Modern society operates on the unspoken cultural agreement that Saturday and Sunday belong to everyone. Not for shop workers, though!
Shop workers don’t wind down for the weekend; they wind up. There’s an old adage: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday: Detail. Thursday, Friday, Saturday: Retail. (Obviously coined before Sunday opening was a thing). The mission is to get all the little jobs out of the way so that you can focus the weekend on selling stuff. That ‘Friday Feeling’ isn’t looking forward to a day off—it’s not being able to move for stock because of the sheer volume customers will get through.
Saturday is the busiest day of the week. Good luck getting it off.
It may be the day that everyone else has plans, but yours will have to wait. As a retail worker, you’re the weekend enabler, providing the office workers of the world with food, drink, clothing, and hardware.
From doors opening to doors closing, it doesn’t stop. The queues at the till never end. Some people are on a mission and know exactly what they want. Some are spending the whole day browsing every place in town and going home with nothing. Others are going home laden with bags upon bags of purchases. You serve them all the same. Fast, efficient. No time for chit-chat.
It’s a different crowd on a weekend too. Fewer people on their own. More families. Kids being dragged along in football kits and swimming costumes, fresh from their Saturday morning clubs. Parents, grandparents, and siblings talking about where to go for coffee and lunch. Couples out for a wander and an argument.
To them, the shop floor is an indoor day out, a weekend pastime, or just a warm place to kill an hour before lunch. To you, it’s an obstacle course. You spend your shift dodging double pushchairs, navigating slow-moving family flotillas, and rescuing items that have been abandoned in completely irrational place ( oh, a chilled chicken sandwich tucked away behind a stack of folded jumpers. How lovely). They dismantle in thirty seconds a display table that took you twenty minutes to fold, completely unaware of the invisible machinery keeping the room functional around them.
You just buzz around your section, restocking, tidying, keeping everything going. You’re the enabler after all.
Weekdays off can actually be a positive
So you have to work at least one day of the weekend. That’s actually not that bad. Because one day a week, the dynamic is shifted and you’re the one with the day off during the week. You don’t call Wednesday ‘hump’ day, you call it a day off. And it’s great!
You don’t need to negotiate time off for a dentist appointment. The roads are quiet. Trains are empty. Cafes are chill. Want to see a movie? You’ll practically get the cinema to yourself.
And the best part about only being free during the week is that you can reliably get out of family gatherings you don’t want to attend with a simple, “Sorry, they won’t let me have Saturday off,” and it sounds like a totally valid excuse.
So while you don’t look forward to a busy Saturday, it’s not all bad. It goes fast and ends in the end.
It just doesn’t feel good when someone pops in on the way home from the pub on POETS day and asks you if you’ve got plans for the weekend.
