In my post yesterday about Energizer’s sucky print ads (link), I mentioned that I worked at Radio Shack while I was in college.  It was a truly horrible place to work back then; not only were they a lame employer, but they also drove in some of the worst excuses for customers I could ever imagine. Because they have left such a stain on my memory, I am utterly surprised to tell you that they have produced some pretty damn cool ads for the holidays.

I have four to show you, this is my favorite:

See? That’s just fun, creative stuff.  I could give them a little grief about calling themselves “The Shack,” but whatever, they’re having a good time and obviously trying to pull in a younger audience.  I remember back when I worked in the Arcadia store, the local old age home would truck in the zombies that were slowly rotting away there and all of them would need new batteries for their hearing aids. Hearing aid batteries come in these little weird packs of five or six batteries and there are (were) about a half dozen different varieties, depending on the make and manufacturer.  Of course, these fossils couldn’t remember that each week, so instead of bringing in the old pack to show me the size, they would just take this screeching, earwax covered thing out of their ear and hand it to me so that I could read the size number off the existing battery.

This funny spot has one of my hip hop idols, Biz Markie, in it, just doing what he does best, being a goof ball:

The holidays were the absolute worse time to work at The Shack for a number of unforgettable reasons.  For starters, you worked on commission all year long, but rarely made anything above minimum wage because, back then, all you had to sell was all the little components that never amounted to much and the crappy store brands that Radio Shack used to carry (most people can remember having a Realistic brand radio when they were a kids, that was Radio Shack).  Of course, the one time of year when people were actually in a buying mood and Radio Shack carried stuff people actually wanted (we had RC cars, electronic games, all kinds of stuff), the corporate office lowered your commission rate! Awesome, right?  Nothing inspires you to give it your all like a pay cut during the holidays.

Here’s a goofy one they did to support the new Palm Pixi:

Anyway, another reason to hate the season were the damn customers during that time of year.  As I mentioned, Radio Shack customers sucked to start with, but they would turn up the douche-baggery during that time of year faster than they turned up the thermostats in their double wides. Some of my favorites were, again, the old people that would come in and insist that you teach them how to play the hand held electronic games so that they could teach little Bobby how to play on Christmas morning. Trust me, grandpa, the kid knew how to play that one out of the womb.  Then, after you gave them a little training on this device that lit up and made electronic noises for hours on end, they would ask you if I ran on batteries – not if it came with batteries, but if it ran on batteries. Usually by the second or third day after Thanksgiving, I was telling people that no, it ran on magic and the smiles of children.

OK, this one is just funny:

Back when I worked there, cell phones were brand new, big, heavy, and expensive as hell.  If you think you paid a lot for your iPhone, think again.  These things looked like the phones that you see people in the army using in ‘Nam and would run anywhere from $500 to $1000, and that was before the service, which was incredibly expensive back then as well because there were only a handful of people using it at the time.  Naturally, this was a prime sale to get because of the cost of the phone and you usually got a little bonus (spiff) from the carrier for pushing their service.  One time, during the holidays, I had some redneck and his fat ass son come into the store wanting to buy, two, count ‘em, two of these little commission dreams.  I sold the hell out of these suckers, and let me tell you, I was a rotten salesman back then because I could give a shit about making it in the retail business.

I got all the way down to having the phones out on the counter an was ringing them up when my boss came down and reminded me to sell them the extended warranty.  Fuck.  NO ONE ever wanted the extended warranty and most of the time is just confused people, so you usually just skipped it when your boss wasn’t looking.  So, I bring it up to the father and instead of confusion, I got anger.  Big, blustery anger that drew his son over to the counter to see what was wrong.  Now the son was a good foot taller than I was and twice as wide and probably got that way from eating his absent mother shortly after birth.  After the father explained to the son that “this asshole” wanted to charge him extra for a warranty, this guy actually threatened to kick my ass over the matter. Then, for good measure, the father assured me that, despite the fact that he was old, he would jump over the counter and knock my teeth out.  Awesome, I was about to die wearing a name tag.

This one is kind of weird, but it made me smile:

Obviously, I didn’t get killed that day (my boss came down and calmed them down somehow), but it was no surprise that was my last year in the retail business. I worked at Radio Shack for about three years.  That’s three years of holiday retail hell.  By that third Christmas, I had lost all faith in humanity and the season.  Sure, you would get a little of it back on Christmas eve, because that’s usually when the rest of the people that worked retail came in to shop for their gifts for their family and they were all really nice to you because they had just gone through the same evil that you suffered through.  However, that would all slip away when you had to work the day after Christmas when all the returns started to come in and you had to watch as dads would come in to return their kids toys for beer money.

Here’s one more freaky one:

Working retail or as a waiter/waitress should be required for all kids in their teens or twenties.  If not just for the fact that you’ll always think twice before being a dick to someone with a name tag, but it will give you the strongest reason you’ll ever need to stay in school, lest you spend the rest of your days behind a counter or wearing an apron.

Anyway, this is probably the last post I’ll do before I take a break for the holidays, so I wanted to wish you all Happy Holidays.  I’ll be back next week to review the last of the holiday ads I have laying around before I slowly slip into the haze known as New Year’s Eve.

J.

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