Thursday, October 2, 2008

The Horny Creek Chronicles, I: Introduction

(Written sometime in 2006...I don't have the exact dates anymore)

This will be the first in a series of stories I plan to post, tentatively entitled the Horny Creek Chronicles (I said it was tentative). I'm aware that most people of my generation have probably worked in some capacity for that Mecca of mall employment we call retail services. For those of you who have not, I will try to provide some brief background on my own experience working at the "New Money" Shopping Mall in Toronto, Ontario (a large, mid- to upscale shopping center blemishing the north of this fine city, which has been pseudonymed in honour of the jerkoffs who shop there) in order that you might fully appreciate the sheer magnitude of idiocy for which this sort of capitalist edifice serves as a lush breeding ground. With this in mind, I introduce you to life as a "paid" mall rat.

Back when I was around 19, I worked as an assistant manager at a Canadian retail chain called "Horny Creek" (obviously, not the company's real name - but I don't really want to be sued). For those of you unfamiliar with this particular company, Horny Creek ostensibly sells young men's apparel, usually pandering to the same lucrative 13-19 demographic that MuchMusic and MTV and all the rest try to corner.

Now once upon a time, way back in 1995 or so, Horny Creek went about cornering this market by selling to a slightly older crowd; say, the same folks that were actually old enough to have seen Nirvana in concert prior to Kurt Cobain's unfortunate encounter with the business end of a twelve-gauge. Think of this demographic as pseudo-Yuppies; former Seattle Grunge patriots who discovered that many post-secondary institutions required general hygiene and moderate sobriety (at least at the interview) to be mandatory in order to secure acceptance. To these patrons, Horny Creek sold fashionable young men's apparel: you know, sweater-vests, khaki pants, reasonably-priced boot-leg denim jeans...sort of your standard all-American boywear. Okay, so it isn't exactly avant-fashion risqué in that high-school Hot Topic kind of way, but I liked it, at least. Take what you want from that.

At any rate, by the time I began working at the New Money Mall location (for those who care, it's the flagship store for Canada), Horny Creek had been sold to another interest, and as such a new Head Office staff was hired. They immediately shut down all stores nation-wide and began implementing a new "marketing plan" (read: pandering to the lowest common denominator in the interest of securing a sizeable retirement fund for themselves). Thus, when I moved back to Toronto and took the assistant manager position, I was aghast to note that the trendy sweater-vests and khaki pants of old had been replaced with PG knockoffs of T-Shirt Hell outerwear, bargain-basement versions of the likes of FUBU and Sean John jerseys and pants, a whole slew of "wide-leg" jeans whose total fabric volume might well clothe an entire African village, and a host of thoroughly gaudy belts, necklaces, sunglasses and even boxer shorts, all designed to lure in the chronically self-image-deprived young men of the greater Toronto area. The tag line for this new wardrobe abortion might well have been "be a non-conformist, just like all your friends". Needless to say, nothing could be further from my own strong sense of self-direction and common decency, but with bills piling up and an earnest desire to fill my belly with gin and President's Choice macaroni and cheese motivating me, I dutifully set aside what dignity I retained from my high school years and utterly sold out.

Upon taking my position at the helm of this inevitable train-wreck, I met and quickly befriended the manager of the store, a 19-something like myself who I'll henceforth refer to as The Captain (in the interest of avoiding him beating me to death with a tire-iron for posting these potentially libelous stories). The Captain was truly a straight-arrow; after having been booked on an arson charge for burning down a barn full of tires while under the influence of copious ganja (seriously), he resolved to move his life in a better direction and took his responsibilities as skipper of the U.S.S. Horny Creek very seriously. Initially, he and I quite did not get along: he disapproved of my lackadaisical attitude towards all things work-related, and I found it necessary to regularly point out the large stick that seemed to be protruding from his asshole. In time, however, he and I developed a symbiotic relationship; just as the moon governs the tides and the spontaneous bleeding out of human females, so I worked upon The Captain as a mediating force, eventually transferring my total lack of regard for the alleged responsibility of our positions onto him.

Assisting me toward this end was our third-in-command, a twenty-something who I will refer to as E-Dubb, though I seriously doubt he'd have nearly so much concern regarding these stories as The Captain might - E-Dubb and I tended to take notes from the same page with respect to the utter shenanigans that constituted our job descriptions. E-Dubb and I spent the vast majority of our time at Horny Creek generally hanging out with customers instead of endeavouring vainly to sell them clothes that both we and they knew invariably stained, shrank, ripped or simply fell to pieces upon four or five washings. In general, our customers were reasonably intelligent men and women, often the parents of the aforementioned self-esteem challenged. Of course, given The Captain's intense desire to right his past wrongs through masochistic retail ritual, he was obliged to frown on our simple fraternization in lieu of hard budgetary goals.

We were therefore obliged to sell the occasional thousand dollars' worth of clothing, which isn't nearly as hard as it might sound. Granted, at thirty dollars for a pair of jeans, it takes a goodly while to reach that lofty thousand mark, but I'm going to dispel the rumor now: this shit sells itself. No matter what your District Manager has told you about "upselling" (or, as it's better known, convincing people that they really do need a faux-silver Ghetto Chain to go with their K-mart Sean Johns, and while we're on the subject wouldn't a belt be a good idea since you're a 32 waist and you're buying the pants in a 38?) you really don't need to convince anybody of anything - these kids come in knowing exactly what they want, or at least exactly what they want to look like, and they can put it together themselves. One might think that it would be more of a trial to sell to smart parents whom, as I've said before, were well aware of the sweatshop quality we were trying to peddle. One might think so, that is, before discovering that these selfsame, otherwise-intelligent men and women, are all total pushovers. I said before that New Money is a mid- to upscale mall, but really the only "mid" part about it is the existence of a Horny Creek within its confines - most everything else is Harry Rosen and Hugo Boss and so forth, so you can imagine that the clientele that frequent the mall are also ostensibly high-class, or at least have a lot of cash to burn. Couple the Platinum Card with a serious case of divorce-related guilt on the part of Mom and Dad, and suddenly they're charging up not only the Ghetto Chain and the studded belt, but also a very trendy Puffy Jacket (you know what I'm talking about - those Michelin Man-looking things favoured by suburban white boy gangbanger wannabes all across this great land), a sweatshirt that says something derogatory about girlfriends even though half these pint-sized G-unit disciples haven't even figured out how to masturbate yet, an assortment of white cutoff shirts (I understand why they're called wifebeaters but I can't bring myself to call them that) that look like they came out of Eminem's yard sale, and still have room left over in the bag for a pair of yellow boxer shorts with black ant graphics on them. Ants in the pants. Get it? Seriously.

It's a love-hate thing; on the one hand you get some kind of hollow satisfaction out of putting that red checkmark beside your employee number (not your name, your employee number) at the end of the night, signifying that you jumped the hurdle with room to spare. On the other hand, you've just partaken in what amounts to a fashion Holocaust. Your compliance in allowing for an impressionable youth or youths to parade themselves around with "I'm a big target" written on their saggy-pant asses for every real gangbanger to line up in their sights is kind of inexcusable from a moral standpoint. But like I said before: there is no dignity left in me, so I plastered on my best used-car salesman smile and sucked it up.

Here endeth part one, moreso because I have to take a bit of time and structure what I'm going to say next; for the moment this is all memory work, so I think I'm going to call up The Captain and E-Dubb and have them help jog my memory. A litre or so of whiskey might do it.

1 comment:

mystysaint said...

this font is small and hurts my eyes

now i stop whining :D

will take my introduction into the next post.