Wednesday

There must have been a time when people could make a decent living by working in retail, but not anymore. My experience working at the hardware store has given me a glimpse of how difficult life is financially for many people who are working for the minimum wage, or just over it. I had to work until six pm today and my bowling league is at six-thirty. Luckily, the boss is sympathetic to my needs and told me to leave a few minutes early to make sure I made it on time. As it always seems to happen, a customer with an impossible plumbing problem, showed up just before I was supposed to leave. We fiddled with his problem, trying various parts and I kind of lost track of time. At just a minute or so before six, the boss called over the in-store radio system we use, that I should get going. He came and took the customer off my hands. As I was putting my radio away and putting various things in my locker, one of the cashiers came in to the back room and asked me if I was going to another job tonight. I jokingly said that I already had one job too many. She said that she heard the boss tell me to leave and assumed that it was to get to my next job. The reality is that a couple of the people that I work with have a second job and they often go from one to the other. That's a tough way to make ends meet. Of course, there are a hundred reasons for people being stuck at the bottom of the economic pool. Many are teens, some are retired people like me and some people just want to make a little extra money. An awful lot of people don't fall into any of those categories though. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky