The accidentally brilliant thing about waiting as long as I did between the training post and this post about first day is that it took over a week and a half (but less than two weeks) to get to that first day of work after those awful training days (longer for the blog, many apologies, etc). It was excruciating. When I was hired, the woman indicated that I would start work the very next week, but that was not to be. No, I had to wait much longer.
When the time finally did arrive and I was walking up 7th Ave toward the employee entrance at 9:30 AM, it slowly dawned on me how little I actually knew about working for Macy's. I was opening the store and at the Bon Ton, that would have meant a morning meeting where we would talk about meeting sales goals and single out high performers and things of that sort. At the Ton, this took place in the break room, which was also a meeting room. No one told me where the morning meeting took place at Macy's. So I went straight to my station on the third floor. I can't say I was all that interested in a morning meeting at this store and I was fortunate that I was never forced to experience one.
Once on the third floor, I was greeted by a packer, who was just as surprised to see me as I was to be there. This packer was my first introduction to a non-manager, non-HR person at Macy's and it proved to be a wonderful surprise. He was pleasant, good-natured, relatively knowledgeable, and friendly. He told me what he knew and directed me to where he thought I should go and went on his merry, as the saying goes.
The thing about being early and not knowing where you work day begins is that you will wait for a long time before anything actually happens and if you work in retail and you show up before the store is open, you will be doing nothing for in the dark for awhile. The lights finally came on and other associates (what's wrong with just being a cashier anymore? Sales associate is such a farcical term. I'm not a salesperson, I don't make commission, and I can't be anyone's associate anything) began to trickle in. They knew their business and they went about it with about as much effort and diligence as you would expect from long term employees at a store run like Macy's Herald Square.
The number of things I didn't know about this store were piling up quickly. When no one has bothered to introduce you to a manager, you have limited resources for getting your questions answered. The urgent one at the moment was, am I, a temporary employee, allowed to open the cash register? I had been trained to do it (oh so efficiently), but no one had bothered to tell me if I should (that might sound ridiculous, but don't forget that opening a register involves counting money and that temporary employees are not allowed under any circumstances to close a register). I was standing behind a counter full of registers, so the question was not only should I open this register, but how many of these registers should I open? It was my first day, so I hung back and let the real pros handle that delicate question (for future reference at Macy's during the holidays, you open every register you come across).
The store was now definitively open (with the wandering customers to prove it) and still no one had greeted me, told me if I was at the right register, what was expected me for the day, when I would have a break, how long that break would be, where the stockroom was . . . you know generally useful information that you should be, what's the word I'm looking for? Oh yeah, trained on. But hey, this was the pants section and like all pants sections in department stores, it was a mess. The piles of pants were spread all over, forget about neatly stacked, the racks were full of pants that had no business there (Kenneth Cole doesn't sell for 39.99, I'll tell you that). The tie displays were a frightening nightmare.
Over the course of the next couple of hours, I got to know the nearest sales associate. He was an incredible resource, always helpful and cheerful. He looked at me oddly when I told I had been assigned to men's pants, but he took it in stride and let me in on a few tips, including what the manager's looked like. When it came time for my lunch break (meaning half the day was over), he helpfully pointed the managers out and I sauntered over to them to introduce myself. They too looked at my strangely when I told them I had been assigned to men's pants. Fortunately, I caught the area number that I was supposed to be working (that required some deduction, since none of the trainers bothered to point the number out or explain its significance, that was left up to me). A light dawned on the managers. "You don't work in this department." What? "You work in the basement. Uh, follow me."
Off we went, down into the bowels of the Herald Square store. He showed me where I could go, told me the name of the manager and went on his merry. That might sound brusque, but once again, the actual employees on the floor of Macy's are always eager to help (often because they are not eager to do their job or help customers, who, unlike me, are rarely grateful for it). I finally landed in a lonesome section, tucked between the Tommy Hilfiger discount boxers, the Hugo Boss, not so discount underwear, and the socks, the section devoted to Dockers. The men's pants that I had been working with not so long ago were on the third floor, there were casual pants on the second floor and jeans on 1.5, but Dockers were in the basement. You're right, it is ridiculous.
I never got around to asking managers about why no one asked me what I was doing on the third floor and why no one bothered trying to find me when I clocked in at the wrong register. I later learned that attendance is a perfunctory affair at the store. At some point during the day, a manager will come around to each register, usually after the staggered shift change should have been accomplished and ask if someone has arrived. Then they will check that name off their printed list. In their defense, while associates are assigned to specific sections, they will quite often float over to the busiest of the nearby sections on their floor in search of their daily goal, so they won't be found when a manager goes looking. Now, the idiotic thing about this is that we have to clock in and we do so on the registers, all of which have unique ID numbers. Somewhere in that building there is a record of an employee signing in and where they signed in. You don't really need to go around looking for people, especially since the computer keeps track of their sales goal in real time. If they clocked in and they have recorded sales then why do you need to lay eyes on them? What kind of idiotic con would involve coming in to work and giving all the credit for that work to another person? Just one more inscrutable mystery about the procedure of Herald Square.
I spent the next hour folding corduroys on a satellite display (the main one was on - wait for it - the third floor) that would prove to be the bane of my existence. Then I finally had to help a customer. I wandered over to the nearest, or the most obvious cash register and rang them up. And since no one lines up at an empty cash register, as soon as I was there, I was trapped. Another employee eventually wandered along and immediately treated me like an idiot child, the kind of behavior I had been expecting, but was now disappointed to encounter. She rudely shooed me from her counter (after stealing my credit application, something she undoubtedly did not need for her quota) and waved dismissively toward "your" registers. At first I didn't even know what she was talking about. But then it became clear: just behind the massive sock display and directly in front of a wall of socks was the counter for the Dockers, not fifteen feet away (the placement of those registers neatly sums up what is wrong with the Herald Square store, something I'll elaborate on later).
And that just about wraps up my first day, the rest of which was so uneventful that it is lost in the horrific sameness of the retail experience, particularly when you work one 80 square foot section of store. Every day. Awesome, I know, right?
