Reductions Girl
Minimum wage. Maximum avoidance.
One summer between university years, I got a job at the local Co-op as the “reductions girl”, which meant going around stickering food with yellow markdowns before it expired. I’m not sure that was the official title. It was hot: the kind of airless heat that made any movement feel exhausting. I was working two hours a day, which somehow made it feel more annoying, not less. It tore me away from long, aimless afternoons watching daytime television, and for that, I resented it deeply.
To get the job, I had to lie and pretend I wanted it as a forever career: like this was the first rung on the great ladder of retail management. I wore blue polyester trousers that were too tight at the waist and too long in the leg. I couldn’t find any black shoes, so I wore red Doc Martens. They squeaked on the shop floor.
I knew the job was going badly when I turned up on the second day to find my boss standing over a table overflowing with unreduced goods: all the ones I’d forgotten about the day before. I found the job so understimulating that it was genuinely hard to concentrate. To pass the time, I squished things. Mainly jam rolls. And cakes. I considered it quality control through destruction. Sorry if you bought any.
I also used to try and finish ten minutes early by going to the toilet. One time, my boss started banging on the door and screaming, “Your shift isn’t over yet!” But I was done. Emotionally.
Meanwhile, the Co-op radio kept playing my favourite songs, completely unironically, while I stood there in my polyester trousers stickering reduced-price meringue nests. I’d start pretending I was somewhere else: on a train, or in a film, or briefly dead. It made everything harder. I was being undone by Sixpence None the Richer.
Once, I was asked to put away some wine. I’d been doing it for about half an hour, carefully reading every label, when the manager tapped me on the shoulder and asked why I was spending so much time reading. “Are you sure you’re not a student?”
Obviously, I was a student, but at that point, I couldn’t admit it. So I panicked and said I’d had a family emergency and needed to move to the north. Why did I do this? I’m not sure. At the time it seemed like a normal reaction to mild questioning in a retail environment.
I never returned. I avoided that Co-op for the next eight years, until I finally moved to a different town. I had told a man in a fleece gilet that I was relocating for a tragedy that didn’t exist; I couldn’t risk being seen buying crisps. There’s no real moral to this story. Unless maybe it’s this: one stupid lie can cost you eight years of convenient shopping.
I adore these little acts of rebellion. My own comes from when I had to work as a warehouse picker. One had to get a quota of something like 2000 greetings cards an hour. Of course I didn't achieve that because I couldn't be bothered. After a few days I was called into the office and told I was to leave at lunchtime and not come back. So for the next few hours until lunch I did 3000 cards an hour. Just to make the appropriate point. I don't know whether that's an Aquarian tendency of mine or my Sagittarius ascendent coming out. But it definitely felt good.
The next temp job was a different warehouse. It was a combination of young people like me and old-timers. For the latter, I don't think I've ever seen faces displaying such nihilistic despair with life since. The radio music selection was horrible and chosen by those old-timers. Everyone went to the pub at lunchtime and drank as much as they could. The final straw was when they sent me to first sift through a pile of broken things to see if anything could be salvaged, that was in the morning, followed by an afternoon sticking little stickers on boxes of little lightbulbs.
The problem wasn't necessarily the zombification of the work, it was the fact that it required just enough concentration so that I was not able to completely dissociate and spend the day in an internalised creative trance. I remember hearing an anecdote about Ian Curtis saying once that he didn't mind working in a chicken factory because he was able to daydream creatively.
Some zombie jobs allow one to do that. Others occupy some middle ground and they are the ones that threaten to destroy your soul if you don't resist. Whether that's what hell looks like, or purgatory, remains an open question.
Love this! I exited my first paid employment as a paperboy after being on the receiving end of one scowl too many from Mrs Martin the newsagent, and responded by delivering an entire round of Sunday papers through the letterbox of the first home on my route. I loved to think of the chaos and angry phone calls she took that day! Hardcore, eh? On balance, I feel I had a far more valid reason to never return to that shop than you, perhaps 😆