Wherein I learn about shoplifting and suntan bottles lie.
I remember a time in high school where I took a trip to the beach. Growing up on Long Island, the beach was always accessible within about thirty to forty minutes of driving, which meant I almost never meant. The same way I’ve never been to the top of the Statue of Liberty, something nearly every Manhattan tourist schedules. Sure I went to the beach a few times with parents when younger, but I just didn’t in my high school and junior high years. Perhaps I ran with too pasty-faced a crowd that sun worshipping was never a suggested topic. Maybe they traded in their offerings to Apollo for those to Dionysus – I know later on this was definitely true.
On this day, I went to the beach by myself. It was a hot Sunday afternoon in August. By hot, I mean the heat and sunlight could sear the flesh off an unfurred animal within minutes, leaving mere bones, as if attacked by some crowd of solar piranhas. Yes, worse places have worse summers. But in New York, August is some hellish month where both heat and humidity assail you and you wish that you can pull off your own skin to be cooler. Woe to those who need to use subways in August.
I ended up planning a beach trip on a lark. While normally on a Sunday it would rare that I’d be up before the crack of noon, I had to be up early this particular Sunday for a training class at work. I was working at a retail bookstore owned by corporate masters. On Sundays the store opened later, so the corporate powers wanted the training before the store opened, so that the entire staff could be there without a risk of lacking coverage on the floor. This meant all of us had to be there at 8am on a Sunday, nothing any of us were happy about.
The training was on shrinkage. Unfortunately, this is not about the phenomena of shrinking genitals on a cold day or getting in colder water – that would have been a much more riveting training that we would have not been falling asleep during. One wonders what they could have trained us on that topic – is there really a professional and corporate solution to wang shrinkage? Unfortunately, the true topic was on merchandise shrinkage. This is a clever way of saying theft. In retail, the concept of the pool of merchandise shrinking without it being bought and exchanged for profit is known as “shrinkage”, the stock shrinking without performing its purpose.
For a retail store, this meant shoplifting. Unfortunately for our groggy 8am minds, this wasn’t as simple as “don’t let shoplifting happen”. Due to the litigious nature of our society, there are all sorts of rules about shoplifting. For example, employees are not allowed to touch customers in any way, as they can be sued. Even if we see them put something in their pocket, can’t touch them. Even if we see them put something in their pocket, we just report it and watch them. They are not technically shoplifting until they step outside the store, as they could take it out of their pocket at any time and purchase it. Even if they walk out with merchandise, we can’t grab them, tackle them, or anything. Instead, we call mall security, who I assume would walk up to the shoplifter (if they could catch up to them), wave a donut at them, peer menacingly over their beer gut, and then watch in futility as the shoplifter walked away.
This of course amounts to a great deal of work for little to no payoff. The fact that we could not touch or do anything about a shoplifter, merely whisper suspiciously made it particularly frustrating. We were told that one tactic is to give them “excellent customer service”, continually asking if they need help, which sometimes broke their nerve. To explain more clearly, since we were not allowed to touch or accuse them, if we saw someone steal something, it was recommended we aggressively ask them if they need any help finding anything else, basically trying to pester them and dick-move them into putting it back and leaving. At the end of the training, I felt like I shouldn’t even bother noticing shoplifters. If I noticed them, it was work and nothing could be done. Better to keep a cheerful opinion that those Pokémon cards similar went for a walk, rather than to deal with all I couldn’t do to deal with the kid who stole them.
We did learn much of what not to do. Do grab, yell, or do any of the obvious things you’d think to stop a thief. Don’t be a hero. This was less in cases of shoplifting, but full on armed robbery. We all chuckled at the sheer ridiculousness of someone robbing a bookstore, but then our recently transferred general manager chimed in. She recounted an anecdote from a previous store where just that thing happened. An armed robber somehow entered through the loading dock, and was waving a gun around the receiving area where the books are taken out of boxes and scanned in. Some heroic employee saw the robber, but the robber hadn’t seen her. So she leaped on the robber’s back to subdue him. Unfortunately, this just ended up with her getting pistol whipped. Afterwards, to add insult to injury, she was fired. Heroics were against the company byline.
Corporations hate heroes.
After this terribly uplifting training, I was already awake at a relatively early hour, so I decided to go to the beach. I had decided I was a little too bookish, and I could go with a bit of a tan. I was also of the age where there is great interest in seeing scantily clad females in a beach setting, and perhaps finding some way to meet and talk to said scantily clad females. So off to Jones Beach I went.
Once there, I wandered among screaming children, massive families, and frat boys drinking beer. I did see girls of the scantily clad nature, but they ran in packs, quite a deterrent to the lone hunter. As I set up my beach towel, I watched as those wild packs of bikini girls did such noteworthy things as played volleyball, listened to music, generally acted too cool to notice anyone around them, and applied suntan lotion.
Stripping down to my swimsuit, I also decided I needed to apply suntan lotion. And here is where we get to the crux of this memory. I was, as I mentioned, unfamiliar to tanning as an adult. All previous cases were when I was a child and did not care. At the same time, I had no one to ask or confirm things out. So I fell short at the suntan lotion instructions: “Apply liberally.”
Now of course as an adult with a far more pretentious vocabulary than necessary, I know what that means. They were saying “apply generously”, as in slather it on like you were preparing the glaze a ham or like you needed lubrication to slip into a tight and uncomfortable spot. I know this now. But at the time, there was confusion. I had only heard liberal in a political sense, not in a suntan lotion application sense.
I sat and thought about it. This was the early nineties, the era of George Bush Sr and his New World Order. This was a man who had tried to remove the right of habeas corpus during his presidency, luckily failing. This was when Neo Conservatism was on the rise. Unlikely regular Conservatism, Neo is very forward about restricting rights, pushing a religious agenda. For years I had grown up hearing of Bush and Reagan eras pushing agendas to enforce morality, restricting free speech, rights, etc.
So when I thought about liberal vs conservative, I often saw liberalism fighting against the excesses of Neo Conservatism, fighting against the restrictions they pushed on individual rights. So unlike the convention meaning and term of liberally as “more” and “excess”, I saw them as actually more even handed and moderate.
I re-read the suntan lotion bottle. Clearly this meant I should apply the lotion moderately or lightly.
You see the flaw here?
Hours later, I found myself red like a lobster. There were some patches where I wasn’t quite so red, where I had applied the lotion a bit more “liberally” than others, but overall, I was bright red. And unfortunately, since there were few lobster-fetish girls on the beach that day, there was no scantily clad meetings or love to be found.
So I say this to all the product manufacturers out there, to all those who design the labels on bottles, boxes, unguents, and lotions: don’t use politically charged terms on your labels.
Add A Comment