February 1993: Sticking Around

The job at Electronics Boutique was supposed to be seasonal. I expected to be out of work in February and looking for something new. However, two of the permanent part-time employees left for full-time jobs at other stores. With their hours open I was asked to join the permanent staff. That was fine with me.

There was a huge difference between the mall in February and December. It was about 5 degrees out with wind chills frequently knocking another 10-20 off that. There were only 8-10 hours of sunlight during the day, even then the reflection off the snow and ice was blinding. Wallets were empty after splurging over the holidays. The malls, of course, were vacant. We could easily go an hour without anyone entering the store. Employees would stand outside their gates and chat most of the evening to pass time. It felt like working in an Antarctic research station. Every 2-3 hours we'd have to run outside to start our cheap cars and let them run for 10 minutes so we wouldn't be stranded when closing time rolled around.

The positive to this slowdown is that it gave me the time to learn more of the day-to-day operations. I started learning how to close the register down at night. It sounds like something that should be simple but was overly complicated with many steps. For example, we had to manually add all the credit receipts despite the fact that the card machine already did that. For a software store, we sure didn't trust software.

This time of year was perfect for the annual inventory. It was an all-night effort where we counted every single item in the store and reconciled it with what the system said we should have. The numbers weren't close so we'd have to pour over shipping and register logs for the next few weeks until we came up with more reasonable figures.