JOB DESCRIPTION - Final

 HomeGoods Associate

 

I think HomeGoods is a store that everyone knows about but doesn’t have to actually enter until they start getting ready to shop for college. I had absolutely no desire to enter a HomeGoods until my mom came home with a job application to be an associate there. She shoved it at me and told me I needed to make some money. Which I did. I just didn’t expect that it would make me so miserable.

 

A sales associate at HomeGoods is in charge of everything. The managers sit in their office for most of the day, unless called upon. You stock shelves, act as a cashier, change prices, and move furniture. But really, it’s so much more. Working there is truly an experience that no one can describe. My friends in high school told me my job by far sounded like the worst, but I could always entertain them with my stories from the day prior.

 

If I had to explain to you what a sales associate at HomeGoods does, I’d leave you with these three descriptions.

·  Candle Organizer

·  Punching Bag

·  Cashier?

 

I’ll give you some more insight.

 

 

Candle Organizer

 

There are not many customers in HomeGoods unless it is a holiday season. That’s when people come to buy decorations. I was usually stuck at the front of the store waiting for someone to show up and end my boredom. While I was stuck, I could only organize the candles. I became a candle expert. Florals, sandalwood, citrus. I smelled them all and I knew them all. I would take every single candle off the shelves and put them on the ground. I found a different way to organize them every single time. By scent. By size. By color. It was like the Dewey Decimal System of candle organization, and every other worker knew I had a method to my madness. I had to keep myself entertained and I did that by organizing the candles. It was my only option.

 

 

Punching Bag

 

When you work at HomeGoods, you can look forward to one thing for sure: old ladies that are upset about their beach house decorations yelling at you.  

 

Here’s an example. A lady bought about 15 teacup sets. The sets came with the teacups and matching saucers. I had to wrap every single piece individually in paper to make sure nothing would break. While I wrapped them, the lady got a phone call. She said something about a hospital and hung up. I had already wrapped most of the glass, but she became angry and yelled at me to go faster, that she needed to get to the hospital. She reached over my desk and ripped the paper from my hand. She began wrapping the cups herself and demanded a bag to put them in. When she had to follow the prompts on the screen to pay, she became even more angry and yelled at me like I controlled the corporate office’s decision to ask if you wanted your receipt emailed to you. This is one of about 100 stories I came back with about someone yelling at me at HomeGoods. People got angry over the credit cards, and their returns, and the discounts my manager wouldn’t approve. If you notice, not a single one of these things had anything to do with me. People just decided to take out all their anger on me like I was their own, personal human punching bag. I just had to smile to meet the ‘HomeGoods Happy’ standard.

 

 

Cashier… Or Maybe a Telephone Operator?

 

Officially, I was a cashier at HomeGoods. However, the job came with many more responsibilities than just ringing up people’s decorations. I had to:

 

·  Call my manager every 2 minutes because someone wanted a discount on something that was broken in the store

·  Call my manager at least once a shift because someone wanted to return something that they had purchased three years prior

·  Call one of my coworkers to the front of the store so they could carry a piece of furniture to a customer’s car and get tipped

 

This happened a lot. I have more stories about having to call someone than I have about actually taking people’s money. One time, a customer came up to me and asked to return a new shower head she had purchased. We had to check in the system to see if each item was still in stock when people tried to return stuff. I went to check in the system and the barcode didn’t even register. Meaning, not once has a HomeGoods ever stocked that shower head. When I told the customer she couldn’t return it because she hadn’t purchased it here, I had to act like a telephone operator.

 

I had to call my supervisor because the customer was extremely angry. My supervisor then told me I had to call my manager because she was about to go on break. So, I called my manager. My manager refused to come up to the front of the store, so I mediated the conversation between her and the customer. I was the middleman for their entire conversation and the customer finally gave up. As I was giving her back the shower head, my manager called me again. She then told me that if the shower head was in the original packaging and not opened, we could accept it as a return, to give the customer a $20 gift card, and make up a random price tag for the item to go on our shelves. Just in that one single transaction, I had three different conversations on the phone. Honestly, that’s how most transactions went. I spent 70% of my time at HomeGoods on the phone.

 

 

Conclusion

 

I leave you with this. Being able to make money at HomeGoods was nice. They gave me a raise twice in less than a year, but I started off with a higher hourly rate as soon as I started working at USC (by about four dollars). I could never make any tips because they exclusively had me call my coworkers to carry stuff out to people’s cars. At least I got a paycheck. But, between constantly listening to people complain, having to call someone every five minutes, and living in a general state of boredom, I have enough HomeGoods horror stories to last me a lifetime. I always get a little chill up my spine whenever I pass a HomeGoods, but at least I became an expert in candle organization.

 

Document Stats

 

Passive Sentences: 0%

Flesch Reading Ease: 70.8

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 6.7