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.