This is a blog post I wrote for Regal Crest Enterprise’s holiday blog post. I’m reposting it here on my website to share with my readers (with an added paragraph at the end).
For much of my young adult years, I worked in retail. This was long before I knew I wanted to be an English professor and years before I realized I wanted to pursue a career in writing. My first retail job was at a mall in a store called Kay Bee Toy and Hobby. I started out as a cashier, quickly realizing that a job in a toy store would be busy, especially during the holiday season.
We received two shipments a week during the holidays: a huge truck filled with cardboard boxes full of Cabbage Patch Dolls, Barbies, Transformers, and Hot Wheels. Whenever we received a new order of Cabbage Patch Dolls during the holidays, we’d have a line outside the door, even before the store opened. Nintendo was also a hot item back then. The phone rang nonstop whenever customers called to ask us which new Nintendo games or Cabbage Patch Dolls arrived or which new Barbie was in stock. On rare occasions, we’d get customers coming into the store looking for classic games, such as Yahtzee, Monopoly, or Life.
But forget closing on time during the holidays when the mall had extended shopping hours. On Christmas Eve, the manager of the toy store would stay open until most of the shelves were empty, even if that meant we’d work overtime until close to midnight. As a young adult trying to save money for college, I never minded getting overtime.
It was during the holiday season when I worked at a mall that I realized that there was a distinct sense of magic in the air when children would wander down each aisle as they made their Christmas lists for Santa. Sometimes, if we were lucky, the mall Santa would make an appearance in the store. We’d tell the kids he was taking inventory of the toys we still had in stock, checking his list to make sure all the kids got what they wanted.
Once we would finally shut and lock the doors on Christmas Eve, we’d do our best to clean up the mess left from the frantic last-minute shoppers. This was my first real job, the first time I felt like I’d worked hard for a paycheck. At nineteen years old, I learned to be grateful for a paycheck to help pay for Christmas gifts for my family and friends.
I often wonder what became of my fellow Kay Bee Toy and Hobby co-workers. The store has long since closed down, replaced by a cell phone store. Many of the people who worked in the store probably went on to marry and have families; some attended college. Back then, never did I imagine I’d be now working on my third novel and teaching full time at a community college. Like I did when I was just barely out of my teens, I still value hard work and dedication to my job.