Cracked has had articles from some pretty wild sources doctors, child stars, spies but I know what you've all been thinking this whole time: "When are we going to hear from someone who worked at a thrift store?!"

I worked at a very popular thrift chain, the name of which has been removed because I don't actually know anything about the law and have no idea if what I'm doing might blow this whole operation wide open. Just to be on the safe side. I might not end up unveiling a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top, but I bet I've got one or two things about working in a thrift store that might surprise you.

4. The Wealthiest Customers Are the WorstThis might come as a shock to some of you, but did you know that sometimes having lots of money turns a person into a huge dick? It's true! Many wealthy people have no true concept of poverty and, well bred though they may be, often delight in patronizing people whose lives are already hard enough as Dt5FW6a9x a way of re affirming their financial and douchebag superiority. Working at a discount store leads even middle class customers to either treat you like a discount human or an exciting foreign adventure, like, "Hey Bertrand, wouldn't it be a lark if, just this once, we vacationed on one of the not secret islands that only rich people know about? I'm serious, let's go to the Bahamas or Jamaica; we'll be slumming it just like the poor! Ah, the poor.""Oh, honey, isn't this just like if we were on The Wire? I'm such an Omar!"

The thrift store I worked at was in a really wealthy neighborhood, so obviously we got a solid handful of rich, bored housewives who'd come in out of idle curiosity for how the other half lives (spoiler alert, rich people: not as well as you). The wealthy customers would talk to me as if being around donated clothes meant that I was also some kind of discount, donated human. One such woman sneered when I told her an Abercrombie shirt was $2.99, because she expected it to be free, apparently. After I finished ringing her up, she stood by the register and pointed out every dismal aspect of our store like a judgmental stepmother."Where am I supposed to park my nice car or my tiny dog? And what

about OTHER stereotypes about rich people? What about THOSE?!"

If they're not being rude and judgmental, they're just taken by how positively quaint the idea of a thrift shop is. Another clearly rich woman was totally enthralled by how "cute" all our recycled, dusty clothes and barely making rent employees looked. She was really curious about my life, totally amazed that I was in school, even complimentary about how well I socialized with her. She looked at me with sad, sympathetic eyes like I was a toddler in a Russian orphanage and she was Angelina Jolie.

I can't decide which is worse: being openly thought of as a shit stain on society's otherwise perfect silk tapestry or being treated like an alien in a laboratory fascinating, yet still very much different and intrinsically inferior.

A quiet majority of our customers, however, were people looking to steal.

3. Theft Is a Huge Non ProblemThe way our cheap super bowl jerseys system was set up, unless a customer was the worst thief in the world, there was no way we could actually stop them. There's no barcode system to track our inventory we had to manually count everything once a month. We had cameras, but those were to watch the employees, not the customers. We were supposed to have plain clothes anti theft people wander the store, but we were in a nice neighborhood, so they only ever came in to train new police academy dropouts."If you see anyone taking anything just start making Michael Winslow noises."

An ongoing problem my store had was that we never had enough people on the floor to do everything our jobs entailed. (Surprise! Not a lot of people sign up to work at thrift stores, and most stores don't have enough money to pay the amount of employees they need!) We had to put out 800 items per employee for an 8 hour shift on top of letting customers into fitting rooms and checking on them so they don't steal, working the register on the exact opposite side of the store, helping customers find things, and keeping the store tidy. Even splitting all of that between two people (which is all we ever had on the floor), you still find yourself constantly rushing like a chicken with its head cut off who's also high on crack.

In my particular store, the only time we ever caught someone stealing, it happened by accident. A very drunk guy brought his stuff up to the register to buy a single shirt. The hat he was wearing had our price tag on it. When I pointed it out to him, he lifted his arm to take off the hat and I saw his shirt had another one of our price tags on it. I pointed that out to him too. He went to reach into his cheap nfl pro bowl jerseys bag where his original shirt was, presumably forgetting the hat and shirt weren't his, and when he opened the bag, I saw another one of our price tags inside it. He took off the shirt and hat at the register and walked out topless, leaving his original shirt inside the bag on the counter. And thus, my career as a crime fighter began and then abruptly ended. http://www.fordification.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5615
http://signumtempestatis.de/index.php?forum-showposts-1049
http://forum.wladimir.su/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=18696
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