My Sears employee number was 30049, and the first time I entered it on the register was nearly my last. As soon as I had eased a stack of clothes into a customer’s bag, a clerk approached me.
“My name is Arlene, and I’m on commission,” she snarled. “The next time you take one of my sales, I’ll make sure you don’t work here again.”
I was such a newbie, I didn’t even know what a commission was, but I stayed clear of Arlene’s customers and survived for the next two years at Sears, the one on the corner of First Avenue and University Boulevard in Denver that closed last month.
It was 1977, and I was 17 years old, time for the first job to take me into college. It turns out my higher education started that summer.
I learned how to maintain the children’s and infant wear department at the height of back-to-school time, when I unpacked hundreds of starchy dresses with novelty bows and plaid pleats from slippery plastic bags and hung them on plastic hangers, and then rehung them, warm and crumpled in corners of the dressing room, hundreds of times over.
I restacked slabs of Toughskin jeans, the ones with the armored knees, and heaved them into metal shelves. (Like most former store clerks, I am a very tidy shopper.)
I learned how to operate the freight elevator when the warehouse wouldn’t pick up the phone and a customer was waiting for a crib or a car seat. I violated every OSHA standard to climb the stacks in my platform shoes. One time, as I wiggled a carton toward me, the box underneath gave out, and I went tumbling onto the concrete floor. Angry, embarrassed, and scared, I walked that box all the way through the basement, through the barbecue grills and novel microwave ovens, up the escalator and around the corner to my department to deliver it to my customer. My rear end stung a little, so I inspected myself in a mirror. I was sliced through my gaucho pants and undies (Sears?) and into my numb butt.
Sometimes I was a dispatched as a rover, especially when I agreed to stay past my shift. I loved the paint department, squirting out the right measures of cyan and magenta into base white and the spattered can shaker that must have inspired Pollack
I wasn’t so comfortable in the tool department. Every piece in every bin was foreign to me. The clerk I was covering for told me that if I couldn’t find a widget or gadget, to tell the customer we didn’t carry it anymore. I tried it on a customer within minutes, and he said, “I got one here just last night. Are you going to tell me you discontinued it overnight?” I learned that customers deserve better.
I watched little children swat tiny booties and knock socks off racks — and then saw their mother, without warning, haul off and hit them. I learned that children can be abused standing within 2 feet of Winnie the Poohs.
I accepted a return of a pale yellow sleeper, the neck label worn and unreadable, dropping a few dollars and coins in a meek mother’s hand. I learned that compassion supersedes store policy.
I worked long enough and late enough to buy three major things with my employee discount: a bicycle that would carry me to and from the University of Denver most days, a camera that would cover stories for the DU Clarion newspaper, and a sewing machine that I would use to sew my own babies’ quilts and bumper covers 12 years later. Their crib? It was from Sears, a freestanding one in San Diego.
I was a loyal employee and felt terrible giving my notice. Even in 1980, the store had started its slow decline. The register that Arlene ruled was replaced by stations “serving” large areas of the store, and then large areas of the store were no more. The last time I visited, it was more like half a store, half of it filled with Whole Foods and a whole different kind of customer who will never know the special (less than 70 percent cocoa powder) taste of the chocolate stars in the Sears candy department.
Lucy Ewing is a teacher at Bear Creek Elementary in Boulder and is a columnist for .
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