Malled. Really?

In the late summer of 2008, I returned to the United States from Spain (at least we Americans don't have a 25 percent unemployment rate, eh?) and found the job market a vast wasteland. Like so many of my journalism brethren before me, I turned to retail. I worked at an independent pharmacy and gift shop until October 2009, when I was laid off.

So I have little sympathy for Caitlin Kelly, author of Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail. She takes a stab at exposing the plight of the proletariat, but Upton Sinclair she is not. For starters, her "career" in retail was two, then reduced to one day a week stints at The North Face in a New York suburb. When I read career, I think 40 hours a week. She complains about climbing like a monkey in the dark, dirty stock room, I raise her a stock room that occasionally flooded with raw sewage. It brought another perspective to the phrase "crappy job."
I can, however, commiserate with her chapter on customers from hell, her apt depiction of tyrannical managers, thinly-veiled nepotism and short-sighted company rules. Her stories about slaving for little more than minimum wage strike a chord.

But Kelly spends too much time name-dropping publications she's written for, and alternately fondly reminisces about and looks down upon her less-than-middle-class former co-workers. If the book is about your unintentional career in retail, give me more of the hilarious and tragic stories. My retail brothers-in-arms and I love swapping tales of woe -- once, an old lady threw a temper tantrum in my store when I told her that she couldn't purchase an individual rubber glove and instead must buy the sealed box. After days of tantrums, she vandalized a rubber glove box, then gleefully trekked in each week thereafter for a single rubber glove from it after our manager gave up. Or there was the woman who used a live, molting parrot as her shopping consultant. The stories are endless.

So in conclusion, the book was a quick read and a good introduction for those unfamiliar with the retail machine. But for who have worked in the ranks, it wasn't a complete picture.