Natalie Beach Stole My Idea

In conversation with a fellow (former) shopgirl

I do this thing that hurts my librarian mother’s feelings. Instead of checking books out from the local branch, I buy used versions for five to twelve-ish dollars at my favorite bookstore, and then every few months I bring a tote bag full of rejects back to them to sell, and then I use the store credit to buy more used books, and so on and so forth. My librarian mother thinks this is the height of lunacy, but I don’t even know where my library card is and suspect it’s expired anyway. Also, you can’t dog-ear pages and underline whole paragraphs in library books, and spilling coffee and/or yogurt on them is generally frowned upon.

The latest book to come into my possession this way was Natalie Beach’s Adult Drama and Other Essays. If you’re not familiar, Beach is the writer who wrote the Caroline Calloway exposé, I Was Caroline Calloway, which appears in the collection. If you aren’t familiar with Caroline Calloway, I can’t help you. That’s not why we’re here.

We’re here because Natalie Beach stole my idea. There is a folder on the desktop of the very computer I’m currently typing on titled “Shopgirl.” It’s an idea that has been percolating in my sad little brain for the last handful of years when I’ve been working in small, locally-owned retail shops. Stories abound in such a position—stories of customers, of employers, of coworkers, of the human condition, et cetera. I used to post bitchy Instagram stories under the title of “Shopgirl Diaries” to complain about annoying customers and generalized retail-induced woe. I didn’t invent the “Shopgirl” moniker—Steve Martin wrote a novella titled Shopgirl in 2000 and then starred in a movie based on the book, so maybe he did—but I use it sarcastically every day when customers ask me if I’m the owner of the shop I work in, answering, “No, just the shop girl.” They almost always respond with some version, “Not just!” (The other day a man said, “We love a shopgirl,” and I appreciated the deviation from the norm.)

Anyway, I was writing about my shopgirl experiences in hopes that they could maybe be a book or a long-form essay, a-la David Sedaris’s SantaLand Diaries, when I bought and started reading Beach’s book. Her shopgirl essay is called “How Can I Help You?” and it describes a shopgirl experience so close to my own that I actually audibly gasped a few times while reading it behind the counter of the shop where I currently work.

The majority of the essay takes place in a stationery store, and my first shopgirl job was at a stationery store. I too assisted helpless townspeople in finding the right birthday or sympathy card or told them about the history of a brand of pencils. “I knew the job was mine if I wanted it,” Beach writes of her interview at the stationery store. This has been the prevailing feeling at every interview for every store I’ve worked at. Something about us, me and Beach, projects a sort of calm capability, I guess. “With gratitude and despair, I took the job,” she says, and that is precisely it.

Retail is no one’s passion. I promise you with 100% certainty that every single shopgirl or boy or gender-non-conforming person you’ve ever interacted with would rather be elsewhere, doing something a little more stimulating. We are there because, alas, living costs money. It can become a passion if there’s a ladder one can climb to a position more interesting than lowly sales associate, but that is usually not the case in small shops like the ones Beach and I work(ed) in. I was one of three employees at the stationery store and that’s the most coworkers I’ve ever had. A couple of times it’s been just me. So, yeah. No ladder.

Retail is the day job that creative people who can’t stand to be behind a desk all day find themselves in. It’s also better than waiting tables because at least you’re not sweaty and covered in crumbs at the end of the day (usually). The hours are mostly daytime, which is why you see so many middle-aged women working as sales associates, so they can pick their kids up from school in the afternoons. “There was no upward mobility, only a paycheck and a counter to lean on until your real life started,” Beach writes. Most of us who work in retail at this scale don’t have benefits, or paid time off, or even sick days. It’s a clock-in, clock-out scenario. It’s monotonous and often requires a sort of self-erasure that deadens one’s soul, but at least you’re on your feet, problem-solving, communicating, looking at pretty things, rearranging those pretty things on a shelf, and just in general doing things that make you feel productive. For a while that’s fun. Affirming, even. Rewarding. For a while.

I’ve been working retail in the Old Port neighborhood of Portland, Maine for *pause for finger counting* six-ish years. Within those years I earned both a BFA and an MFA, then did a brief stint living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I moved ten hours across the country because I had two degrees for reading and writing books and yet I was working retail five, sometimes six days a week and it made me want to die. I felt like a failure when I moved back to Portland not because I didn’t make it in Pittsburgh, but because I was right back behind that cash register again. Actually, before moving back to Maine, I almost took a job at a stationery store in Pittsburgh. Imagine how bleak that would have been.

“The longer I stayed a shopgirl, the harder it became to pretend that the job wasn’t who I was.”

Now I’m lucky enough to have a flexible schedule. I work in the shop a handful of days a week and the rest of the time I write, but the more I try to make a living as a writer, which so often makes me doubt myself and my own abilities, the more I feel like a shopgirl because I’m good at being a shopgirl. I know it, my customers know it, my boss knows it. I don’t question it beyond the inevitable few moments a month when a customer interaction or inventory miscalculation makes me feel like a total ninny. I can run a small store entirely by myself with my eyes closed. I am salesperson, cash register, merchandiser, incoming and outgoing shipments manager, back stock organizer, spider and fly killer, et cetera. If it could just be all of that, maybe I wouldn’t hate it so much.

But “When your job is to welcome everyone who walks through the front doors, it can be hard to know how to push back on customers, when to let your personal security gate lower over your face. The problem is, creeps love shopgirls. We’re sitting ducks, eye candy, a captive audience,” Beach writes. I have somehow been fortunate enough to not be the victim of anyone I would call creepy (Actually, recently a man said “You don’t have to stand at attention, relax” when I was standing behind the counter as his wife shopped, and he laughed like I would be grateful. “Oh, this is just how I stand,” I said. Does that count?), but I have the misfortune of playing the role of captive audience on a regular basis. It always starts as something small, like, “What a lovely store. Do you think these prints would make good groomsmen gifts for my son’s wedding?” and then turns into an elaborate story about their son’s fiancé and how obsessed she is with homesteading and how her son was never so picky before he met her but now he insists that he wants to give his groomsmen “monoculars” as a gift and won’t listen to reason.

These customers know nothing about me—don’t even know my name—but I know what they do for work and what neighborhood they live in and what scents their mother-in-law likes. Maybe I sound pessimistic, and of course, there are some customers who are genuinely kind and who do acknowledge me as more than just the conduit to their consumerism, but the mostly one-sided interactions fill me with disdain for people whom I might otherwise find to be perfectly lovely. If the woman who comes in every couple of months looking for new art for her therapy office met up with me for coffee and we had the chance to talk, maybe she would be interested in my life. Instead, I’m what stands between her and returning yet another print that she bought and then decided didn’t look good over her armchair even though I told her we only accept returns for store credit. So she takes the store credit and comes back the next month for another print, and the process repeats itself over again until one of us dies or I quit.

“Why did all these people need my help?” Beach writes. Why can’t you just buy your print and hang it up over the armchair even if it slightly clashes with the pillow? I want to ask her. Do you enjoy doing this, coming here every month and agonizing over which landscape will make your therapy patients the most comfortable? Why are you so indecisive? Do you even like art? Also are you accepting new patients?

“A shopgirl becomes useless when she hates the customers for shopping.” Indeed. And so I am mostly useless. When Beach felt this way she left her stationery store for greener pastures, as I did mine. But I am still a shopgirl, just at a home goods store now, and she’s making a living as a writer like I wish I could. It feels a little like she stole my timeline—like she found it before I could.

She returned to her old haunt only after one of the owners died. She reunited with her former coworkers, with the counter she leaned on and the pencils she sharpened, and she was reminded of what she used to find fulfilling about being a shopgirl.

“Back when I gave my two weeks, it seemed that working at Shorthand made my life as small as our smallest product,” she reflects. Shorthand is the name of her stationery store, which funnily enough made notebooks that we carried in my stationery store. “It became overwhelming, to feel so trivial and then be faced with the bigness of our customers’ needs.” That’s the thing: their needs seem big but they’re actually minuscule in the grand scheme of things, and our livelihood depends on meeting their needs, so that makes us feel small. Multiple wars are being waged on the other side of the world, and here I am selling candles. It’s like staring at the horizon line where the ocean meets the sky, and realizing that you could just walk into the sea and be swallowed up. Or it’s like looking at the Milky Way and realizing that you’re nothing more than a bunch of flesh and brains on a spinning rock in space.

Or as Beach puts it, “Joel was gone,” Joel was the owner who died, “How could a five-dollar card solve this problem? The answer to that, as always, is above my pay grade,” because most things are above the pay grade of a shopgirl, and most of the time that is a comfort. Most of the time, feeling small in the face of bigness is a comfort. Because “If you had been there that night, in the room that Joel and Rosanna built together, you would have understood what it means to quietly ask a stranger, ‘How can I help you?’ and then actually be able to do it.”

Sometimes, when the bigness is too much for me, helping someone pick out a candle is enough.

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