Holidays are over...or are they?

What's the deal with retail at Christmas time?

Where I work, there are two seasons of crazy: Summer, and Christmas. The difference between them (aside from the obvious temperature and musical ones) is that the stress comes from different sources: without and within.

Put simply - Summer is when we get busy because our customer base increases from all the out-of-towners who come up/over/down from places unknown with nothing better to do than clog up the roads, pollute the nearby lakes and trash our store while waiting for either the movie to start...or the rain to end.

Christmas is when we get busy because suits behind desks decide on their own how we should run our store with the expectation that customers are going to be out and about buying crap for themselves or their loved ones that nobody's going to want to wear/use/need after the second week of January.

I loved Christmas as a kid, as a young adult, as a college student and as a parent. For different reasons of course, but the general feeling of good will towards all seemed pretty tangible...

...then I got immersed in retail.

Where's the good will when someone complains about an open box of perfume...which was opened because someone wanted to know what it smells like?

Or when someone lets their child(ren) loose in the store opening toys and breaking things they have no intention of buying?

Or when people leave opened containers of snacks/chocolate all over the place because they were hungry & couldn't be bothered to at least pay for it first?

Or when we get truck after truck of stuff that suits think people will buy?

Or when stores push their associates and managers to the brink of quitting on a daily basis?

I still believe in the spirit of the holidays, but I also believe in:

1) getting more than 4 hours of sleep every night
2) spending more than 2 hours every 24 with my family
3) having the opportunity to venture out into the world as a consumer
4) completing things necessary in life - like grocery shopping, laundry, dishes, blogs

I will get back to reviewing comics again - because I want to.

But right now...I have to go to work.