Gallowglass

I’m sitting here writing a job description, and so I’m once again thinking meta about staff.

What is the purpose of staff? What is their function?

At some point we were all staff. A staff of one in some cases – we were general dogsbody, head buyer, morale officer, do you want fries with that server. Open when we were awake, closed when we were asleep staff. And at some point we became I’m not even supposed to be here today staff. For thirty years we all have a template as to what staff are and how they should behave, thanks to Kevin Smith. Smith’s characters don’t give a shit. They have their own inner lives to worry about.

Clerks came out in 1994. A year before Richard Linklater had released Dazed and Confused. Together they gave voice to a generation, and gave that generation a name.

Slacker.

Trapped between education and employment, the slacker chooses neither. In the face of imminent nuclear war, the erosion of perceived benefits of their Boomer parents – jobs for life, decent salaries, home ownership, picket fences – came an erosion of their value system. Hard work was not its own reward. The denizens of Clerks are trapped between their own idea of who they should be and the reality of who they are. What, you think Gen Z invented entitlement? Or millennials. no – that was us, Gen X, riffing of James Dean. What were the characters of Clerks rebelling against? Everything and nothing. “Whatdaygot? I’m not even supposed to be here today”.

I cried when I read an article about slackers, because I finally felt seen. Because this was me – bouncing between dropping out and fitting in. I hung around university doing odd jobs where I wasn’t even supposed to be here today. EWvery night Mary would tell me I probably wouldn’t be needed the next day and then every morning I’d get that phone call. Needing me.

I was a zero hour contract kid before it was cool.

And it was never cool.

Here’s the thing though. The Nineties was the first big age of retail disruption. Only disruption back then meant malls over high streets. They had slowly popped up like monstrous carbuncles across the retail landscape – all stores under one roof. And this made existing stores on high streets less tenable. But your landlord doesn’t care if you are less tenable or not – he still wants his commercial rent. And so your job is less tenable too – more precarious. The life your parents enjoyed is now beyond you, because the one thing they had that you are denied is cradle to grave job security.

As each generation ages, they are replaced. Replacement theory is real, it’s just generational and age based. The new generation pays in to pensions so the older generation cashes out, first financially and then terminally. Your cradle to grave security is just that. But we weren’t even supposed to be there today. Gen X was convinced that we would die of thermonuclear war or drugs or Aids – just say no kids, to everything.

So we did.

That’s what your staff are there to do. Replace you. Be the not-you when the you is absent. You want them to think like you, act like you, make decisions like you. You don’t just need them to be there today, you need them to be THERE today. To sublimate their interests into your own. To align. To be your gallowglass. Your security.

The first task – and arguably the most important task – is to maintain the security of your business. Yes yes, serving customers is important. But the act of taking money for goods and or services IS a security task. Security and integrity, for the two are interchangable. The physical security of your business – unlocking and locking your doors, opening and closing your till, loss prevention from theft, protection of your interests and occasionally protection of your customers are all security tasks. While your staff member is in, that’s all on them. Maintaining the physical security of your business. You can also expect them to maintain the online security of your business, and not to happily send ten thousand pounds worth of Pokemon boosters to that random online guy who Shopify flags up as fraudulent. Not to download hentai onto your hard drive. Not to expose you to additional threats above and beyond the normal day to day threats, so not to bring your business into disrepute. What disrepute means varies from business to business. But you don’t want to employ people with views that are antithetical to your own.

Ethos is security.

It bulwarks you with integrity armor.

Integrity is security.

A former employer used to buy stolen goods. He knew they were shoplifted – hard not to when they come pre-priced with another store’s stickers. Shoplifting is like urban big game hunting – you can kid yourself that the crime has already been committed, that the animal is already dead, but somewhere retail Bambi is crying for their game mother. In the urban jungle, stores are either prey or fences. Stolen goods are cheap, but the cost for dealing in them is that your customer base is also now a rogues gallery of thieves that would make Forge Fitzwilliam blush. Thieves need security too of course – they need to know you aren’t going to double cross them – by, say, not buying that burglarised NFL top. Because once you are a fence, they want to fence everything, and pretty soon you’ll be buying gold fillings from corpses. And the day you say no? Well, you just became prey, and you are like criminal Cheers – every shoplifter in town knows your name and knows that you are the reason they had to trudge back home with a bag of stolen NFL t-shirts and a car radio.

They weren’t even supposed to steal that today!

You want your staff to be on shoplifters like a bear on honey. Without the licking, although that would definitely be a deterrent. Shoplifter and staff member are locked forever in eternal battle like Wil-e Coyote and Road Runner. Meep Meep Motherfucker. But unlike Saturday morning cartoons, this isn’t a conflict your staff signed up for. They are unwilling combatants, their mental health collateral damage. The shoplifter only needs a momentary distraction to win. You never forget the first time a shoplifter lifts from your shop. It’s a gut punch. Like you failed a test nobody told you you’d be taking, and the guy who was taking it happily took it and ran off laughing and pointing like Nelson Muntz. £2, £20, £20,000. It’s the thought that counts. Your legs spinning around in mid air before your body falls a thousand feet to the bottom of the canyon. A.C.M.E. won’t save you now.

Sometimes it’s hard to be a boss because being a boss often means watching your staff fail. But that coyote picks himself up and gets back in the game. His boss isn’t going to fire him. He has a security of his own – job security. One thing every boss in the history of the world has done is fucked up. Give those humans free will? Even God gets in on the act. Gonna be some repercussions for that, says the one character who can talk to God mano e mano. What does God do? He fires his sorry Mornigstar ass.

He wasn’t even supposed to be here that day. And that was like, day seven of creation.

Pretty soon God is dealing with the ramifications of his poor staff training decisions. Pillars of salt are involved. There is much smiting. Not much security if you live in those proto inner sea kingdoms – God gets so mad he floods the whole shebang and drowns literally everyone – even the dogs and the cats. Save two of each and after that its smite city, population: everyone. Except Noah and his family. He was like, God’s shift supervisor. Everyone else was fired. Slash and burn baby.

This is often the first response a boss has to a security crisis.

Last month was the anniversary of the Manchester bombing. On the 22nd of May every year Victoria Station is filled with floral tributes. I was running events that night, in the old store, when we heard an almighty crash. You don’t think ‘bomb’. We don’t live in a world where your mind goes automatically to ‘bomb’. This isn’t the Nineties. The venue had security of course. After the fact everyone is culpable though, right? They should have done this or that differently. Hundreds of chances to identify a lone bomber with a deathwish and feeling that everything wrong with society was Ariana Grande fans.

Twenty three people died.

There are worse things than that kid stealing a booster. There are points where losing eyes on the target means death. Your staff are just on a security continuum, and when things go bad – which they will – your job is to tell them that it’s not their fault. Yes, even when it is. We can’t rewind time, but we can learn. Each security breach is a learning experience – you learn where the snatch thief that Connor chased into the road sold the copy of Onslaught he stole.

You learn where the road runners swap the goods they steal with their handlers, because these days those shoplifters are pack hunters. Distraction. Point man. Snatcher. And when you cross them you are crossing their gang masters. Not steal enough? Your gang master won’t pay you. Only its drugs rather than money. Cross the gang masters and you’ll be targeted day in day out, snatch squad after snatch squad. Security for a shoplifter is access to drugs and not being beaten by your boss, in a world where being fired involves gasoline and matches on a patch of waste ground.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t try. You should practice vigilance, though not to the fault of suspecting intent to people who don’t look like they belong. Everyone looks like they don’t belong in the wrong place. Shoplifters by and large wear shoplifter gear – nice baggy trousers you can hide a frozen turkey down without freezing your giblets. Trainers for running fast and furious. Jackets, even in the warmest weather. It’s the worlds shittest disguise because it screams ‘I am baggy enough to hide product under’. You’re no Bill Murray in Quickchange, that’s for sure. Once you are generally aware of shoplifters, you start seeing them everywhere. You are the retail security version of Rowdy Roddy Piper in They Live, rather than Rowdy Roddy Piper in Hell Comes to Frogtown. Once you have worked security you can’t unlearn it. You see people eyeing up where the security cameras are, where the blind spots are, how observant the staff are. From now until the end of time, 10% of your processing power is threat identification.

That’s not something you can teach, except by failing.

Observation is a skill, like cold reading. Boss you probably got pretty good at identifying when a customer was a customer, when they were a time waster or an attention sponge, or a whale looking to spend the average GDP of a gulf state on Magic singles. And you needed to simultaneously weigh that up with not looking like you were weighing things up, those things being people. People do not like being weighed up. Your customers don’t like it, your staff don’t like it, even your shoplifters don’t like it. People like the security of knowing they are viewed as a human being first.

This is doubly so of people who don’t look like you.

We can all go into a space where we are seen as a threat. If I go into a classy store in my t-shirt and shorts and start looking at fixtures, a trained sales assistant will start to shadow me. A well trained sales assistant won’t. An exemplary sales assistant will be able to penetrate my ablative sales assistant armor with a question that engages with me and makes a connection. This is the best security measure, because an engaged customer is like a sales assistant you don’t have to pay. Because the greatest security comes from being in a great community. A great community isn’t gated, it doesn’t have security guards because nobody is kept out. The folks on the doors are not there to gatekeep, but to direct people to where they best get served and satisfied. And then you, boss-in-absentia, can sit back and sip your mojito.

Your work here is done. And you don’t have to be here today.

Most of us aren’t quite at that point. Last month a business one minute away was hit by a snatch squad who lifted £20K in Pokemon cards. In an A.C.M.E. crate marked Valuable Pokemon: Do Not Steal. If we were jewellers, that would be locked in a safe. That’s fine – in 2015 Lust Liquor and Burn had a one ton safe lifted out through their breeze block wall. Our own safe was stolen about the same time, with all our Magic cards in it. It was kind of a locked room mystery, only our locked room came with a door into the electricity room which the workmen remodelling the building had keys to.

Shoplifters are ten a penny in a city like Manchester, but safelifting is a Guy Ritchie movie. It’s the Stath, lantern jawed, putting ‘the team’ back together, all wise cracks and testosterone. Security are the incompetent dolts we laugh at when they give chase.

Yet that is us.

Twenty thousand pounds is a hard fuck up to write off. On CCTV you can watch the exact moment – on endless repeat – where your security was less effective than a chocolate fireguard. We know all the folks involved – yes, including baby faced shoplifter and weasel guy – they are, as they say ‘known offenders’. Everyone involved feels like shit – probably even the shoplifters do, because that value means it automatically gets upgraded from a slap on the wrist to a custodial sentence, and like I said… ‘known offenders’. And I get the primary impulse to fire all the staff involved. In the US where there are – shall we say – lax employment laws and rights, people can be fired for less. On a whim you might say.

But here’s a question:

Do you think your staff can be effective at securing your premises, your stock, your integrity, your customers when they are concerned about their own job security? When they have to pay rent? When they are one paycheck away from homelessless? How can people be expected to prioritise your needs when they are worried about their own? This was the true legacy of the bonfire of the retail sanities in those halcyon post mall decade. We stripped folks of their security and their dignity, stuck them on minimum wage with a name badge and expected them to do an exemplary job.

Which they did not always do. Would we, in the same situation?

Clerks was thirty years ago. But the tropes and themes are still relevant today, still reflected in every minimum wage employee in a zero hour contract job. We learned nothing from Dante and Jay and Silent Bob. But worse, our slacker selves became business owners and bosses and parents. And yet we still expect our replacements to somehow be where they are supposed to be, on the day they are supposed to be. To be mindful. To be observant. To be present in every sense of the word. And in order to do that, they need the security of knowing that their jobs – their lives – are not at risk if they fuck up, which they will. Because we did.

And they are our replacements.

p.s. And you know what? I WAS supposed to be in today. And I was in today. But I wrote this instead of doing any real work!