hypertext #2

My hypertext essay #2 is going to be on the retail business, clothing to be exact. Barbara Ehrenreich writes about her experiences in working for a low wage in “Nickel and Domed.” I’m going to do the same in my hypertext. I’m going write my point of view as a worker there, the point of view customers have of the people who work there (I’m going to use the point of view/opinion I used to have of the people who worked at the store). Also, like Ehrenreich and given experiences of people from “Fast Food Nation”, I’m going to talk about the type of people who came into the store and how the workers and I would deal with them; from scary to annoying to not being able to understand what they were saying. In “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser, I could easily relate to Chapter 3: behind the counter. Working in retail does not require much, if any, skills. The only skills which are needed, and what hiring is based on, are people skills. Page seventy in Schlosser discusses jobs being “de-skilled” and page sixty-eight talks about teenagers being the main work force and relying on part-time. Teenagers and people in their early teens with willingness to work for low wage makes it less expensive to hire them, and the job being in retail does not require much experience makes it easy for those businesses to justify the “low-wage.” I’m going to talk about what the customer do see and what they don’t see. For example, do they know the people in the back have special boards to fold the shirts uniformly in size? That every hour a list of what has been sold in the previous hour is printed out and that we have people to look for those things in the back and bring it on the floor, and that perhaps there is an hierarchy in the store? Page eighty-four in “Fast Food Nation” talks about closing and robbery. I think I am also going to mention these topics in my hypertext. I couldn’t really relate to the meat-packing chapter besides “The Worst” section (pg. 176-178). It talks about all the bad things the cleaners have to go through at night. Retail is not that bad by far, but I’m considering mentioning what the least favorite parts of working at the store were.