Awhile back, I was in one of my favorite stores, Ollie's Bargain Outlet. Now, I don't like Ollie's because it's the creme de la creme of retail stores. Quite the opposite. It's about as tacky as a short skirt at Sunday Mass. 

Their business model is to buy up products at huge discounts, such as a store will go out of business, or there's a slightly damaged shipment of products that the creme de la creme stores are too good to sell. Then Ollie's buys it at a huge discount then sells it for lower than you'd pay elsewhere. They always have new stuff in their store as a result, so I like to just walk in and see what they might have.

Well this particular visit to Ollie's, they had a mannequin at the front with an employee shirt, name badge and so on, with a little sign that said, "This could be you."

Now, if I lacked basic motivation in life and desired my family and future generations of my lineage to live in  servitude to others in perpetuity, this might be appealing to me. The store has more or less a positive environment, and the people who work at Ollie's are basically decent people.

But the way it was written, and maybe it was my mood at the time, put me in mind of the adage:

"There, but for the grace of God, go I."

I mean no disrespect to the employees at Ollie's, nor any retail store. A good number of those folks are doing that to make ends meet, or to bridge the gap between where they're at in that moment, and where they see themselves after a certain period of time.

Yet the majority I would say take those jobs because they can't visualize themselves doing anything more important than scanning products over a laser scanner, then announcing the total price (which the customer can clearly see but I guess they like hearing it spoken so that's just what you do I guess) and the ensuing awkward pause while the customer swipes their card, enters the PIN number, etc. and finally hands them the receipt.