Feminine Napkins

Things have been slow for us in Gift Wrap land. Since the initial Black Friday weekend, our services have not been called upon to wrap. We don't know what it means; either we're terrible gift wrappers or the economy is in the crapper. Regardless, it seems we've been demoted. One of us has spent at least three shifts in the back room, unpacking boxes (HELLO! THE OPPOSITE OF GIFT WRAPPING!) and putting stickers on things. It's really tedious.

But one of us has noticed a few things. One of them is cocktail napkins. Now...cocktail napkins are something that we have never thought of in our entire lives...in fact, we hate them when the waiter or bartender puts them down in front of us at a bar - especiially if we're having red wine. Why do we need a cocktail napkin for that? There's no condensation! There's no ring to leave on the table! It seems stripper-y, this cocktail napkin. And yet....Floofity's sells cocktail napkins out the YING-YANG! Like, we would say they're the number one seller, novelty cocktail napkins. And by "novelty," we mean that they say "funny" things on them. Like IF I KEEL OVER AT WAL MART, DRAG MY BODY TO NEIMANS or PUT YOUR BIG GIRL PANTIES ON AND DEAL WITH IT. You get the idea. Most of them are about female empowerment (I'M THE BRIDE, THAT'S WHY) or alcoholism (BOOZE IS THE ANSWER; I FORGOT THE QUESTION). But let us tell you: nothing makes you re-examine your life quite so quickly as finding yourself yelling "we need five more big-girl panties over here!" to a sixteen-year old girl who just ordered a Shirley Temple to-go from the restaurant next door.

Lest you think that cocktail napkins are the bulk of it, let us also note that styrofoam cups are probably a close second. Styrofoam cups that say WEEKEND WATERFORD or FORGET RUDOLPH - LET'S GET BLITZEN on them. Again, not something we ever really gave any thought to but let us tell you: these things are practically a license to print money. Otherwise perfectly normal looking people EAT THEM UP.

America is a mystery.

Emergency Intake!

So I got a frantic call from Sister Meg, the Store Manager, late yesterday afternoon, begging me to come in and help "intake some product." Now my only previous experience with the word "intake" is from Six Feet Under, where they used it to indicate that there was a new stiff on the way and poor Rico was gonna miss dinner with his big-haired wife because he had to do reconstructive surgery with Play-Doh on some guy who accidentally ran over his own head with his SUV.

But anyway, that's not what this was. What it meant was that I had to unpack about eleventy million boxes and sticker product with UPC labels, which I don't really get because all the products have UPC labels on them already and wouldn't it be easier and less labor-intensive to just use the UPC labels the manufacturer assigns to the product rather than have a full-time person doing it? Isn't the whole point of UPC barcodes to be unique to a product? So why do we have to have a second one? But then again, as Ex-Chicago-Meg says, it doesn't pay to think in retail. SO I mindlessly unpacked baby bibs with pirates on them and burp cloths with princesses on them and Vera Wang Xmas cards (all ugly except for this one and even it's no great shakes; Kate Spade has it all over Vera when it comes to the paper products) and some lip gloss for the "Tween" table (oh and don't even get me STARTED on this Tween table!).

All in all it only took about three hours and Sister Meg bribed me with a Five Guys cheeseburger so it was totally worth it, though I certainly have no interest in unpacking boxes full of tiny things for a living. It was very frustrating to open what looked like a normal little box and then be presented with about a thousand little tiny objects that had to be stickered. I mean...working at the Hello! Kitty store must be like the Holocaust.

Saturdazed

The day after Black Friday doesn't have a cute name that we know of, so we'll just call it Saturday. We were prepared to be super-busy at Floofity's but it was actually a little bit boring. We both agreed that this was indictative of Serious Economic Problems in America and are using it as further evidence for our Vote Democratic or Die argument.

One of the services that Floofity's offers is custom printing. That is, if you buy a package of notecards, they'll take them and print your name on all of them for just five dollars. Don't get too excited, they just run them on an Epson printer, just like you could do, but we suppose it's worth it for some people to not sit there and cuss at their printer because they forgot to load the stock upside down or whatever. One of us has experience doing this, so we started off on Saturday in the back room printing notecards. It's alarming how many people are named things like Rayleigh and Caleb and Carmondy and Lawson and Parker. Where are these people from, other than White Person Ville? Where are the Prudences, the Dorises, the Hildegards? Where is Shatangé or Leroy? We swear to god, if we ever meet a Shaylee in person, we're going to punch her just on principle.

We did have a little more real wrapping to do on Saturday, but there's not enough room to do it. If we were any wrap-busier, we'd be in trouble. The only drama all day long was when a full-grown man dropped a lava lamp on the floor. We ask you: what is a full-grown man doing looking at a lava lamp? Is he looking to swank up his bachelor pad? Will the chicks dig it? What? It's a mystery.

So far, we're both surprised at how well we've handled it; we both had a moment when we realized that the amount of money we had each made in a day was less than the amount we normally bill in an hour at our real jobs, and honestly? Retail is hard, so one thing we have promised is to be nicer to retail workers in general. Except that one miserable little bitch who works at our local Kroger. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

Black Friday: the Aftermath

It wasn't that bad, really. Not so much Black as a little bit checkerboard. Bits of crazy with brief caesurae of calm, just enough to make it bearable. We don't care how great your shoes are, though, it doesn't matter. After nine hours, your feet hurt. Now we might not be 100% up on The Official Christmas Story, but we can absolutely say that now we know how the Baby Jesus felt on Chrstmas Morning when they nailed him to the Cross, right through the feet.

We spent all day Floofity-ing stuff up, the white-box-with-ribbon thing; not a single old-school gift wrap. One of us thinks it's marketing, that Floofity's doesn't make it clear that the service is free; the other of us thinks people are just cheap and don't wanna pay for the paper.

Things got off to a rough start. Floofity's sells M&Ms in like twenty different colors. We were asked to refill the bulk bins before we opened so we made our little list of colors we needed from the back (mustard, Titans blue, light teal, dark purple, red, chocolate and lavender) and brought them all out. Somehow, while we were re-stocking, we pulled the front off the bulk bin and twenty-five million pounds of M&Ms showered to the floor in an event now known as the Great Lavender M&M Tsunami of Aught Seven. And we are to never speak of it again. And we are to never tell Sister Meg. NEVER!



Other than the young girl who peed in her pants with the mother who asked us to clean it up and the lady who complained that Hannukah stuff and Oyster Platters & Picks were sharing shelf space in an un-Kosher fashion, the best thing that happened was when some random old lady objected to the pink and orange ribbon on her box because the gift inside was intended for a boy. Now. Let me say: she was buying a stuffed white horse wearing a pink jingle bell collar, whose mane was braided with glitter strands. We mean....this gift box was just one DVD copy of Auntie Mame short of being Exhibit A in the Nurture vs. Nature argument, but WHATEVER LADY! We'll put blue ribbon on it!

All in all not a bad day, but we still threw our shoes out the window on the way home.

Black Friday: Save Me Jesus

We're about to go in for The Big Day.

Hail Mary,
Full of Grace,
The Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women,
and blessed is the fruit
of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary,
Mother of God,
pray for us sinners now,
and at the hour of death.
Amen.

Also? Make me not tell someone to fuck off.

Day 1: We're Off! (Our Rockers)

Recently, my friend Chicago Meg - who is no longer Chicago Meg since she moved to Music City - and I decided to take part-time jobs as seasonal gift wrappers at a local high-volume gift and stationery store. For legal reasons - and because my sister manages the store - we will call the store Floofity's. That fake name is actually less bizarre than the real name of the store, but anyway, that's not why we're here. We decided to take the jobs because, strangely, we had the same notion of what it would entail: sitting at a long table with rolls and rolls of lovely gift wrap and miles of ribbons and twenty-four hours to wrap up the dumb old socks and underwear you're trying to pass off as a thoughtful gift, dispensing valuable advice about sophisticated gift-wrapping concepts and trying desperately to talk you out of that flocked nonsense with the cartoon grandfather clocks on it.

After one day of training and one day of actual work, the scales have fallen from our eyes faster than the panties fell off Judi Dench when she got out of that car that time (oh, just Google it). We knew things might not be the way we had imagined when we were informed that instead of asking "may I gift wrap that for you, madam, at my leisure after my two-martini lunch?" we are instead required to ask "would you like me to Floofity that up for you?" I AM NOT KIDDING. I am a forty-one year old man asking a total stranger if I can "floofity" something up for her. I know people who wait until at least the THIRD DATE to ask that. But okay, it's handle-able. So far, though, there's not a lot of actual gift-wrapping. The "Floofity-ing" is complimentary (hence extremely popular, especially among the rich folks, which is I guess how they stay rich), and therefore pretty minimal: a white box and two different-colored ribbons (pink and orange) tied in a bow. There is also red if someone requests it and blue "for our Jewish friends." So this gets old pretty quickly: take purchased item, remove price, wrap in tissue, place in box, tie with bow, next. Not exactly the Olympic Gift Wrapping event Ex-Chicago Meg and I had expected to medal in... at least not so far.

One of the other requirements of Floofity's is that if someone does want real gift wrap, there are two to choose from for sixty cents a foot, both rather generic holiday wrap. You can also purchase commercial gift wrap from the store and we'll use that wrap to wrap any item, whether it's from Floofity's or not, for free. We're hoping word gets out about that and we'll be able to get down to business with the real wrapping pretty soon because I'm already about to commit white-box-o-cide.

Today we prepped for "Black Friday," which to my surprise has nothing to do with hanging out at juke joints and break dancing. Instead, it refers to the day after Thanksgiving, upon which apparently everyone in America loses their minds and decides to go to this one Floofity's so they can purchase styrofoam cups that have "If I die at Wal-Mart, drag my body to Neiman's" printed on them. We assembled boxes and pre-measured ribbons and stocked the tape dispensers and secretly ate about five hundred dolalrs worth of M&Ms. We are ready. We are strong. Love! Is a battlefield!

So that's the background. Check back to see if we make it to Christmas Eve or if, as I suspect, we are escorted out by security because of a distinctly non-traditional "FUCK YOU VERY MUCH" holiday salutation. I'm smuggling a camera in on Friday, for those of you nitwits who don't like the reading so much.

Happy Holidays, bitches.