Law of the Jungle
A newly hired Staples sale associate learns about the Law of the Jungle.
Jake wandered bewildered through the aisles of antique technology that made up the Staples tech section. Photo printers sat next to typewriters which sat next to printer copier combos which sat next to fax mach. The store sold a hundred variations of machines that all could have been replaced by an iPhone and a working internet connection. He ran his hands over the beige plastic machines, trying to memorize dots per inch and pages per minute statistics.
How the hell does a fax machine even work?
He froze as his first customer lumbered towards him.
"Can you tell me where the sharpies are? Sharpies, the thick black ones. C'mon man, let's go. I have things to do," The customer had missed a button on his dress shirt, which let a stained white under shirt peek through the gap. A red cart filled with a mishmash of items trailed behind him.
Jake tapped his plastic name badge with the word TRAINEE taped over it. "Sorry, still learning where everything is. I can help you look, though." He glanced down the row of aisle signage in search of anything marker related.
"Sharpies... Markers..." The man continued. "Something that writes on paper and isn't a pen. Do you know where a paintbrush would be?"
Jake raised his shoulders and the man cursed.
"And they keep voting to raise the minimum wage! This entire store exists to sell two things: Staples and Sharpies. How can you know not where they are?"
Paul, the other sales associate working the Sunday morning shift, stepped out from a nearby aisle. He held a wipe off marker board towards the angry customer like a lion tamer's chair. A quick puff of air blew his raccoon painted bangs out of the way. "Aisle six. On your left. Half-way down,"
The customer left with another curse tossed over his shoulder, sliding into aisle six like an olympic speed skater taking the final turn.
Jake tried to say something, tried to do anything but stare after the retreating customer with confusion in his stomach. "Did I do something wrong?" he asked finally. "I said I'd help him look."
"Law of the Jungle, new fish." Paul said. His bleached bangs couldn't quite hide the red bloodshot eyes behind them. "Do unto others as you can."
"Maybe he was just in a hurry. Important meeting this morning or something. Or maybe he's just having a bad day."
"Yeah, a bad day," Paul laughed, retreating into the cover of the aisle, and busying himself rearranging stacks of poster board. "Nothing but animals in this store. All of 'em. Animals."
Jake hustled back to the relative safety of the empty printer section. He did his best to stay busy the rest of the morning, selling fax machines he didn't understand and pitching printers he'd never seen before. He could feel Paul's eyes on him the entire time.
Later that afternoon, just as he finished explaining how phones worked to an elderly customer, a frantic wave from the front office caught his eye. Alex, the store general manager, motioned towards a man in a colorful rose tattoo shirt meandering down the rows of printers. "SECRET. SHOPPER." Alex mouthed slowly and gestured again.
An entry level HP suddenly seemed mis-aligned on a low shelf, and Jake dropped down to finagle it back into place. His sweaty palms nearly slipped off of the slick white cardboard box.
Secret Shoppers were like an undercover corporate hit squad sent to judge sales associates. The break room was covered wall to wall with posters tracking the store metrics and their impact on quarterly bonuses. A full three days had been spent teaching him the four key steps to a successful Secret Shopper visit.
Engage.
Commiserate.
Up-sell.
Warranty.
I'd get a raise for sure if I nail one of these my first week.
"Hot out today, huh?" Jake said, in his best used car salesman impression. "Can I help you find what you're looking for?"
The secret shopper filled out his v-neck Ed Hardy like an inflatable superman costume. Colorful skeletons dotted his bulging shoulders and his expanding midsection. "You can indeed, my friend. I'm looking for a photo printer, the best you got. The primo, top of the line, printer. Understand? This thing is going to be printing me money,"
Jake smiled, desperately trying to remember everything he'd ever read or heard about photo printers. "So, why do you need a good photo printer? Is your business selling photographs?"
"My business is selling anything that people will buy and right now that means dog pictures. A buddy of mine smacked ass doing this during the Spokane fair last year." His hands ducked into his skinny jeans and came out with a crumpled paper advertisement. "He has the-- yeah. The Kodak 3000 model. You sell this one?"
A wave of sweaty soccer shin guard scented air rolled off the man's outstretched hand. Jake snorted against it, coughing as politely as he could into the back of his hand.
"It's a powerful scent, isn't it? Called 'Salt Spray'. If you're interested, I have a few extra bottles in the car..." the man's voice trailed off.
Jake walked them upwind of the air conditioning and around the row of printers to the aisle end cap. A giant photo of a sea turtle served as a colorful backdrop for a white plastic printer that looked pretty much like all the other white plastic printers.
"You want the latest and greatest? This is the Kodak 4000 right here. Forget last years model that your friend has. I'm talking about photographs so gorgeous you'd think I was stealing them from our copy department," Jake reached out to hit the large red button marked 'SAMPLE'. The Kodak printer ground gears and whirred in a way that sounded just like a top of the line photo printer would.
"What makes this better than the other one? Do the pictures really look that much better?" the man said. He squatted to put his face up to the paper inching out of the machine.
Jake used the distraction to feel for the information card that should have been tucked behind the printer. Scalding heat from a power brick seared across his knuckles. He twisted his fingers under the sharp corner of the shelf, grasping for anywhere that it could have fallen.
"Every year the tech gets better. Time marches on, you know. And-- and--" His burnt knuckles brushed paper and he peeled the info card up, inch by inch. He took a quick glance at the top line. "All you have to do is take the picture, and it does the rest," he read confidently.
"Good line. They teach you that in an airport Sheraton? Fuck it. Just gimme the box. The card says forty bucks. That right?"
A thrum of adrenaline went through Jake's chest as he realized he was about to close his first real sale. Get the warranty! He imagined Alex congratulating him on a perfect secret shopper score over the store PA system. The customers would cheer along, and even Paul would have to admit that he'd been wrong. The store might be filled with animals, but that only meant Jake was a lion.
"That's for the warranty, sir. Which you should absolutely get. Nothing worse than buying a printer that ends up to be broken."
"Why the hell would you sell me a broken printer?"
"I would never," Jake laughed nervously. He held up the white information card, his finger highlighting the bold black numbers with the price for the printer. "Of course, that price is only for the printer. Then you've got to pick up a USB cable, our gold plated ones have the fastest connection speed. Photo paper really helps the pictures pop. And we'll have to get the new ink cartridges out of the security cage on your way out."
The customer's shoulders deflated a little, the skeletons drooping like bones wilting in the early morning heat. "Photo paper? Ink cartridges?"
"Well, sure. The glossy paper is why the photos look so good. Then you'll need a cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridge. Oh, and a black one too. They're about thirty or forty bucks a piece. But if you want you could get the double filled cartridges so you don't have to come back. Twice as much, for half the trips,"
A thin line of sweat beaded on the customer's forehead as his mental calculator overheated. "Christ. I wanted a printer, not a mortgage. Can I buy the display model? Actually, you know what," He surveyed the number of printers around them for a second. "Maybe I'm in the wrong business. Do me a favor: hold this for me,"
Jake stood alone among the rows of printers, holding the latest Kodak 4000 model and waited for-- well, he wasn't quite sure what he was waiting for. Weren't secret shoppers supposed to actually buy the product? It wasn't until after he put the printer box away that he caught sight of Paul, standing in the shadow of aisle seven, holding an armful of poster board, his raccoon bangs shaking with laughter.
--
That night, after the store closed, Jake met Alex in the manager's office. A soft glow from the registers through the tinted security window draped the room into shadows. Alex breathed out slowly, a thin line of vape smoke swirling through the claustrophobic air. "Sit," he said without turning around. "How do you think today went?"
The plasticky-spiced scent of the empty ramen containers in the trash can made Jake's stomach growl. Nine hours wasn't a long shift, but being a bubbly salesman had taken it's toll.
"I fixed a problem a customer had with her printer for the last 6 months," his face flushed with pride at the memory. "She was very happy, said she'd be shopping here a lot."
"And how'd you do that, Jake? How'd you fix her problem?"
"Well, she had a weird firmware installed on her router. I Googled the matching drivers, but then her anti-virus wouldn't let her run them. So I flashed a--"
"You know," Alex cut him off. "I've seen a lot of things from this window. Seen a grown man rip a card reader out of a register because we wouldn't take a return. Seen a woman steal fourteen laser jet printers on an electric scooter. And I don't think I've ever seen anyone fuck up a printer sale that hard."
Jake was glad the room was dark, so the embarrassment wouldn't show on his face. He'd gone over the sale in his head the entire day, looking for where he'd gone wrong. "I followed the system, just like the training videos said. Honest."
"Then why didn't he walk out of here with a printer and a warranty? That's the whole point of the system," Four meaty fingers appeared in the air.
Jake swallowed hard.
"We're going to do a quick performance review, ready?" Alex ticked the first finger down. "Engagement: Excellent. You got him talking pretty quick. Commiserate: He told me you were gonna buy a few bottles of cologne. That's a great way to connect with customers. What about upsell? What score would you give yourself there?"
"Well, he seemed pretty interested in the new Kodak model. I think he's just gonna wait for when it goes on sale."
"Rule number two of selling: Waiting for a sale means they're buying it on Amazon."
"What's rule one?"
"Sell something! That's what we hired you to do, not Google router codes or flirt with grandmas. That's a zero for up-sell." Alex ticked down the third finger, leaving only the middle one extended. "Which means no warranties, which means a zero for our secret shopper score and no pizza party for the team this quarter."
"Wait, I thought the posters talked about store wide bonuses for good scores."
"Bonuses go to the big dogs. Management staff. The employees really holding it down throughout the quarter. The sales staff gets a pizza party," Alex took another quick drag on his vape pen. "Would have gotten a pizza party," he corrected himself. "But you couldn't manage to sell a printer to someone who specifically asked for a printer. You see Paul out there? He's working his butt off for that party, and you need to help him out a little."
A palm banged against the other side of the glass window. Paul's face peered through the mirrored glass, visible as a darkened outline rather than a blonde-haired burnout. "We've been done counting registers for ten minutes. Legally you have to pay us overtime if we stick around any longer," the threat came muffled through the glass.
Alex muttered something under his breath. "Fine. Fine. You understand what I'm saying, Jake? We're a family here, and we all need to pull together. Shake it off and let's get it right tomorrow, okay? More printers, more warranties, more pizza. Staples!"
The Law of the Jungle, Jake realized, applied to more than just customers. He smiled with his eyes, straightened his shoulders. "I'll do better,"