Inventing a New Game While Locked inside a Big Box Store

At the start of the economic downturn I was downsized at my newspaper job – and then I promptly panicked. I knew there were actual Mensa members who I was competing against for jobs and my self-confidence disappeared. I am smart enough to know that when I get scared I get dumb, but that didn’t stop me from taking the first job I was offered – wearing a name tag in a big box store.

And yes, it was as horrible as you imagine that it would be.

Callous, rude managers hitting on teenage employees, horrible corporate policies, belittling behavior from customers as well as disenfranchised co-workers – just punching in felt like a hazing ritual.

But then I met a teenage boy who shared my sense of humor. We worked the closing shift together and had the tedious task of “re-shopping” which we turned it into an imaginary game show.

Re-shopping (for those of you lucky enough not to have done it) is taking all of the various items that are left at the front of the store by customers, and re-stocking them. Which doesn’t sound too bad, until you have a basket full of pens, and the store stocks over a thousand different kinds of pens – and the manager is threatening you with “punishment” if you don’t get the items re-shopped fast enough.

Re-shop (If you’ve got the balls for it!)”

In imaginary Re-shop, participants would be locked in the store after closing with a basket full of fifty disparate items and they would have to put them away in fifteen minutes. But, the real trick was that the people doing these mundane tasks, wasn’t myself or my teenage friend. The contestants would be the ridiculously pompous butterball of a lawyer who had shrieked at me when his credit card was declined. Or, the manager who was kept us locked in the store for an extra hour because he didn’t feel like going home to his wife who was “ragging it.” (The night crew’s schedule was completely at the mercy of the closing manager’s whim. No manager kept us locked in so long that we came close to overtime, but we were completely powerless when it came time to punch out.)

And that’s why I think that Re-shop would be great, it’s the great equalizer. It could be a cross between The Amazing Race and Survivor, but if the participants couldn’t find out where the items belonged or if the items in the cart weren’t put away fast enough, the penalty wouldn’t be eating an anaconda – it would be having to clean the public bathrooms in the store. Which was our punishment.

(Image courtesy of D’Arcy Norman via Flikr)

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