2502: Black Friday

Spare a thought for the retail workers of the world, who have to work on days like today.

I'm still not 100% clear on where Black Friday came from — and, moreover, why it crossed the pond from America to Europe — but I have pretty mixed feelings about it on the whole.

On the one hand, it's nice to have a period of time when you know you can rely on getting low prices and decent deals on things that you might be interested in buying. In the online sector, events such as Steam sales and "Cyber Monday" deals demonstrate this clearly.

On the other hand, compressing aforementioned low prices and decent deals into a single weekend — or, in some cases, a single day — seems a little counterproductive when it comes to brick-and-mortar operations in particular.

An event such as Black Friday means that stores are probably going to be rammed full of people, making it a less pleasant experience for everyone shopping and significantly harder work for those people working the store who have to try and answer questions, ensure everyone gets served, keep the shop looking as presentable as possible and ensure no-one is wandering out of the door in possession of things they haven't paid for.

At the same time, though, an event such as Black Friday may encourage people to pick up things that they otherwise wouldn't have thought to purchase or been able to purchase at their normally higher prices. I personally haven't bought anything this Black Friday — at least partly because I was working the damn thing — but if I was going to buy something like an Xbox One (the one "next-gen" console I still don't own), Black Friday would appear to be a decent time to do so.

Like I say, mixed feelings. And if you've been out there in the rush and the chaos of people trying to get a hot deal, as I say, spare a thought for the folks who are rushed off their feet trying to make sure everyone leaves satisfied.

Now I'm going to bed to pass out and wait for my feet to stop hurting.

2498: Contributing Something

I went back to "proper" work today for the first time in quite a while. It's nothing fancy or exciting — just a seasonal retail job in our local video game emporium — but I enjoyed my time there last year and was fortunate enough to be called up to help out over the impending holiday season.

While retail is fairly mundane work for the most part, it is at least a nice opportunity to get out of the house, do something and actually interact with human beings, which is something I feel like I've been sorely missing for a while. Don't get me wrong, social anxiety is still present and correct, but I feel like I can usually cope better with interactions in a structured environment such as retail, where both parties involved in a conversation are there for a specific reason. The customer is there to either get some information or buy something, and I am there to provide whatever it is they are asking for, or to provide them with a suitable alternative if the thing they want isn't available.

It can be quite rewarding, too — not financially, since retail pay remains fairly poo across the board, but in terms of knowing that you've helped someone. At this time of year in particular, a lot of people come into shops they might not normally go into wanting to buy presents, and this means that they often need advice. Well, that exhaustive knowledge of video games had to be useful for something, didn't it?

Since I worked my first retail job — I've done several over the years — I've found that the way I communicate with customers usually puts them at ease and encourages them to trust what I am saying. I'm not sure exactly what it is — perhaps it's the fact I display genuine enthusiasm for the things I'm talking about, or perhaps my teacher training lets me explain things suitably for all levels of knowledge — but it usually seems to go down well, and I've sent many a customer on their way with a smile on their face over the course of the last few years.

I'm not sure I'm cut out for anything more than working the floor, keeping things tidy and ringing up sales — although I guess you don't know until you're in a position to take a bit more responsibility and try it for yourself — but for now at least, this is providing both something to do and some money coming in, which is what I needed.

What will happen to me next year is anyone's guess. But I suppose that's the holiday period covered, at least.

2167: Boxing Day

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Today was Boxing Day, apparently a day when everyone and his dog decides to go shopping, because having a single day of the year when you can't go shopping is apparently too much for some people to deal with.

While I certainly don't begrudge people the business they have brought my place of work over the festive period, since they keep me in a job for the time being, I do find myself a little bewildered at the eagerness to get right back out into an absolutely rammed town centre and do something it's possible to do almost every single other day of the year.

I guess it's the promise of "sales" that has people enraptured with the idea of immediate post-Christmas shopping: the prospect of being able to pick up a bargain with any money and/or vouchers that came their way to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of our Lord, but looking around town today I can't honestly say that I saw anything I'd particularly regard as a "bargain". Sure, some stuff was maybe a little bit cheaper than it is usually, but we're talking a reduction of like 20-25% at most in many places, which doesn't amount to all that much.

Mostly the thing that bewilders me about immediate post-Christmas shopping is the fact that people are willingly giving up time where it's absolutely fine — even encouraged — to slob around at home doing nothing of any consequence save for eating, drinking and playing with toys, and instead spending money they probably don't really have on things they're not sure they want, perhaps for people they don't really like.

Oh well. As I say, I certainly don't begrudge these people their choices, since the amount of money we took today — a lot of it cash, too, making for some impressive wads in the tills — is proof enough that online hasn't quite killed the high street just yet, and it's keeping me in employment for the moment, and hopefully for a bit longer after the holiday season is officially over. That last bit remains to be seen, so fingers crossed.

As for me, though, I don't plan on doing any shopping anywhere other than Steam over the next few days, and I don't have to get off the sofa to do that. I have two days off now, so I will most certainly be doing as little as possible over the course of the next 48 hours to ensure I'm rested, relaxed and ready for action as we creep towards the new year.

I hope you all had a thoroughly pleasant Christmas, and that you're having the chance to enjoy at least a bit of a rest over the holiday period.

2139: Black Friday

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I'm exhausted, both physically and emotionally, so I hope you weren't expecting anything too coherent or lengthy this evening. I'm still here, though, so let's get this over and done with.

Worked the Black Friday weekend at work (yesterday and today) and was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't as much of a clusterfuck as I was expecting. It was fairly busy, but not to an excessive degree; we didn't have hordes of customers trampling each other or anything, so that was something of a relief.

I feel I've settled into things quite nicely with this job. I've established some decent "work friendships" with the people I work alongside — having been burned a bit before by getting too close to certain people I worked with, I have been deliberately distancing myself a bit without seeming too impersonal — and I feel like I know what I'm doing a bit better than I did when I started. I evidently exude something of an aura of confidence in what I do, because a number of the other seasonal temps who started after me keep mistaking me for a full-time, permanent member of staff. This, in turn, gives me a bit of a confidence boost, which I've been sorely in need of.

As part of my recent work, we've been opening up a new store. This has been really nice, as rather than trying to fit in to an established environment, I've been able to take a certain degree of "ownership" over the new place right from the outset. I know where things are, I know how the place works, I know its little quirks and idiosyncrasies. Being much more spacious and better laid out than our previous premises, it's also much more pleasant to work in generally.

So work's been going well. It's just a shame a lot of other things have been so shitty recently, because it's really getting me down; had a bit of an emotional breakdown this evening when I reached my absolute limit of endurance, and while I think that "release" helped a bit, I still feel a bit crappy.

Still, holiday coming up next week, so I shall do my best to relax and enjoy it, and hope things improve from there onwards. I can but hope.

2132: Calling

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How do you find your "calling"? In other words, how do you figure out what it is you're "supposed" to be doing; the thing you're good at?

I'm still not convinced I've figured it out myself, but I've been pondering it somewhat recently.

At one point, I thought teaching might be my calling, but the reality of the situation set in quite soon after I started my training; in retrospect, I'm pleased with myself that I managed to survive as long as I did, but annoyed that I wasted several years of my life and possibly left myself with some irreparable mental scars in the process.

At another point, I thought games journalism might be my calling, but going by the state of the modern games press and its contemptuous attitude towards both its audience and the things it covers, it's pretty apparent that I'm not particularly welcome in that field, despite it being one of my biggest ambitions when I was a bit younger.

Most recently, I've been working retail for the second time in my life, and I've been surprised how much I've been enjoying it. This week we've been setting up a brand new store, and I'm absolutely exhausted as a result of the long hours everyone on the team has been working, but it's extremely satisfying. And when I was in the existing store serving customers, it's been extremely satisfying to help people out, advise them or simply hand them a hotly anticipated product ready for them to go home and enjoy.

I shouldn't be that surprised, of course; the last time I worked retail, I enjoyed it a lot, too, though I attributed this to the corporate culture of the company I was working for at the time. My positive feelings towards said company — or, rather, the management team of the store I worked at — dissipated after both a colleague and I were treated rather badly, but I still look back on the majority of my time at that store with fondness.

The fact that I'm enjoying it just as much in a company with a somewhat more laid-back attitude — for the most part, anyway — suggests that it might be the work itself that I'm finding fulfilling. And indeed there are plenty of individual elements that I find oddly satisfying: things as simple as sorting out shelves and alphabetising discs, or as complex as talking an inexperienced customer through the various product lines available. It all adds up to something that I rather enjoy on the whole, with the only really sucky part of the whole thing being that retail, on average, wherever you go, tends to pay pretty poorly, creating a business sector where many employees are overworked, underpaid and underappreciated.

Still, at this stage, having suffered through a number of jobs that clearly weren't right for me, I'm more than willing to suck up a considerable cut in my overall pay in exchange for something that I seem to enjoy and be reasonably good at. Long may these feelings continue.

2110: Stacking

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I've been back in the retail sector for a little while now — part time, temporary, but still in there — and it occurs to me that, despite the pay being low, I actually don't hate it. I even quite like it, I hesitate to say.

This is not entirely what I had in mind when pondering my career choices towards the end of secondary school. This is not what I had in mind when it looked like I was starting to build a career in the games press. This is not what I had in mind when I obtained a teaching qualification. But, well, it's where I am now — and it seems to be "working" for me pretty much as well as anything I've done before, perhaps even better.

You may consider this to not be particularly ambitious, and I'd probably agree with you there; I've been conscious over the last few years of the fact that I'm simply not very ambitious when it comes to career prospects. All I really want is to be comfortable rather than rich, and I value the situation where I can completely "switch off" from work at the end of a day and just enjoy my evenings and weekends.

The other thing which occurs to me is that retail seems to provide an environment that meshes well with whatever it is that makes my brain work the way it does. I didn't cope well with the traditional office environment, for example, because I couldn't deal with all the gossiping, backstabbing, politics and outright lying that went on every day. It didn't help, of course, that I was forced out of the job in question as a result of my immediate superiors not understanding what depression is or how to help someone with it. But then I hated that stupid, shitty, pointless job with all its stupid, shitty, pointless policies and procedures anyway, so despite getting the boot from it costing me a reasonably healthy salary, I'm not sorry I don't work there any more; I'm just sorry that the circumstances under which I left it occasionally leave me with horribly unpleasant "flashbacks" when I'm trying to get to sleep.

But I shouldn't dwell on the past too much; as I say, retail seems to provide an environment that meshes well with me. And I've been thinking about why that is: it's to do with always knowing what I should be doing. because the things that there are to do are always obvious. Gap in a shelf? Fill it. Customer at a till? Serve them. Customer with a question? Answer it. Back counter messy? Tidy it. There's always something to do, which takes care of what was my biggest frustration with the aforementioned office job: the fact that there sometimes simply wasn't anything to get on with. (And boy, they didn't like that being pointed out to them.)

I make mistakes, sure, because I'm still learning how things are done at my current job, but I pick things up quickly and I seem to have been making a good impression so far. It's tiring, too, but coming off a shift feeling knackered makes me feel like I've done something worthwhile rather than sitting on my arse all day — plus it's a kind of "exercise" that I can do without thinking about it.

So while it may not be particularly ambitious to say so, so long as I can keep bringing in some pennies each month with a combination of retail and the freelance writing work I'm doing on a regular basis (not for any websites or magazines, I'm afraid, so you can't "see" it anywhere) I think I can probably muddle through like this for the immediate future. I hope so, anyway; I just want to be able to relax and just get on with life rather than wondering what amorphous, unclear, foggy target I should be aiming in the general direction of next. I just want to live, y'know?

2053: Back to Work

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I had my first "proper" day at a new (part-time, seasonal, temporary) retail job today. While I've been earning a bit of money through some freelance work recently, it hasn't really been "stable" enough to provide predictable income, so I had been looking around for other opportunities for a while. One such opportunity presented itself, and while it wasn't what I'd maybe call my ideal job — minimum wage, part-time, seasonal, temporary — it is at least both relevant to my skills and interests.

I've worked retail before and was surprised at both how much I actually quite enjoyed it and the fact I seemingly had a reasonably natural "talent" for it. While I talk a lot about my social anxiety and shyness, this largely relates to being stuck in a "small talk" situation with someone else; when I'm given something clear and structured to talk to people about — such as selling them something — I generally have no problems with communicating, and I like to think I come across as personable and friendly. So far my experiences with returning to the retail environment after a few years away have backed that up.

Among other things, it's quite nice to have a reason to get out of the house for a few hours. Working from home, as I've mentioned before, sounds like a dream come true, but in reality it's a fairly miserable and lonely existence a lot of the time, particularly if you find yourself going through something of a dry spell with assignments. Sure, you can talk to people on the Internet, but it's not quite the same as being surrounded by actual real living and breathing people you can look in the eye and hear the voices of. Despite everything I may have indicated to the contrary here on these very pages, I do actually quite like having company sometimes, particularly if they're people I get along with and enjoy spending time with. And while it's much too early to determine whether or not I'll truly consider the people I'm working alongside to be "friends" — to be honest, after a few previous negative experiences with what I thought were workplace "friendships", I'm very much inclined to keep everyone somewhat at arm's length rather than getting too chummy — I certainly haven't found myself walking out of the door thinking "what a tosser" about anyone, which is a pleasant position to be in.

When I was younger, I always wondered if I'd "make something" of myself and have an exciting, high-powered job with lots of responsibility or whatever. To be honest, as I get older I'm just content with something I can get on with and not be bothered too much. I'm not going to rule out the possibility of developing a career from this position if the opportunity presents itself once the "seasonal" season is over, but for now I'm just happy to have a bit of semi-predictable money rolling in alongside the more erratic income from freelancing.

I would like to find myself in a position where I can just get on with life without having to wonder if I'm doing enough to "get by". For a while last year — and on a number of previous occasions — I thought I'd found that, but unfortunately that wasn't to be. I have low expectations this time around; hopefully that means I won't be disappointed, regardless of whatever ends up happening in the long term. In the short term, meanwhile, this will at least help me to survive, which is, to be honest, all I'm really concerned with for the moment.

#oneaday Day 785: The Case of the Disappearing High Street

The oft-mentioned "economic downturn" (which has been turning downwards for so long surely it's completely upside down by now) has had wide-ranging effects — or, at the very least, things have happened which people feel can be attributed to said economic downturn. A lack of jobs meaning highly qualified people are forced to sit at home in their pants watching The Jeremy Kyle Show. Currency devaluation and something about inflation, which I shan't pretend to understand even a little bit. And, of course, the demise of the High Street.

To be fair, online shopping has been providing a compelling reason not to go and shop on the High Street for a number of years now, but as the news channels attempt to sex up incredibly boring financial stories with words like "CRISIS" and various incomprehensible graphs plummet inexorably downwards, the demise of in-person shopping could very much become a reality.

The latest casualty of various financial implications is the Game Group, who run both Game and Gamestation, the two main video game retailers here in the UK. Over the course of the last couple of weeks, major publishers and suppliers have pulled out of their deals with the two chains, preorders for big hits like Mass Effect 3 and the like are not being honoured, the company's share price has plummeted to something obscenely low and it's looking increasingly likely that the whole thing will go into administration, potentially leaving around 6,000 people out of a job. Which would suck.

For any Americans reading, Game is essentially our equivalent of GameStop. And while it's prone to many of the same problems GameStop has in the U.S. — inflated prices for preowned games, being bugged to preorder, a not-terribly-generous reward card scheme — it's been a fixture on the British high street for many years now, and the go-to destination for people to get the latest releases. Gamestation, meanwhile, was formerly the second-biggest game store chain, with a somewhat more grungey feel inside its various shops. It used to carry proper retro stuff — we're talking right back to Super NES and the like here — though that side of things has dried up a little in recent years, though you can still find the odd rarity. Game acquired Gamestation back in 2007, but kept the separate brand as a distinct shopping experience.

Both carried a wide variety of new games, preowned titles and gaming-related crap like Pokemon toys and Sackboy plushies. Until recently, they always seemed to be doing a roaring trade any time I paid them a visit — this perhaps partly being due to the fact that they were pretty much the only recognisable video game specialist retailers in the UK (barring second hand-only stores like Pink Planet and CEX).

Now, though, it's an altogether different story. The carefully-crafted music playlist playing through the store's speakers has been replaced by whatever the employees want to listen to (the other day, I heard some awesome metal versions of Nintendo themes, which made me wonder why on Earth they didn't do that more often); the employees seem a little downcast, particularly when people come in asking about (occasionally ill-informed) stories they'd read on the Internet; and the shelves are noticeably empty of the week's big releases. Every new day, it seems, sees a new publisher reporting that its latest titles will not be available on Game Group shelves — in just the last week or so, I've seen reports of EA, Capcom and Tecmo Koei pulling out before everything goes really tits up.

It's sad to see a once-proud retailer in what is clearly its death throes, and it's doubly sad when you think of the thousands of people nationwide who will likely be out of a job when the shit hits the fan. But as a consumer, it's worth noting that now is a great time to go and pay a Game or Gamestation a visit, because the stores are desperately trying to get rid of the masses of preowned games cluttering up their shelves. And you probably already know what that means — ludicrous savings.

In the last week, for the price of two brand new console games I've managed to acquire 17 games across several different platforms, many of which I've been meaning to try out for quite some time but couldn't really justify dropping £40 on. That's a pretty frickin' awesome deal, and while none of that money I spent makes it back to the publishers and developers of the titles in question thanks to the fact they're all preowned, frankly I don't really care at this point. I've long been a supporter of the used games market — over the years, it's been the source of some of my most beloved and rarest titles, which, in many cases, I've come to long after the game is out of print anyway.

But I digress. It's looking very much like Game is not long for this world, and once it's gone there will be very few places you'll be able to physically walk into to buy a new video game. What will take the place of these stores on the High Street?

Clothes shops, no doubt. One sector that remains resolutely safe from the "threat" of digital distribution.