Corporate to the Rescue?

With what some have speculated as the worst Black Friday in the history of retail on the horizon, Macy’s has decided to put their mouth where their money is and send their white-collared, corporate workers down to the store level. What could possibly go wrong?

“When the armada is sinking,” says Macy’s CEO Jeffrey Gennette, “The admiral doesn’t just stand atop his gilded sea-tower and watch. No, he sends all his best men to those sinking ships to help throw bucketfuls of water back into the ocean to save the precious cargo within!”

But what retailers like Macy’s are facing this year isn’t just a bucketful of salty brine, but a perfect storm of supply issues, mass resignations, and Karenism against which George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg would have no chance.

“They comin’ to the store on Black Friday?” asks one Orlando area Macy’s employee. “That’s like sending a toddler to take the beaches at Normandy in 1944, but okay.”

“I honestly don’t see why the floor workers make such a big deal out of this,” said Lisa Florence, who has worked in the accounting department of Macy’s corporate headquarters in New York for the past eleven years. “It’s a Friday. Go in for eight hours, do a little work, catch up on all the hot goss, and you’re sipping margaritas with the crew at Tito’s by six. Then you have the whole weekend to just relax and unwind. Not sure what all the fuss is about, seriously.”

“It would be nice to get some help this year,” says Paul Sarsgaard, manager of a Macy’s location at the Westfield Mall in Milford, CT. “I only wish that help was in the form of higher wages or benefits to entice and retain staff and not what amounts to a corporate visit on the busiest goddamn day of the goddamn year.”

It’s a truth that most retail workers will tell you that having visitors from corporate is rarely anything but a hindrance.

“I was scheduled to make sure the electronics section was fully stocked, priced, and ready to go for Black Friday,” says Rachel, a Macy’s worker at the Milford location, “but now I have to spend that shift scraping gum off the floor under store racking and making sure the staff break room and bathrooms are spotless. I don’t really see it as a good use of my time.”

In PR statements to the press that totally reflect things as they’re sure to happen in reality, Macy’s assures us that their corporate workers are ready to roll up their sleeves and put in the same hard work as any other Macy’s employee and that any implications that this is something they’re being forced to do and not something they want to do is totally inaccurate.

One such statement reads: “In order to ease the tension on our valued, essential frontline workers we’ll be doing everything from bringing stock out from the back and tidying up those pesky dressing rooms inbetween guests.”

“They think we actually got stock back there?” says Marcus Hall, a long-time employee of a Chicago area Macy’s. “Man, they got no idea what goes on at these stores, like for real. Like they think doing dressing rooms is easy as– you know what, nevermind. Yeah, just take care of the dressing rooms, they’re not usually that bad, right?”

As hilarious as the idea of a corporate employee scraping trodden diarrhea off a dressing room floor is, the fact of the matter is these buttoned-up, slack-wearing corporate stooges are leaving the comfort of their office chairs’ ass-grooves and coming to stores this holiday shopping season to test their ability to do the work of the real workers, their patience with a screaming public out for blood and bargains, and the durability of their weekend New Balance sneakers, and it may not be a picnic for any party involved.

“They act like they know what it’s gonna be like,” says Sarsgaard, “but they’re about to find out they don’t know shit about crap.”

“Maybe once they see how bad we have it,” says Hall hopefully, “they’ll stop seeing us as expendable and start giving us the resources we need to do our jobs effectively.” [Editor’s note: They will not]

Only one thing seems certain as Black Friday quickly approaches, and that is that placing employees in an already volatile situation with angry, sometimes violent customers with the added pressure of being on “corporate visitor in the store” behavior can logically only lead to disaster.

“Only one thing matters on Black Friday,” stated CEO Jeffrey Gennette, “and that’s that we turn a profit for our valued shareholders. Also, we need to pretend prices are going up because of inflation and not just because we want more money.”

At the end of the day, whatever happens, Macy’s owes its staff one hell of a pizza party.