Caitlin Kelly was a journalist, who due to downsizing at her newspaper, decided to take a part-time retail position with The North Face, a adventure clothing store. This book details her experience, starting with the interview, training, dealing with corporate expectations, demanding customers, and an ever growing sense of the lack of respect shown to customer service employees. Businesses pride themselves on their excellent customer service, but many pay their frontline people a low wage, give few benefits, create unsafe work environments and show little respect to those employees. Caitlin intersperses her experiences with actual facts about retail work, making this an informative and entertaining read. While I've worked fast-food, I've been lucky enough to not work retail with sales quotas and such and I will count my blessings. It's hard enough working in a field with a lot of public contact, I can't imagine doing so where I also had to sell so much every shift.
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