Let the Retailing Begin

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?

Let's Get Trained

So, you've been hired by Macy's. You get a tiny break, since they don't throw you directly onto the floor. First, they throw you into a room full of computers and POSs (seriously – it stands for Point of Sale, but it has to be one of the most unfortunate acronyms ever conceived) and they make you wait. I've already run through a number of synonyms for dreary and dingy in my last post, but I managed to find one that I like better – seamy. The room is seamy. In keeping with the best Macy's tradition, you are left waiting, along with your other confused new hires, before anyone bothers to sort out who belongs in which training room (sales gets a different room from support which gets a different room from the Santaland folk). When they finally decide that you belong in the room, you get to sit and wait again as a clutch of HR personnel hunt down paperwork and comb through lists making sure that they made the right decision on whether they let you into the right room. Their original decision is by no means final.

Most of the fuss was over the sign in sheet and what to do with the people who weren't on the sign in sheet. For the extremely unlucky, it might be scheduling another early day at least a week later. For others it meant signing the sheet by hand. That required them to pass out a new sign in sheet, so everybody had to sign in again. Then there was the time sheet (which they insisted you sign before you had every clocked out, which is always a no-no in the real world – it's like leaving a signed blank check lying around. Not that Macy's cared). It took about forty five minutes to sort out the dos and don'ts of the two sheets and the members of your training party finally settles into a discernible pattern.

In the meantime, no one has given you anything to do, so if you are fairly certain that you are in the right room, you have nothing to do but twiddle your thumbs and watch the inefficiency and bureaucratic machinations unfold in slow motion. Once the ponderous decision making process has settled down into a semblance of certainty and lent the affair some stability, you begin. You begin the process . . . of filling out your HR forms, various bits of information organized neatly for various government authorities interested in your income (or lack thereof). Most of these forms are online, which requires a silly process of logging in to the system with your employee number (remember that white form? Well, you need it now. You needed to present it to get into the room and you need every time an HR person is confused about your existence or any question that you have posed to them). There are two astonishing facts about the process of filling out all of these forms. The first is that you have to do it at all. I have no idea what regulatory or legal walls exist between macysjobs.com and the internal site, but you have to give up all of the information that these forms require when you apply. So when you log in with your unique employee number, it is apparently ridiculous to expect all of those forms to have been filled out in their entirety and they await only your approval. But that didn't happen. Instead, you have to type your name and your social and your address several times to satisfy the bureaucratic monster at the center of these machines.

The second astonishing fact is that there remains one or two forms that you have to fill out by hand for no obvious reason whatsoever. And one of these forms, a classic bit of tax form obfuscation designed to confound and trap the unwary into making inadvertently false statements about their tax status. On top of that, if you use a ball point pen and you make a mistake, the Macy's HR people make you fill out the form again. Because, and they say this with a straight face mind you, that unless it is perfect the first time, if you so much as double up on one letter or number in the interests of clarity, the New York bureaucrat responsible for processing the form will assume that someone has tampered with the form and reject it out of hand (presumably Macy's and without even the thinnest glimmer of insight into why someone would tamper with a form in a way that makes it more legible). So you have to get it exactly right and without any problems from your ballpoint pen. I dare you to attempt the experiment. Take out a clean sheet of paper, write out your address, your phone number, and your social security number and see how many times a used ball point pen causes legibility problems. I'll wait.

The mistakes you make on those forms will follow you into the next session, which is a bizarre mixture of lecture and interrogation, but we will get to that special torture in a moment. There are too many people in the room to completely let them off the hook. The first thing that will strike you when looking over the room is that holiday managers are in the same room as you. That makes some sense when all you are doing is filling out forms (something that took about two hours for about twenty people). But when they follow you into the lecture on how to sell the Macy's way (which isn't strictly speaking different than selling things any other way, but again, I'm getting ahead of myself). There is a wide range of socio-economic levels and levels of education in the room. There are several people who are clearly college students or recent graduates and who simply need some extra money over the holidays. They are generally betrayed by their age and their quality of their clothing. Then you have the people who are hoping to turn this temporary position into something permanent with Macy's after the holiday is over. They are a little bit older by and large. Then you have the prospective managers and executives (yes, I said executives). They are obvious by their age or their deportment. And then you have the people who probably shouldn't have been hired at all. I mentioned last time that the most important characteristic that Macy's is looking for is not being a thief and a stated willingness to report thieves. One of the most important documents we were to fill out was the direct deposit form. Direct deposit is generally desirable, but in Macy's case, it is doubly so, since the only other way to get your check is to wait in line at a place ominously called the Vault during regular business hours (heaven forbid that anyone in human resources be around to help employees after six pm), a wait that our hosts inform us could last at least an hour every Friday (one piece of mercy of the Macy's system is getting paid by the week). At hearing what it requires to get direct deposit, namely a bank account, the woman next to me talked to me about how little she trusts banks. Didn't trust them at all. She was shortly to be flummoxed almost completely by the cash register, but that's tomorrow (tomorrow's training, not tomorrow blog time). To help us wrap our heads around direct deposit and speed that path along, Macy's kindly hosted a group of Chase hawking their checking and savings accounts and offering to open one on the spot, with a $100 gift card as a sweetener (I'll be taking them up on that one shortly). I would have thought such a presentation much more crass and insulting if I weren't sitting next to a woman who was completely unbanked, in the graceless phrase of the industry. When you take that into consideration, Chase and Macy's are doing the often poor people that Macy's hires a huge solid. It is one of the few things that Macy's gets right, though the flagrant salesmanship of the Chase team made it apparent that even when good comes of Macy's actions, it is always tempered by incompetence and inefficiency.

When it came to filling out all of those forms, which took far too long and presaged the maddening inability of the trainers to, you know, train, this woman was constantly stymied and needed help. I seriously doubt that she filled any of the forms out herself. You'd think that some kind of skills test would be the final arbiter of hiring because this woman would be a major drag on the sales floor (just wait until she is ringing up someone who is in a hurry and finishing up a shopping day with something that isn't from her area – a nightmare of customer service). But no, this woman had been hired by Macy's and would shortly hit the floor to terrorize customers already harried by the pressures of the world's largest and most illogically laid out department store.

It got much worse for her when Macy's revealed it's associate discount policy: you have to have a Macy's credit card to get it and your discount shows up on your bill, not at the register. It is veering dangerously close to company money. If you want the discount, you have to have some kind of Macy's credit card, either the line of credit (which that unbanked woman was not going to get) or a pre-paid card, which they discourage you from using. Since your discount occurs “back of house” (a phrase so meaningless that I didn't know what it meant for a long time), meaning your discount is applied to your balance, not to your purchase. For example, if you buy a $100 item, your balance will be $80, but at the register, it will look like you have paid $100. This is awkward for the pre-paid card, since you actually have to have the $100 on the card in order to buy your item. You will just end up with a credit. It turns out there is a trick to treating the Macy's card like a pre-paid card since you can make a payment at any register, as soon as you make the purchase. It's better than the pre-paid because you don't have to waste value on the card (which from Macy's point of view isn't a waste – based on my experience with the Bon-Ton, I'd say that employees of department stores are some of the most dedicated customer's of those stores). Macy's Credit Card will be the subject of another blog post, don't worry.

The best part about filling out all those forms is where you digitally sign the code of conduct. Every company in the world has a code of conduct, as does every school, and they all generally go out of their way to construct the document so that you have to read it before you sign the document that says you read it and agree to abide by it. I have no idea how legally binding that document is frankly, but I know that you could get out of any lawsuit that results from violating the Macy's code because you will be told explicitly not to waste time reading it; just skip to the bottom and say that you have nothing to divulge regarding past violations (meaning things done in the past which would be considered violations even though you weren't an employee at the time) and that you had read it. It was the real physical equivalent of skipping the licensing terms on software. You know the annoying part of installing any program, the part where it makes you scroll all the way down before “Agree” is highlighted as an option. It was a stunning admission on the part of the Macy's trainers that their code of conduct was useless. We were encouraged to read the 50 page document at out leisure. It is only available online through the employee website (InSite – get it? Yeah, me neither).

After hours had been wasted filling out forms that we should have only needed to rubber stamp, rubber stamping forms that required our signature, and generally waiting around watching the trainers waste time, I mean work, you will be herded into another room down the hall. In the computer room, you were told explicitly that you would not be allowed to eat or drink in this or any other training room. That made sense in the computer room. It didn't make any sense in what was essentially a converted hallway. Perhaps it just meant that they could give up all pretense of cleaning the room. It would save them the money it would take for a janitor to do the work. There were clearly double doors on both sides of the room and you could hear the raucous cacophony of the employee break room next door. In my case, the most immediately striking thing about the room was how cold it was. It wasn't hard to spot the broken window that was letting all the cold air in. This was our home for the next couple of hours.

In this room you will learn several things, almost none of them the lessons that Macy's wants you to learn. They do have a sales philosophy articulated by the acronym MAGIC. Meet and make a connection, Ask questions and listen closely, Give options, give advice, Inspire to buy and sell more(!), and Celebrate the purchase. But that's all marketing speak for “Be nice, be knowledgeable, remember what your job is, and make people happy they bought something.” The fact that it took hours to drill this into the new recruits (including the executives and managers, I might add, a soul crushing blow at the beginning of employment that would almost be enough to make me quit on the spot since it shows such dedication and care on the part of Macy's corporate). Much worse is the incredible incompetence of the people presenting the information. We were familiar with them from the enervating experiencing of filling out all of those forms, mostly since nearly everyone had that New York tax from rejected for some arcane reason or another at least once (three times for me). Their crowd management skills did not exist or if they did exist, they were never on display. When it came to the actual lectures though, their disinterest was palpable. They tag-teamed the presentation, the one seemed engaged at least, she stood up, actively sought responses from the dulled minds of her audience. But she was hampered by the fact that she didn't actually know the material very well and she was hopeless at warming the room up. Like most bad teachers, she defaulted to angry frustration far too often, though the next trainer took that anger and snarkiness to another level. “No.” “Wrong.” She was so bored by her work that she didn't bother to stand and she picked mercilessly on the crowd, passing a binder and cards along to be read by people who have no desire or inclination to declaim, let alone have any idea how to do it well. That should be the trainer's job. She was at least entertaining when she went off script and told us about the outrageous ways the customers and employees would steal and her shopping habits as a stewardess based out of Singapore.

Finally, the agony of that silly training was over and it is time to be subjected to another presentation, this time from the hilarious Loss Prevention personnel. I know that some marketer or PR guy decided that store detective or something along those lines said the wrong thing, but Loss Prevention is a soulless euphemism full of all the coded cynicism and distrust that corporations can muster, especially since the vast majority of loss prevention measures are aimed at employees. On that high note, the day ended and we could finally leave the building on a day that started at eight in the morning (or six in the morning if you had to commute like I did). The next day will be worse. It will be shorter, but that just condenses the horror.

Register training is both a sad necessity and a ridiculous task. Modern point of sale software, especially at the high level that Macy's requires guide their users through each step of the process. All you really have to do is read the prompts and fill out the requested fields. Macy's current POS terminals are NCR's top of the line RealPOS 80XRT (remember what I said about unfortunate acronyms?). I have a hard time believing that anyone needs a quad-core cash register, but it's available if you need it. Within two hours you can have all of the basic functions of the terminal down and they can throw you out onto the sales floor confident that you can handle that aspect of customer service, the easiest part. There are lots of other parts, especially knowing the practical running conditions of the store (how long breaks will be during what shift, what to do when you open, what to do when you close, where the stock rooms are, how to get in touch with a manager, etc). They don't bother helping you out with that. But that's another story.

Instead, register training, as well as the odds and ends of proper maintenance, lasts for over five hours. There is no description for the tedium of being chained to a computer via headphones doing the same thing over and over again without even the validation that doing it all on the floor gives you. The training lacks all focus or thought too. You are given fake checks and told to use the terminals nearby but then no one checks to make sure you have run the transaction properly. About a third of the time, the computer wants you to run through the transaction on the computer and not the terminal. You would think that this would prove you can do it, but the computer doesn't give you options; there's no way to get it wrong. The room is full of terminals that you are supposed to use, but there is only one trainer whose sole job it appears to be to hold the incompetent new hires' hands. There is no way to be unhired just because you can't use a computer, a sad state of affairs for the nice customers just trying to finish up their holiday shopping.

That would be horror enough to complete this epic tale of woe and degradation, but in my case, there were two more ridiculous affronts to my reason and attention. The first thing that happens after you complete training is that they give you your schedule. Except for me. In my case, they couldn't find the sched. They asked for that white piece of paper again, the one with my requisition number. They didn't say that I should bring it, but after all the “Can I see your white paper?” action yesterday, I knew that I wasn't going to be without it. They asked for it. After twenty more minutes, it turns out that I would not be working the next week, but the week after that. So I had been trained, but wouldn't be working for another week and a half. And then there was the tour.

There is no way to do justice to a ten story department store on a whirlwind tour trying to explain both the store and where each of the twenty people following you around is going to work. It took far too long to complete the tour and when I got to my first day of work, a week and a half later, it turns out that my tour guide had told me to work on the wrong floor in the wrong area. It was a great introduction to the next three weeks.

Welcome to the Assembly Line

I realize that my last post may have involved too many of the kind of geeky numbers that I enjoy immersing myself in, so I want to continue this series on Macy's with some of my personal experiences.

I started my time in New York looking to snag that elusive first internship, so Macy's was deep into hiring for the holiday season when I finally got around to looking for a real job to get me from getting the news about being a production assistant to actually being a production assistant. As with so many massive employers these days, Macy's begins their hiring process online (www.macysjobs.com if you are super curious). Macy's gets you to work before they even hire you by making you fill out an extensive application, including those annoying personality inventories which are meant to weed out the dumb potential thieves (though frankly, I am positive that the results of these questionnaires are simply ignored by an overworked HR department). It took me between forty minutes to an hour to apply. If that seems excessive, then you and I agree.

Eventually, someone makes an executive decisions and you get an invite. Macy's gives you a time to be at the Herald Square store. You are instructed to head to the 8th floor, which in addition to being home to Santaland, Au Bon Pain, and Ladies Outerwear, is also Human Resources central for the store (and possibly for the entire region). Your first trip to HR goes through the employees entrance on 7th Ave, a door that is easy to miss except for the crowd of six to ten people dressed in black sipping on coffee avoiding getting to work. The entrance to the store is a bad omen. The hallway is dingy and dirty. The exposed pipes are rusty and frequently dripping with some unknown liquid with clearly corrosive properties. The rusty cage protecting the stairwell up into the store proper is a sign as well. The uncomfortable truth of your future place of work is that the infrastructure of the store is clearly hurting.

Once you make it down the scary hallway and up the intimidating stairwell, you are immediately confronted with an ultra sophisticated security setup – another narrow hallway guarded on one side by a bored security guard who manages to look menacing and disinterested at the same time and on the other by the vendor sign-in window and the vendor coat and bag check. To the left, is a tiny alcove filled with crappy old chairs that serves as a holding area until an HR person comes to wave you past security without a pat down, search of backscatter scan of your person. The lesson of this is that they are more worried about the people leaving the building (that would be the employees). Your HR guide shepherds you into the elevator for the quick jaunt to the eighth floor via the back way. 

Once you get to the eighth floor, you are awarded with another dismal holding room full of chairs, though this room at least has the space for all the silent hopefuls staring at the Human Resources people beavering away in their glass enclosure. Their job is a mystery but it involves taking questions and looking like they are busy (knowing what I know now, I bet the company is giving them something idiotic to do that makes them simultaneously busy and unproductive). On the other side of the room is the computers for those who want to apply to Macy's in store rather than in their pajamas. The floor hums with activity as gregarious employees who have nothing better to do than chat with each other as they meander between the places they may or not supposed to be. At your first trip to the woman behind the glass (what is it about HR that makes it primarily female?), she has you fill out a few tidbits of information and then directs you to the security guard who prevents shoppers from accidentally wandering into the logistical nerve center of the region (or during the holidays, the home of an endless procession of children and parents waiting on line to see Santa). The security guard takes your ID and gives you a bright pink pass. Then you go back to the dreary holding cell and you wait. 

About twenty minutes past the time you were supposed to be there, you are invited into an interview room where as many as six prospective associates and managers are being interviewed at once. There is very little privacy in there and as far as I could tell, there was little of substance being asked for except to glean what I thought they wanted to hear about stealing - yes, stealing is wrong. Yes, I will narc on anyone I see stealing, etc. If you convince her that you are sincere about not stealing and committed to squealing on those who do, she will tell you to go back out into the awful sitting area and wait. Thank the Lord for technology because you will spend the next half an hour to forty five minutes surfing the net on your mobile internet device. No one reads actual books anymore.

Eventually, a different woman will bring you back into the interview room, and sketch the general shape of what to expect from being employed by Macy's over the holidays, things like what department you'll be working, dress code, and wages. Macy's has a theatrical approach to dress. Everyone (with a few exceptions, usually based on whether you make commission or not) is expected to wear black and for once, women have more options than men, because most men are expected to wear suit jackets.

And then there is the matter of pay. I'm searching for a word to describe the pay for an associate at Macy's. Only one word comes to mind: derisory (such a fun word, especially when you say it out loud). Eight dollars an hour. Eight. I admit to being a bit stunned by that. For one, burger flippers at McDonald's make 7.25, since that's the minimum and Macy's customers have a right to expect more service from their cashiers than from McD's cashiers. It's not entirely out of line with what other retailers pay though. I heard rumors that Express pays their employees minimum as well, which is utterly absurd considering the level of fashion expected from Express employees. Apple is at the other end of that scale. They pay fourteen dollar an hour, for essentially the same job, only easier because there isn't an Apple Store in the world that occupies nine stories of an entire New York City block. I would also like to point out that I was paid more than eight dollars an hour to work at the Bon Ton in York, PA almost six years ago. If there is a better benchmark for wage stagnation over the least half decade, I don't know it (it probably involves inflation adjusted purchasing power parity, but hey, that's not the kind of analysis that's we're doing here). 

Where was I? Oh yes, the woman had given you the down low. The next step is getting your ID back from the security guard (no one has ever explained why that security guard is in charge of my ID up until you get hired, but not afterward). Once you get your ID back, you are permitted to wait again, albeit in a different room. The eighth floor is a warren of cramped rooms that stretch your ability to come up with exotic synonyms for dismal and dreary. Let's call it utilitarian, since it is dominated by the desks and work stations of the HR managers (again predominantly women) who process the already copious amount of paperwork generated by hiring a temporary sales associate. The most important piece of paper is essentially a P.O. Or requisition and the product being ordered is you, which is (another) disturbing glimpse into Macy's inner workings. It turns out, that req number I had originally been given had already been used. That necessitated an additional wait, while they tracked down the woman who had briefed me (not the woman who had interviewed me) so she could sign the new form.

Your next bit of business is to choose two days for the completion of your Macy's training (I was surprised that they had any training at all, but that training session is a whole other topic, one that I can only address when I no longer work for Macy's). The whole thing was appallingly old fashioned, with these women dedicated to processing endless mountains of paper, stuck in this tiny room dealing with people and computers. Every. Day. Once you get that form, the one with the requisition number, the one that every HR person who talk to or even glance at or question during training (I need to go to the bathroom. Can I see your form?), you have been hired by Macy's.

During training, one of the HR people let slip that Macy's hires twenty five hundred, that's two thousand and five hundred, temporary employees for the holiday season at the Herald Square store. The entire set up, from signing up for your user id on macysjobs.com, to sitting with the HR ladies while they gossip and do your mindless paperwork, is a grinding machine, the kind of low power, high maintenance machine that passed for race cars in the fifties. You look at engines today and wonder what those guys in the fifties were doing only getting three hundred horses out of a V8 that big, when you should be getting six or seven. Here is Macy's with a huge HR department, 24 billion dollars in revenue and they still haven't graduated their HR procedures from the fifties and their IT department is stuck in the eighties. Macyjobs makes a good fist of things, but it's a giant database and the last thing that I or anyone else interested in hiring me should be doing is writing my name on a form, and yet that happened on countless occasions during the two hours between when I was interviewed and when I was hired. The Macy's I've been hired by is a relic, a hulking behemoth, that is lumbering under the weight of a bad business model and a terrible business infrastructure. It survives on its name, tradition, and the attractive ideal of a department store that offers a one stop shop for so many of your household needs (except wool socks). Macy's hires armies of underpaid temporary employees with overworked and unproductive staff. It's mass production in the age of just in time assembly. The Herald Square store is a time machine dedicated to the memory of the past in more ways than one.

Retail!

What do Skoda, Seat, Bentley, Bugatti, Audi, Lamborghini, and Porsche have in common? They are all designed, assembled and owned by Volkswagen, a major car brand in its own right. What do Ben and Jerry's, Bertolli, Country Crock, Knorr, Lipton, Popsicle, Ragu, Slim Fast, and Wish Bone all have in common? They all reside in Unilever's enormous stable of consumer goods. What do Guiness, Tanqueray, Johnny Walker, Bailey's, Jose Cuervo, Ciroc, Captain Morgan, Seagram's and Goldschalger have in common? Diageo or its subsidiaries distills and brews them all. Filene's (the non-basement portion, Shillito's, Burdine's, Rich's, Foley's, Sanger Brothers, Boston Store, MainStreet, Marshall Field's, I Magnin, Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Famous-Barr, Strawbridge's, Hecht's, The Jones Store, Robinsons-May, Meier and Frank, and Kaufmann's? Since 2005, these stores have all been owned and operated by Federated Department Stores, better known since 2007 as Macy's, Inc.

I became interested in brands and the companies behind them when I noticed that the head of one of the minor global car companies (isn't that a crazy thing to say? But still Fiat is both global and minor compared to other global car giants) said that he expected only six car companies to be able to survive in a fully globalized car world. I was immediately interested in finding out how many car companies there actually were and discovered that there were really about sixteen major global car companies that make more than a million vehicles a year underneath all of the brand names we know (Toyota, General Motors, Volkswagen, Ford, Honda, Hyundai, PSA Citroen, Nissan/Renault, Fita, Suzuki, Daimler, Chana, BMW with Mazda, Chrysler, Mitsubishi nudging that number, but distinctly under it, if you are interested, I know I was). Since then, I have constantly been on the lookout for the information underneath the brand.

There are many reasons for the consolidation of the companies behind the brands and it's a process that has been in full swing since the 1990s at least. I wish I had the time and resources to explore the process that has led to the current landscape. I say that because the current state of the department store has a very interesting history. The most interesting to me is that the company you know as Macy's, the one that's been turning iconic department stores the country over into Macy's at a breakneck pace since 2005, isn't precisely Macy's. Sure, the stock ticker symbol is a nice big M and all of those stores call themselves Macy's (even if it's really, say, Marshall Field's). But it used to be called Federated Department Stores, a department store holding company founded in the glamorous city of Cincinnati, OH. They owned a number of famous stores, including Filene's (the upstairs part, the basement part has long since been spun off), Lazarus, and Foley's. FDS had some problems with takeovers in 1990, emerged from bankruptcy in 1992 and bought Macy's in 1994, just after Macy's finished it's brush with death. So, Federated has owned Macy's since 1994. In a huge buyout in 2005, they bought the May Department Stores, which included Kaufmann's, Hecht's, as well as Foley's and Filene's, stores they had bought off of Federated in the 1980's, and Marshall Field's (though May only owned Field's for a year). Following that merger, FDS bgean transforming every store in their stable to either Macy's or Bloomingdale's, the flashier half of Macy's and completed the transformation by turning itself into Macy's Inc, in 2007. 

Got it? Of course not. I still don't get it (I might draw a chart next week, if I figure out how to make Google's chart thing work - don't hold me to that). The more closely you look at the department store landscape, the more confusing it's history gets. Fortunately, thanks to all these buyouts and mergers, things are a little clearer today. Basically you have Macy's, Saks, J.C. Penney, Dillard's, Nordstrom's, the Bon-Ton and Sears for department stores, with Kohl's, Target, TJX (TJ Maxx and Marshall's), and the grand daddy of all retail Wal-Mart competing on the discount end of things (check out Google Finance for a snapshot of the industry financials). That's the state of affairs that I want to take a look at in the coming weeks. But I'm not just interested in business data, I am also interested in department store culture. I worked at a Bon Ton in York, PA and the parallels between that Bon-Ton and this Macy's are eerie, yet another reason that I started digging into Macy's financials (which are mostly a matter of public record thanks to being a publicly traded company and all).

Over the next couple of weeks, I am planning on thinking aloud, sharing the things I discover about Macy's, and writing about how Macy's Herald Square works (or, uh, doesn't work, as the case may be), from the perspective of a cashier (ok, sales associate). Next week? I think we will talk about getting hired.

First Impressions

New York City doesn't exist. If you ask the Post Office about it, they will correct you. Actually, they will make you feel like an idiot, if you are looking for a zip code and you use "New York City" in the form. You can try it on your own (use 83 East 4th Street for the rest of the address - I've been there). New York is not one unified place, it is many, much smaller places jammed into one geographical area. It's impossible then to discuss my first impression of the city as if there were only one. There's too much to experience, too much going on, for that to be even remotely true. This is the case with every major city the world over and "first impression" syndrome where someone offers a sweeping generalization of the city because they spent a couple days exploring the ultra-famous parts of the city is one of the most grievous sins of tourism (and I am just as guilty of it - I'm sure Amsterdam and Brussels had much left for me to truly explore). Most cities defy easy generalization and categorization, but some are more eclectic than others. Berlin, for example, offers a more varied experience of German life than Munich. Berlin isn't even properly one city yet, it is literally a collection of areas (though I understand they are working on that). But New York is easily the most diverse city that I have ever been to.

Truthfully, I have only experienced one borough of New York, a tiny sliver of it's metropolitan area. Jersey City, where I live, has several facets of it's own. I live in the part that is surrounded by the crappy and the run down. It sounds worse than it is because the rules of economics are slowly dictating a move into the area. It's fine. It's a bit of a dump, but it's fine. Then there is Hoboken and apparently a tiny bit of Weehauken (things run together here), which are trendy and solidly middle class (and just as predictably the food and bars are mostly overpriced). Pavonia/Newport is for people who want to feel like they are living in New York proper, but with a view of the city, and the prices and taxes of New Jersey. It sounds like it's a cheap imitation, but Goldman Sachs has an entire office tower not too far away. It's only cheap when compared to Manhattan.

Ah, Manhattan. That's the only borough of the five that I've spent any time in. I'm sure that I will end up in Brooklyn at some point, but the PATH trains only run to the World Trade Center or 33rd St. So no Brooklyn and no Queens just yet. It took me a couple of days to work up the nerve to cross the river and check out the city. I'm not sure why, to tell you the truth. Maybe because going over the river (or under it rather since the ferries are stupid expensive) meant that I was really here. I couldn't chicken out and bolt the city if I set foot in Manhattan. But the truth is, as soon as I saw the New York skyline in person, I knew I was hooked. I am sure that I will take pictures of it at some point. It's stunning and if it captivates you at all, then you know, you are in New York to stay, come hell or high water. Or that's how you feel if you are a little bit of a romantic. The whole reality of unemployment may indeed have something to say about staying in New York or not, but I'm working on it. I'm working on it.

Looking at the skyline though already demonstrates a truth you will encounter on that ground: New York isn't really one place. You can see the difference between the skyscrapers downtown, the vast and obviously residential area, and the skyscrapers in mid-town. The Empire State building dominates its part of the island, practically unchallenged. Downtown, the skyscrapers are thickly forested, competing with each other like jungle trees for the light of the sun. There will be a big boy on the block in the near future when they finish the new World Trade Center tower, but for now, there are no winners, just competitors.  It was unintentional, but my exploration of that gorgeous skyline followed the same path as my eyes from one end of the island to the middle (it's not the other end - I've made it to 50th St. and the island goes all the way to 216th St.).

If you get on a different PATH train, you will end up on Christopher St. instead of the WTC and it's a completely different world, the world of Greenwich Village. I was disturbed to find how easy it was to lose entire skyscrapers when you are actually among the brownstones and walkups (if those are the terms - Law and Order gave me the vocabulary, but I still use it like a tourist). In parts of the Village, you could easily go the entire day without ever knowing that downtown was even there. The parts that I walked through were gorgeous and I've seen quite a bit of it, though not enough to make unqualified judgments about the Village. It is always a surprise to discover major theatres just tucked into the buildings. Cherry Lane is literally tucked around a corner, the buildings so tight that even the sounds of traffic are significantly diminished. The Lortel is in an unassuming building on Christopher St. It's incongruous. In my world, these theatres are more important than the commercial giants on Broadway and around Times Square.

Yesterday, I got my first real taste of walking into that other, fabled, part of mid-town: Times Square. I had a few hours to kill before the concert I was to observe (the very same French Horn Rebellion I mentioned earlier), so I figured I would check out the Empire State Building. I was on 11th, it is on 33rd. That's not so bad. But then when I got to 33rd I thought, what's nine more blocks? So I ended up in Times Square, where I heard quite a few languages that were not English. New York reminds me of Europe in a lot of ways - you can walk large parts of it, it's packed with history, you hear all kinds of languages and accents all the time. But then I figured I would check out some of the theatres where I was trying to intern. I felt much worse about my application to Roundabout Theatre Company when I saw American Airlines Theatre. Roundabout is a LORT theatre company, much like the Alley, but on steroids. I am much more confident about New York Theatre Workshop where I was allowed to hand my application to an actual person. One who works for the theatre. Not one who works for the post office.

Finally, I thought I'm so close to Rockefeller Center that I will just pop over and then walk back. I was already at 47th and 9th, it's nothing to get to 50th and 6th (it's so easy to say those numbers like they mean something, but if you don't know New York, how much sense does it make?). After which I walked back to 11th and 4th. The walk back felt endless because I had somewhere to be at a particular time, so it was much more frustrating that you can only walk a block or two before you get stopped by a red light, even with jaywalking, even when you are traveling with traffic. I arrived at the concert venue and discovered that my feet hurt quite badly. I knew I had walked a fair bit, so I looked it up. If I had gone straight to Rockefeller Center from Webster Hall (which I most emphatically did not - Broadway is a kooky street that does weird things around Union Square and again around the Flatiron building), it would have been 2.2 miles. At first that number didn't impress me because I was so used to looking at kilometers. 2.2 km isn't that bad at all (it's barely a mile and a half). Then I doubled it because I had walked back and than I had to add another mile and a half to cover the walk to and from the subway stops (I say subway, but I have yet to be on the New York subway proper - just the PATH trains to and from Jersey). All told I walked about 8 miles yesterday. I can safely say after a stretch like that on the streets of New York that I still don't really know anything about the city at all.

What To Make of Brussels

I thought that I disliked Amsterdam. After my first day in Brussels, I realized that I didn't dislike Amsterdam; it was merely disappointing. It was not as charming as I expected; it was a little too cynically attached to tourism; it was just too rushed. But overall it wasn't so bad. Brussels on the other hand, is a nightmare, from top to bottom. The transportation system goes everywhere, but it requires two or three different connections to get anywhere (You Can't Get There From Here syndrome). There are three train stations of staggeringly different significance and levels of sophistication. Noord is a dung heap, there is no other other description for it, complete with the seedy street where the prostitutes appear in their windows (at 11 in the AM) running along the tracks. Apparently, they do exist in the wild and not just in the tame confines of Amtersrdam's red light district. Central Station is central only in terms of geography, though not in terms of significance. For most practical purposes, Central is basically irrelevant and out of the way. Zuid is where the action is, but it was also the farthest away from where we ended up staying.

The real problem with the transportation system is not the bizarre set of connections between places but the staggering incompetence with which the system is run. If you are lucky, on the major trains (like the subway or some of the trains between cities), they might announce the stations. If you are really lucky, the trains will actually stop where the schedule says they will stop. I discovered to my cost that this is not always the case. I wanted the Schaerbeek Station. The schedule said it was one stop away, a paltry four minutes. I boarded the train thinking that my travel day was almost over, a day that had begun at 1:00 AM (because I refused to be 24 euro for a reservation on the Belgian night train because the train would only have been in Belgium for an hour and a half - it costs 10 euro for all of Germany). The train passed through said station, but didn't stop for another 20 minutes in a place called Mechelen. I later discovered that this stop is halfway between Brussels and Antwerp. I took the train back to Brussel Noord and made no further attempt to get to that train station. Local transportation is much better at sticking to the posted script, but you will never see or hear what the next stop will be once you are in the tram or bus. No announcement, no monitor flashing the upcoming station, nothing (a stark contrast to Germany where every tourist who spends any time on public transport will have learned at least two German words "Nächste Halt . . .").

I can generally put up with a lack of information about stops and the like and I am always willing to walk if I make a mistake. If public transport runs regularly and is vaguely on time, I can make do. This is also not the case in Brussels. The very first tram my mom and I were on stopped dead in a tunnel a couple hundred yards from the station. After ten minutes, the conductor opened the doors and had the passengers hop down onto the tracks and over to the service path where we completed our journey  to the station on foot. We were on our way to the train station to catch a train to Brugges, which we naturally missed. We were already planning to go to Brugges so I could make the most of the last trip on my railway pass. What began as a normal day trip became a necessity after the first two hours I spent in Brussels were so stupidly obstructive and cack handed. If it hadn't have been Brugges, it would have been anywhere else: Ghent, Antwerp, Leuven (hmm, Stella), Liege, Waterloo . . . Anywhere other than Brussels.

Brugges turned out to be as picturesque and as medieval as promised, but it is also a tourist trap, not the thing most calculated to soothe anyone's mood, especially as quite a few of the cafes and bistros closed up shop between 5 and 6 PM, right about when Mom and I were looking for a nice place to grab a bite. Brugges must have a Rothenburg/Martha's Vineyard thing about preserving it's medieval character, including shunning tourists after a certain point in the evening. We eventually found a place to eat: Quick Burger, the equivalent of McDonald's and just as tasteless. It was at least inexpensive.

To the credit of Brussels, the rest of our stay was not as bad as that first day. Public transport proved more reliable, though no more informative. The major exception was rush hour, when using the system became positively oppressive. None of their trains were designed with accommodating very many people, a strange decision in a city of nearly 2 million people.

If it seems like I am fixating on public transportation at the expense of the rest of the city, consider it evidence of my ambivalence about the place. Despite the fact that Brussels has a long and distinguished history in the region and that many of the older (though not the oldest) buildings have been preserved, it does not present itself particularly well. Brussels is first and foremost a city about business and getting things done. It has provided ways for visitors to explore some of the past, but the past that is most open to visitors relates to the near past and usually to the Belgian monarchy which only dates back to 1830. The most massive and monumental buildings all originate after that time. Many of them date from the reign of Leopold II, the infamously megalomaniacal king who considered the Belgian Congo his personal colony, though the city has much older roots, on display in the stunning Grand Place (where you can find Victor Hugo's old place), and in some of them gorgeous cathedrals in the area. I just can't make any sense of the city. There are things to visit, there is some beautiful architecture, and even quality museums, like the Magritte Museum and the Museum of Musical Instruments (the museum dedicated to the french fry is in Brugges though - french fries originated in Belgium, there's your fun fact for the day).

The best way for me to explain the city might be to compare it with Berlin ten years ago. Not all of the benefits of re-unification had made it to the eastern parts of the city yet. Much of the city was dingy or covered with graffiti. It was in the throes of integrating an enormous new population. Germany's modern economic success had not completely taken hold (indeed many of Schroeder's most important reforms were yet to come). Brussels, despite it's importance as a commercial and legislative center, has not yet experienced the economic success that will help bring it the kind of vision that could transform the city or give it a cohesive sense of direction. This is a malaise that afflicts Belgium as a whole, actually. As of the writing of this post, Belgium does not have a national government. Negotiations for coalition forming have stalled since the election in June.

I can say without reservation that the hostel I stayed in was the best of the entire trip. Calling Sleephere a hostel doesn't do it justice. The owner, Karel Mondt,, a gregarious and generous host, prefers to call it a guest house. It reminded me of the boarding houses of the 19th century that I read about in Balzac and Dickens, though with significantly less drama. Or closer to home, the hostel my friends and I found ourselves in ten years ago in Budapest. Sleephere is the owner's 4 story house, with every room not dedicated to eating or cooking transformed into sleeping quarters. It is a quaint old house with creaky wooden stairs and the idiosyncratic decorations that can only come from someone's personal accumulation and not from any conscious attempts at interior decorating. It was authentic and unforced. My mom hated it, but she is used to factory sleeping, which is what so many hostels have become (that's Karel's phrase, not my own). StayOkay in Amsterdam, the Y in Basel, even Metropole in Berlin, they are all like the Southwest Airlines of hotels. They offer great service while cutting facilities and extras to the bone. They are hotels in spirit now, rather than hostels as I remember them - the kind of place that you look for when you arrive in a town without a thought for reservations. The internet has almost completely done away with the cute personal pension that you discover tucked into the Place St. Michel, steps away from Notre Dame de Paris. It was a positive pleasure that my mom had discovered this place, even if she didn't particularly like it. We spent the last night in Brussels in a hotel by the airport and while I enjoyed the privacy and amenities on offer, the soullessness of the place just reinforced what I had already knew - hosteling is about character not convenience. We certainly found it on 155 Landbouwstraat, Schaerbeek. The only part of Brussels that I enjoyed unequivocally.

Amsterdon't

I am Not Amsterdam

I knew Amsterdam was going to be problem as soon as I started taking a look at their tourist board website. My mom had suggested a series of museums, most of which I couldn't afford and then she mentioned the I AMsterdam card. It promised access to almost all of the major museums and a full ride on public transport. For 38 euro. For one day. If I spend 7 euro, I get the benefit of the public transportation (and that goes down on a per day basis the more days I buy - 4 days is only 20 euro). After my exhaustive efforts in the various museums that I have visited that to do museums justice you have to be willing to spend 2 to 4 hours in one, significantly more in the case of a good history museum. I spent 10 hours in the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin and managed slightly less than half the museum (which only cost 5 euro). Anyone who encourages you to spend that much money on a lot of different museums for one day is not encouraging you to spend considerable amounts of time in any of the museums. They want you to go there, follow the arrows around the exhibits, spend some time in the shop, and then leave. This is completely antithetical to nearly every habit I have been attempting to create. This did not bode well.

My arrival in Amsterdam did not make things better. The night train from Basel was inexplicably delayed for an hour in Mannheim (the worst of German service coming out in Deutsche Bahn there; they didn't even acknowledge that we were late), so we were practically shoved off the train into Centraal. My first task was to get to the airport to pick up my mother, who would be landing in an hour. It was going to take at least a half an hour to get to the aiport, assuming nothing went wrong with getting a train. Fortunately (and not at all thanks to DB), that went off without a hitch. There was a minor hiccup when I realized that I had promised my mother that I would meet her at baggage claim when of course that is off limits to the unwashed masses since international arrivals have to go through customs, but the architects of Schipol airport were at least aware of what usually happens at baggage carousels and helpfully set up a waiting area with a great view of passport control. The most time sensitive parts of our time in Amsterdam revolved around the airport whose thoughtful design made those tasks much easier.

Maybe Centraal will eventually be as well designed a transport hub as Schipol once the paroxysm of construction has passed over and through Amsterdam. Thanks to that very same construction, Centraal is a mess (and a centruy of design decisions since it was originally built). Beyond the construction, Centraal is a frustrating place because there are few and not particularly accurate and useful signs. While there were plenty of arrows indicating the direction of buses and trams, few of them bothered to point out that the office where you have to buy tickets for those buses and trams is across the street from the main train station, as though the local transit authority's remit stopped at the gates of the train station. Beyond this line, you shall not pass. The outlook did not improve when we went inside that ticket office and it was packed, an ominous sign of things to come.

Eventually, all our transportation needs were taken care and we had safely settled in at the hostel. I figured that we should avoid the tourist traps and museums and just take in the city on foot during our first day. That's when I discovered the horrible truth, or several horrible truths about Amsterdam in its current "under construction" state, the first being that Amsterdam is not a particularly pedestrian friendly city. Between the canals, the trams, the roads, and the bike paths, there is very little real estate for the lowly Fussgänger, often not enough for two people to walk side by side. Stray too far outside of your zone you risk getting run down by the scooters and mopeds traveling in the bike lane, never mind the wolfpacks of cyclists. When we finally arrived near the center of the old town at Waterlooplein, we discovered that even in those areas were tourists are expected to congregate, there is no such thing as a pedestrian zone. This was true even for the Dam square, the Red Light district, and the Centraal. If you can get there on foot, so can the crazy guys on scooters. You are never safe from them.

One of the purposes of walking on foot is to experience a city in a more relaxed way. It gives you time to process your surroundings. There is no better way to learn a city than with your feet, assuming the city is safe for such an approach (though that is also something you can learn by walking). I never felt that this was possible in Amsterdam. Even in late September, the middle of the city was crowded and pulsing with speed and movement. Everyone and everything was in a hurry or on edge or behind and trying to make up time. This edginess is exactly what you deserve if you are driving a car in downtown Amsterdam, but isn't something I generally want inflicted on me as a pedestrian (or as a flaneur really, since I had no particular purpose other than being there, which is not true of every pedestrian).

I think Amsterdam hates cars as well as pedestrians. It's not just the narrow streets and the ever present canals and roaming packs of cyclists. You can tell a lot about a city from its cars, not just things like median income level, but personality. Porsches are common on the streets of Munich (so are BMWs but you have to discount that since they are made in the city) because the city is full of trendy rich people who want to be seen and who enjoy the kind of ride the car provides, especially the stares and the envy, but also the speed and the cornering. Berlin is full of government types and Mercedes, sedans that are sober and luxurious, with just a splash of Ferrari red and British racing green to go along with the money and influence. Houston, with its oceans of oil money, features Bentleys, as well as plenty of Lexi or Lexuses or Lexus (like moose) to go along with that money. Amsterdam is full of Opels and ugly Renaults and older VWs. Most of the cars were dirty and unwashed. There are very few Alfas or Fiats or any of the other small cars that have the sense of swagger and cool that let people who can't afford swanky sports cars enjoy their ability to accomplish their weekly shop. Based on the cars I saw in Amsterdam, there is a decided lack of joy or interest in driving, certainly most of the cars aren't shown a lot of care. For some people, this will be a selling point of course, but for me, it was just more proof that the city and I would not get along.

This fact was confirmed over the next few days as my mom and I took in Amsterdam's museums, which I suspect are all designed for maximum tourist processing. They are always crowded even as late in September as we were there. They have precious few places to rest. And they never ever have any place where you can just contemplate the work of art or the piece of history on display. The Jewish museum is a bit of a breather, but it's also not particularly good at explaining or illuminating history. There will be plenty more on museum culture later, when I deal with museums from all of my travels. The verdict on Amsterdam is almostly completely negative. If I were handing out grades, it would get a D only because, to be fair, they do have some amazing works of art. You may or may not know this, but Van Gogh and Rembrandt were pretty good painters. The exception to this was the Hermitage branch campus. The Hermitage in St. Petersburg opened an exhibition hall in for rotation exhibitions in Amsterdam not too long ago (like the Louvre, but instead of dropping it in the middle of the Arabian peninsula, the Hermitage put it somewhere useful). The Alexander the Great exhibit was everything that the other museums were not. It was especially well lit, compared to the other museums. Bad lighting is a surprising problem for a museum to have when Philips, one of the largest lighting companies in the world, is a major sponsor.

An important caveat here is that Amsterdam is a city beset, plagued even, by a rash of renovations and construction projects. If you visit the city in the next two years you will run into a whole mess of renovations including (and certainly not limited to) the Royal Palace, the Rijksmuseum, the Stedelijk, the Central Station, the Maritime museum, the Rokin, and the road in front of the Jewish museum. If any of those places interest you, then you should put off your visit to the city until 2011 at the very earliest. I'd say you should leave it to 2012, if the world hasn't ended. I don't think I will like it anymore, but I leave that possibility open to others.

Where did that leave us? That left us very happy people when Mom and I parted ways. She was headed to a bus tour through Ireland (undeniably cool, especially since I have never been) and I was headed to Munich, the city that was really at the heart of my trip to Europe in the first place. I'm glad I went to Amsterdam. But I was much happier leaving it.