed for... a very long time. Maybe it's time to try altruism.

Concerning TRU

I've made no secret of the fact that I used to work at Toys R Us, so it's with the kind of fascination of watching a train wreck that I have been paying attention to them "suddenly" going out of business. Sure, I get that it's surprising to some, but this is by no means sudden, whatever they would have you believe. And maybe I wouldn't have said anything about this at all, but...

There's always a "but."

But TRU (Toys R Us, but I'm going to refer to them as TRU) has, evidently, blamed their woes on millennials, the seeming punching bag these days of corporate America and of Boomers in general. ["Boomers" means "Baby Boomers." More on them in some future post.] "If only millennials were having more babies, we would be making enough money to stay open. It's all your fault for not giving us your money." As if just the fact of millennials having babies would drive them into the open arms (or doors, as the case may be) of a local TRU or Babies R Us store.

The truth of the matter is that TRU has been on the verge of going out of business for at least the last 20 years, it being 20 years ago that I last worked for them, and they were teetering on the brink even then. The further truth of the matter is that TRU is a shitty company and has been for at least the last 30 years, 30 years ago being when I first worked for them when I still lived in Louisiana. They're a shitty company, and they actually deserve to go out of business.

Why would I say they deserve it? Well, because they've had 30 fucking years to do something to improve their business model and, yet, they have refused to do so. They've just gone ahead with the what seems to be the driving philosophy of the Boomer generation: Did you fail the first time? Well try again using the same method but do it faster and harder. In fact, keeping doing that same thing over and over again; eventually, you have to succeed.

Right?

Evidently not.

So, yes, Toys R Us definitively deserves to go out of business.

Oh, hey, breaking news right in the middle of me working on this piece: It seems that the founder of TRU has died. At the age of 94. One of the things TRU is saying about him is how much he loved the customer. Well, I didn't know the guy, so that may well be true, but I do know that TRU definitely did not love their customers. Their customers were only second their employees as enemies.

When I first worked for TRU back around 1990, it was official company policy to not help customers. The extent that we were allowed to help someone was to walk them to the aisle where something should be located. If something was not on the shelf, we were instructed to tell customers that it was out of stock. Even if we knew it was not out of stock and was, indeed, sitting in the store room. Retrieving something from the storeroom was a big NO. You see, it just wasn't cost effective for employees to spend time helping customers.

Note: I was once reprimanded (at the store I worked at in Louisiana) for getting something down off the overstock shelf for a customer. Now, this was a thing we were supposed to do because, if we didn't, customers would do things like try to climb the shelving units to get stuff down. But, you know, we employees had access to ladders, and the customer could see the item he wanted. As it turns out, a manager was watching me and timing me. Because I had to go get a ladder from the stockroom (and put it back when I was through), it took me more than five minutes to help the customer, so I got in trouble.

By the time I worked for them in the late 90s after I moved out to California, they had somewhat revised their customer assistance policy. We were at least supposed to look like we were trying to help them out. If someone asked for something not on the shelf, we were to go and "check" the stockroom for it. If it was something we knew we had back there, we could even go fetch it... as long as it didn't take up too much time. Otherwise, we were to go to the stockroom, wait a moment, then go back out and tell the customer that, no, we didn't have the item.

Note: This could really backfire on people. I always did the job of actually checking for an item if a customer asked but, then, I knew how to use the tools provided for us to do so and was good at it. It was always bad when a customer asked one employee about something and was told we were out of stock but, then, asked a different employee (say, me) for the item who then went and got it for them. Yeah, that happened more than once.

As bad as they were to customers, it was nothing compared to the way they treated employees. Employees were the true enemy, all of them thieves waiting to happen. Not to mention the fact that they wanted to be paid! All that and they didn't even offer an employee discount program (though they did finally institute that some years after I quit working for them; it was an effort to cut down on all of the employee turnover, but I'm pretty sure it didn't really work).

I'm not really going to get into how bad TRU was to employees back when I worked there. This post is already long, and getting into that can of worms might turn into a novel, and not a novel I would want to write. Or enjoy writing.

Back to the point, though: Even back in the 90s, TRU was struggling to avoid bankruptcy. They routinely identified parts of their business model which was siphoning off their profits, but, really, they could never convince themselves to look beyond theft prevention, both by customers and by employees, and it was this antagonistic stance they took with everyone which ultimately prevented them from climbing out of the hole they kept digging for themselves. As a company, they were very much like the current Republican run government and their fakepresident. I'm so looking forward to the day when they, too, go out of business.

Flippers

My first experience with flippers came in the mid- to late 90s when I worked at Toys R Us. We didn't call them flippers -- the words we used were much less kind, though there may have been some flipping (of the finger) involved -- and, actually, that may not be the correct term at all for what they are. I'm using it because these are the same kind of people as house flippers, which is the correct term for those particular people, so I'm applying it here, too.

It all had to do with Star Wars.

The few years prior to the release of The Phantom Menace saw a huge resurgence in Star Wars action figures and collectibles, and there was, evidently, a lot of money to be made from it on eBay. Every morning by the time the store was ready to open, there would be a group of about a dozen men waiting to get in and race -- and I do mean race, as they were each trying to get to some section of the store first, mostly to the Star Wars action figures but also to the Hot Wheels -- to the action figures to get first grabs at the rare figures that they could resell on eBay. And it wasn't just Toys R Us. They ran a circuit every morning to each store as they opened. Toys R Us, with the latest opening time (9:30), was last on the list after Wal-Mart and Target and wherever else these guys would stop to raid shelves.

Their behavior -- and none of these men were what you could call "nice;" in fact, they were often nasty and vile and were constantly angry at employees when they couldn't find the pieces they were looking for -- served only to deprive actual collectors or kids from being able to find the action figures they wanted. It wasn't uncommon to have a customer come in later in the day, someone who just wanted to finish a set of figures or, god forbid, open it and play with it, and ask about a particular figure that we were out of only to have one of these guys pop up and say, "Oh, I have one of those. It's in my car right now, in fact. I'll sell it to you. Just $20." Something said dude had paid $6 for just that morning, that being why it was still in his car.

Then there was the issue of them bringing back bags and bags of unsold figures every few weeks, once the craze for a particular figure had died down, and wanting their money back, something we were obliged to do since these guys kept every receipt ever for just this purpose. It was kind of a nightmare, and everyone dreaded the opening of the store each morning and having to deal with the orc horde.

At least with house flippers there are some positive things that can be said. Generally speaking, they do do work on the houses they buy so that they can jack up the price for the resell. It made it hell when we were trying to buy a house several years ago, though, as we were constantly losing out to cash bids, often lower than our bid, from flippers. Of course, one of the big problems with house flippers is that many of them make only cosmetic changes to a house, cheap fixes, and leave any underlying issues for the new owner to deal with, issues that are frequently more difficult to spot because they've been "painted over."

Which brings me to my recent experience on eBay in selling off my comics and stuff. As I mentioned in the linked post, one of the guys I dealt with is a flipper. Actually, it was several guys. I know because they all told me that the reason they were interested in my auction was because they thought they were going to be able to take advantage of me to get some cheap comics they could resell. No, they didn't state it precisely like that, but I'm sure that since I mentioned in my auction text that I'm trying to clean out my garage they all thought I didn't really know what I had. That tends to be how that goes. People who at one time or another when they were young collected something and stored it for some length of time until they've come across it again and decided to get rid of it without doing any research about its current value. [And having worked in several comic shops when I was younger, I've witnessed comic shop owners steal from people frequently by offering them the equivalent of nothing for very valuable books because the people bringing them in didn't know the value. But that's a different kind of story.]

Just to be clear, I don't have a problem with people trying to make a buck. What I do have a problem with is people taking advantage of other people to do it. And I find it extremely annoying when people do it within the same venue as the seller and the buyer, as with the kid who wanted the Star Wars action figure who had to pay $20 for it from some unwashed guy's trunk. These guys basically want money just for standing there.

Here, let me give you an example:

Some years ago (like 20), I wanted to get rid of a few comic books that were pretty hot at the time. Probably, I wanted to buy Magic cards with the money; I don't remember. I took the few issues in to the shop I frequented to see if he was interested. I already knew he didn't have any of the issues available. They were hot books, and I only wanted a fair price. They guy wouldn't have had a problem moving any of them. He looked through them and handed them back to me, saying he wasn't interested. Which was fine.

However, a customer had come in while were were talking and after the owner had handed the issues back to me, the customer said, "I'll take that one," pointing at one of the issues.

Talk about being trapped. What I wanted to do was walk out into the parking lot and sell the guy the issue, BUT I was standing in this dude's store, and I didn't feel right about that. I allowed the owner to play middle man and give me $10 only to turn around and sell it to the other guy for $20. (Or some approximation like that.) The store was, after all, the owner's venue.

The problem with these eBay dudes is that eBay is not a venue which belongs to them. They're just people milling through the crowd getting in between sellers and actual buyers, people who want to own the pieces, not resell them at a higher buck. They damage both sides, and they feel entitled to do it, as demonstrated by the anger aimed at me when they were denied something which didn't belong to them. Each of these guys, these assholes, felt as if I had cheated them from something they deserved. It's that attitude that is the problem. A white dude entitlement problem. These are, essentially, the same guys who would hang out outside of Toys R Us waiting for the doors to open every morning. Only those guys, the Toys R Us guys, were actually a step above these guys on eBay.

Clearly, It's MY Fault

As I mentioned many weeks ago, I've decided it's time to clean out my garage and sell off my old comics, most of them, and a lot of my old gaming stuff. Well, I probably didn't mention the gaming stuff, but I've been coming across things I don't want to store anymore, so a lot of that is going to go, too. Naturally, I turned to eBay as my platform for moving stuff out of my garage.

Okay, so maybe it's not "naturally" to other people, but it is to me. I haven't used eBay in a lot of years, but I was one of the early adopters... wow! That was back in the 90s! Yeah, I was using eBay all the way back in the 90s! So, yeah, it was natural for me to pick eBay back up and use it to start clearing things out.

One of the reasons I quit using eBay was the people. Using eBay as a seller is like working in customer service at Toys R Us, which I have done and is why I know that it's an apt comparison. Not everyone has a complaint, but no one is happy to be in Toys R Us. None of the adults are, anyway, which means that if someone is at customer service, you're already at two strikes. All of which leads me to believe that no one is happy to be on eBay, either.

Then there's the problem that a lot of people on eBay, mostly white dudes, are hoping/expecting to get stuff for nothing; like, if you're selling on eBay you must not want whatever it is anyway, so you should just hand it over to said white dude for free, but I'll get to more on that in a minute.

Also, there was the whole thing with constantly packaging things and long trips to the post office, but that's another beast entirely.

But, for the sake of garage clearing and possibly making some bucks off of my stuff, I was willing to venture back into the wilds of eBay again. Let me just say that things are worse there than ever before.

So I ran up a comic book auction. It wasn't really complicated, but it was non-conventional. I have a LOT of comics, and I don't want to try to run separate listings for each and every one of them, and you can't make any money selling them in bulk. For the amount of trouble that is in comparison to the lack of significant return, I might as well throw them in the trash. What I decided to do was to list a few hundred comics for the auction winners to choose from. The auction was clearly stated as being for ONE comic book only with the winner getting to choose the issue s/he wanted. A few of the issues had a minimum bid before they could be chosen. It's really quite simple.

Let me preface what I'm about to say with this:
All of the six auction winners I've had so far were white dudes. Yes, I'm sure. All of them.

Of the six, five did NOT read the auction text. That means that only one of them contacted me with his requested issue along with his payment.

I had to send requests to each of the other five to find out which issue was wanted. All five requested issues which 1. were not listed in the auction or 2. was an issue that had a listed minimum bid requirement that was higher than their bid. So, even after it had been pointed out to the them that they needed to read the auction text, they FAILED to read the auction text adequately enough to make a valid choice.

After a second email about choosing a comic from the supplied list, only ONE guy came back with a valid choice. One guy, after much discussion, apologized profusely and asked if I would let him out of the auction (that's a longer story, but that's what it boils down to). Another guy sent me about six or seven requests for books that were more expensive than his bid or not included in the auction (naming the same issue numerous times) before he he landed on one that was available (my guess is that he was using a dart board for his decision making).

Which leaves two guys, 1/3 of the auction winners, which fits in with the greater demographics of asshole dudes in the United States. These two guys got so mad about their own failure to read the auction text and know what they were bidding on that they filed complaints against me to eBay. That is pretty much the definition of white dude entitlement.

One of these guys thought he had won the entire lot of 300+ comics for $2.50 with only a $4.00 shipping fee. Seriously, the shipping fee should have tipped him off. The cost of shipping that many comics all together is EXPENSIVE. Like in the triple digits expensive. Anyone with half a brain firing working at even half capacity would have realized something was up, but no... Not him. No, he accused me of changing the auction text AFTER he won the auction, something which isn't even possible to do. Once a bid has been entered, eBay doesn't allow auctions to be edited. But stupidity and entitlement never let facts get in the way.

The other one... Well, the other one literally thought he was going to get something for nothing. He wanted a comic on which I had placed a high minimum bid because the comic, for those of you who know what this means: a silver age book, is worth about $150. My minimum was less than half its value, though. So this guy had a bid of about $10 and demanded the silver age comic anyway. Here are the things he revealed to me during our email exchange:
1. He intended to re-sell the issue. On eBay. He felt like he could get at least $15 for it, which, as far as he was concerned, was all the issue was worth. [Just to be clear: This is not what he believed. This was his tactic to try to get me to believe that I was getting a good deal to just let him have the issue.]
2. He had a coupon from eBay which would reduce his effective payment to $0. He would literally be getting the issue for FREE, giving him 100% profit on the re-sell. [I know this because I asked him why he was willing to pay, after shipping, more for the issue than he believed he could sell it for, and he told me about the coupon which would allow him to get it for nothing. Something for nothing.]
3. He's a flipper, which is something I'll get into in another post.

You know, I can understand being disappointed in discovering that you had misunderstood something and that you're not getting what you thought you were getting, but I really don't understand the unwillingness to own up to your own mistake, especially when it's right there in front of you. I know that it happens and that a certain group of people do it all the time (roughly 30% of white males, for sure), but I really don't understand it. Both of these guys acted as if their lack of reading the auction text was MY fault, and both of them accused me of doing things to try to cheat them, cheat them out of what was rightfully theirs. They both felt they DESERVED, were ENTITLED, to have my stuff. For FREE.

Because they're white dudes, and that's what white a significant portion of white dudes believe. They believe they deserve to have their cushy life provided for them with no effort on their part. And, yet, they also believe that other people are freeloaders, people working much harder at making a life for themselves than they are. The alt-right is full of these guys.

And, no, I'm not saying these two guys are alt-right, because it's not JUST dudes on the alt-right who believe this kind of thing, but I couldn't get away from the percentages. It's too perfect an example of white male entitlement.

I don't know... If this is what I'm going to have to deal with on eBay, maybe I will toss the comics in the trash.

"If it's not on the shelf..."

One of the summer jobs I had while I was in college was working at Toys R Us. I've mentioned that I worked there before, but I don't think I mentioned that I worked there on two separate occasions, the first being while I was in college. It... didn't go well.

See, there was a problem: I was too helpful. No, seriously. At the time, TRU had a policy about helping customers: We were allowed to take the customer to the place in the store where any given item ought to be but, if it wasn't there, we were to say, "If it's not on the shelf, we don't have it." Even if there was a box of the item on the overstock shelf (on the aisle just above the items), we were to tell the customers that line. I couldn't bring myself to do it; it was virtually always a lie.

I got more commendations from customers than any other... oh, wait, I was the only employee that summer to have customers comment that I had done a good job to management. Enough so that it was brought up in a store meeting. And, yet, I was reprimanded for helping customers during my first performance review. During my second, I was told I "wasn't working out" and let go. Oh, yeah, also because I was "anti-social" and did things like read during my breaks rather than go outside and smoke with everyone else. [Yes, I was told that part of why I was being let go was non-work-related behavior. (And the not smoking was specifically mentioned.)]

Jump forward several years. I had moved to CA a few months before, and I needed a job. I needed a job like "right now." TRU was running an ad that they were hiring, so I went in. Yes, even having worked there before, I was willing to go. I needed the job. And I wasn't in LA anymore, so I was hoping things would be different.

And they were different. One of the things that had changed during my absence was a shift in corporate thought from "the customers get in the way of the job" to "the customer is the job." When I was hired in CA, I was told "the customer always comes first." It was a huge difference. So huge in fact that not only was I not "let go" after my "trial period" (or whatever it's called), I was promoted faster than anyone else working in that location. Basically, as soon as they were able to promote me (because TRU has policies about minimum times before someone can be promoted), they did. And again. And again. Until I quit (which is a long story and not applicable to this).

Which brings me to my point: I didn't change. I had the same attitude and behaviors working at TRU the second time as I did the first time. It was Toys R Us that changed. They changed what they were looking for in an employee, so I went from being someone who "wasn't working out" to someone who was very valuable (they tried to talk me into staying more than once when I quit). Oh, and I was still reading during my lunches and breaks, too.

If I had try to change who I was, the way I was, when I went and tried to get the job after I moved, I wouldn't have been right for it, and I would have been "let go" again because "it wasn't working out." Writing books works that way, too. If you spend your time trying to adapt to the market, trying to fit in with the current trend, you'll always be a step or two behind. You can't help but be, because you're too busy reacting to an organism that changes faster than anyone can keep up with. When you just do your thing, eventually, it will come into alignment with you.

At least for a while.

I'm sure that at some point (if it hasn't happened already), TRU will go back to their attitude that the customers are an evil which have to be endured, just as readers will one day go back to the attitude that vampires are an evil which have to be endured. [As my son would say, "See what I did there?"] Basically, trends change. Find your thing and stick with it.

And, if anyone ever tells you, "If it's not on the shelf, we don't have it," don't believe them. Right now, that's Target's line, but I make them go look.

The Management Myth (or Making Your Own Future)

About a year ago, I wrote a post about the importance of liking your own work. The post was about how writers should like the work they are writing enough to believe in it and stick to their vision of what that work should be, but that idea isn't limited to just writing. You should take ownership of whatever it is you're doing in your life, believe in it, and not submit it to the constant whims and validation of others. But, if you want to read more about that, go back and read the post.

In that post, I touched on an idea that proved to be somewhat more controversial than I'd anticipated. Well, since I had not thought it a controversial point, I was surprised to find out that it was. So let's talk about aspirations.

I grew up in the South in a state that had and continues to have one of the poorest education systems in the country. It is both poor in that it is bad, and it is poor in that it doesn't have the kind of funding many other states are able to devote to education. I grew up knowing a lot of kids (teenagers) whose greatest aspiration was to, maybe, one day be a manager at Wal-Mart. Or something like that.

Now, before I go on, this is nothing against retail employees or any denigration of them. I spent time at Toys R Us among other places, so I'm not putting anyone in retail down or claiming greater status than anyone who is in retail. In fact, for a long time, my goal was to work retain, in comic books and games, and I've worked in various capacities in those environments, too.

What I am saying is that it's unfortunate when teenagers, due to their circumstances, cannot dream anything better for themselves than to one day be a manager at Wal-Mart. Being a kid, a teenager, is time when you ought to be able to dream big. To aim for things that may not be probable but could, actually, be possible with the right toss of the dice or enough work. Working at Wal-Mart is the thing you do in the summer or at Christmas while you strive for bigger things. Sure, some people will never make it past Wal-Mart, but you certainly can't if you never had aspirations bigger than that to begin with.

And here's the trap:
The goal of "one day being a manager at Wal-Mart" is a lie. Not that the goal itself is a lie but the possibility of it becoming a reality is a lie. At least from the standpoint from which I'm approaching this, that of the teenager (the teenager who is not going on to college or any form of higher education) right out of high school entering the workforce by picking up a retail job planning to stay there indefinitely.

Here's the thing about being a manager at a place like Wal-Mart or Toys R Us: "Regular" employees cannot be promoted to manager. It doesn't matter how long you've been there or how good you are at your job; they don't promote up like that. I know, because there was a point where I was under consideration for management training when I worked at TRU. Here's the process:
1. Be really good at whatever low level job you enter in.
2. Get promoted all the way up to Department Head (the equivalent of assistant manager (and I don't think they call it that anymore).
3. Be so good at that, at being a Department Head, that the regional or district manager takes notice of you.
4. Be sent away to management school which is the equivalent of getting a degree in business. And you have to pay for it, so it's just like going to college. And, sure, if the company (TRU, Wal-Mart, whichever else follows this model, but my understanding is that it's most of them) thinks you're worth sending, they will give you loans and stuff to pay for their school (sometimes you might even qualify for some scholarships, but that's difficult), but, then, you have to pay them back.
5. Be transferred to some other store other than the one you were working in to avoid issues between you and people you used to be equivalently employed with.

So let's look at this a moment:
If you are good at your job as a Department Head, the store you work at is not going to want to put you up for management training. If they value you, they don't want to lose you, so they won't recommend you. You have to get noticed by someone higher up than the store director, and that's tough to do. Especially if you don't know you need to (which I didn't). So, then, if you're approached for management training (as I was), the first thing they're going to tell you is that you will have to go away to school. TRU, at least, has training centers, and you have to go to one of those. You don't get paid while you're off doing that, so that's the loss of your income (such as it is) to your family while you're off at school. Then there's the fact that you will be transferred to some other store once you've become a manager.

The point of all this is that you don't go to work at Wal-Mart or Toys R Us and work there long enough to finally, one day, become a manager. That's not their system. There was a woman that worked at TRU as a department head while I was there who had been there in that position for something like 15 years. That was as far as she was ever going to go.

Of course, the other way to get to be a manager at Wal-Mart is to go to school for a business degree and apply for a management position. You can do that without ever having to work at Wal-Mart or TRU as a "regular" employee.

The whole system is rather deceptive and designed to make people believe they have something that they're working toward when, in fact, in almost all circumstances, they do not.

It's not completely unlike the way the traditional publishing industry works these days: The want to find already successful authors before they're willing to look at publishing them.

[Note: All of this is based on how things worked about 15 years ago. That's when I experienced all of this and discovered TRU's system and that it was based on Wal-Mart's system, which nearly every chain store had adopted. Things may have changed since then, but I sort of doubt it.]

The Importance of Liking Your Own Work -- Part One (an IWSG post)

Back when I first moved out to California, I worked at Toys R Us. At the time, TRU was one of the worst possible places to work at. They had incredible turnover amongst their employees, and, the funny thing is, they couldn't figure out why. After all, they paid minimum wage, right? Anyone should be happy with that. A job where they hire no full-time employees so that they don't have to provide benefits. A job with no employee discounts. A job with absolutely no flexibility to your schedule and, even worse, no routine to it. Really, they did their best to own you by making you be available to them whenever they wanted you to be.

But you should be thankful for the job.

I've heard that it's better there, now. Well, at least, now, they have an employee discount program. I'm not sure about the rest.

And, yes, I'm sure I just described quite a bit of corporate minimum wage retail jobs, but I only have experience with the one. [And when I say that it was one of the worst places to work, I'm not saying that from my experience. During the time I worked there, it was ranked in the top 10 worst retail places to work and, I'm pretty sure, had the highest turnover rate of any retail chain store.]

But all of that is beside the point. Background, if you will. I suppose it's important to note that no one worked there because s/he wanted to work there. No one aspired to working at the local Toys R Us. [On the other hand, I did actually know people when I was growing up (and, remember, this was the South) who did aspire to work at Wal-Mart. Their goal was to one day get to be a manager!]
[I'm totally serious about that.]
[Completely, totally serious.]

To cut through what could be a long story, it wasn't long before I was put in charge of other people. Actually, for someone that started at the complete bottom of the TRU food chain (maintenance (a fancy word for janitor)), it was incredibly quick (as quick as they could make it without violating any of their weird policies). It was unhappy-making for some people that had been working there for years, but, see, I was self-motivated (meaning I didn't wait to be told what to do (because most people, upon finishing a task, would just float around the store until someone found them and gave them a new task (which meant a lot of people spent a lot of time just avoiding being found))), decisive, and more than competent (meaning I didn't need to be told more than once how to do any particular thing).

Which brings us to the interesting part of all of this: I was put in charge of other people because of those traits. I was good at figuring out what needed to be done and making sure it got accomplished. [Actually, my biggest issue was with delegating, because I feel much more comfortable just doing tasks myself rather than depending upon someone else to do them.] These were things the managers liked seeing in their employees. They were not traits, however, that the other employees liked so much. Specifically, they were not traits that employees working under me particularly liked.

Every morning, all of the department heads had meetings with the people that worked under them to hand out tasks. Mostly, this was a pretty uncomplicated interaction that went kind of like this:
"Okay, Employee 1, you need to do Task A, today. It's not a rush job; you just need to be finished with it before you leave for the day." [That's eight hours to do a job that shouldn't take more than two or so to do, but you had to leave in time to help customers. Still, those kinds of tasks shouldn't have taken all day, although they usually did.]
"Employee 2, you need to do Task B. This is a rush job, and you need to focus on getting it finished as quickly as possible. If a customer has a question that you can't answer on the spot, call someone else to help her."
"Employee 3..." [I'm sure you get the idea.]
Seems straightforward, right? Except this one morning, a young lady interrupted me by saying, "Why do you always act like you know everything?"

I think I stared at her for a moment, because, really, I had no idea what she was talking about, then said, "Excuse me?"

"Why do you always act like you know everything?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You never say 'I think' or 'I believe,' you just tell us what to do like you know everything."

Point #1: If you think something or believe something, it's redundant to say "I think" or "I believe," because, obviously, if you're saying it, you must think or believe it.

But that's not what we've been taught in our current society. In a world where everything is subjective, we're supposed to always preface anything we say with a phrase that casts doubt upon what we're saying. Personally, I think that's bullshit. [Yes, I prefaced that with "I think" on purpose.] I don't go around saying "I think 2+2=4." Why? Because I know 2+2=4. Sure, I could be wrong (I'm not), but I believe that I'm correct, so I just say it: "2+2=4." People, though, get all bent out of shape with when you act confident about anything more complicated than that, because, you know, we're all entitled to our own beliefs.

And, see, I believe that. We are all entitled to our own beliefs. But that doesn't mean I have to be wishy-washy about what I believe. And you shouldn't either. If you believe it, if it's really what you think, drop the preface. Just own it and say it. Don't make it sound like you don't know, yourself, if you're sure about what you say you believe.

My response was something along those lines, "If I'm saying it, I must think it, so why should I bother to tell you that's what I think."

"Well, other people say it that way. They tell us what they think we should do. They also ask us if that's what we want to do. Why don't you ask us?"

"Do you mean I should say, 'Hey, would you like to re-do the endcap on aisle 7, today?'"

"Yeah, why don't you ask?"

"Because it's not an option. If I'm giving you the endcap to do, you don't have the option of saying 'no,' so why should I ask you if you want to do it? That would be misleading."

By this point, the other 5 or 6 people under my charge were all staring open-mouthed at us.

"Well, why don't you see which things we want to do and let us pick or something? I don't want to do [the task I was giving her for the day]."

"That's why I didn't ask. It's my job to assign the tasks to the people I feel best equipped to handle them, and you get to do [whatever the task was she didn't want to do]."

Point #2: If you're in charge of something, if it's your thing, it doesn't matter what other people think or feel about it. You have to make the decisions. Trying to figure out how everyone else feels about a particular thing and making it work for everyone will result in some things never happening. Like, you know, when someone smeared poop on the bathroom walls (and, yes, that would happen in the boys' restroom every couple of months), someone had to go clean that up. It wasn't something that was really up for debate, because that's one of those things that no one ever wanted to do, so saying, "Hey, who wants to go clean the bathroom?" wasn't going to get you any responses. You had to pick someone and tell them to do it and ignore any "Why do I have to do that?" and "I don't want to"s.

You may be wondering, at this point, what any of this has to do with, as a writer, liking your own work, but both points are very relevant. And I'm not saying that feedback can't be useful, but too much feedback, or trying to accommodate too much feedback, is debilitating. It's yours, your work. Believe in it. And I'll talk more about all of this in part 2.

Just to wrap up the story, as it turned out, that particular employee had been passed to me through about three other people who couldn't get her to do her assigned tasks. They had not been firm enough and had given assignments out as if they were options: "How would you like to do..." or "Why don't you take..." or "It would be great if..." She had taken all of those assignments as if they were optional and opted out of doing them. So they gave her to me, and she did what I assigned her even though she didn't like it.

However, about two weeks later, on a day when I was not at work, she had tried on a manager what she had tried on me, and she was fired on the spot. Actually, she was told she could "go home for the day," because they (TRU) never actually used the term "fired" (except that one time the one guy was caught stealing a buttload of video games, but that's another story). Then, she was never re-scheduled and when she came in for her paycheck, she was told "things aren't working out" and let go. Don't you just love all the euphemisms? I think they're great.

This post has been brought to you by Alex Cavanaugh and the IWSG.

The Shadow of the Tree

BLACK FRIDAY

It's not something I've ever really participated in as a buyer. Okay, it's something I've never participated in as a buyer; however, I did spend a couple of Black Fridays working at Toys 'R' US, and, let me just say, that's not an experience I'd ever wish on anyone. I'm not going out for Black Friday this year, either, but I do want to participate...

By letting all of you have FREE! stuff!

Yep, FREE! stuff!

So I'm putting the whole Shadow Spinner run up for FREE! today! That's right: FREE!

"Part Nine: The Shadow of the Tree" is brand new and will be FREE! on Friday and Saturday.

All other eight parts plus "The Evil That Men Do" will be FREE! on Friday! That's all 10 parts for FREE! Don't let this great Black Friday deal pass you by. And make sure to spread the word. And click the "like" buttons!

The links are on the sidebar over there or by clicking the Shadow Spinner link at the top of the page.