images/Todd Fowler, Ginny (ginnerobot), Karolina Grabowska, David Stewart (homagets.com), Paul VanDerWerf
A decade has gone by since I graduated from Portland High and I’ve spent most of those years trying to make a living as a shopgirl. My days are filled with candles, lotions, towels, greeting cards and small talk about the weather. It isn’t difficult work, at least intellectually, but it poses emotional challenges — like not screaming every time some visitor asks, “Is it always this cold in Maine?” — as well as physical ones, like fitting eight boxes’ worth of vases into a six-by-six-foot backroom already overflowing with vases, then breaking down the boxes, then figuring out what to do with them and the rest of the broken-down boxes threatening to flood the sales floor because the building doesn’t have a dumpster.
Retail at the boutique level is suited for people who enjoy vacuous banter and repetitive, menial tasks, the completion of which at least provides some satisfaction at the end of the day. It’s for people who can cheerily stand and smile into the middle distance for hours at a stretch. I am not one of those people, but there is something about me, I’ve been told, that makes customers feel comfortable rather than suffocated, and it is this disposition that achieves sales.
Is it interesting or inspiring work? No. Do I feel satisfied at the end of each day? I suppose so, but most of the time I also feel sad. Is this it? I think to myself as I break down another box. Is this what I am fated to do with my one “wild and precious life”?
Wild and precious or not, modern life requires money, so I am a shopgirl. I’ve attempted other jobs — serving beer and coffee, tending to people’s children — but found them entirely too sweaty. Retail is the one that stuck. I blinked, and when I opened my eyes five years had passed.
I’ve run several boutique shops by now, all in Portland’s Old Port, all owned by locals, and none larger than a two-car garage. I’ve never worked at a store with more than a handful of employees, and twice I’ve been the only employee.
The shop I work at now employs two other people, but for a long time it was just me and the owner. A lot of locals still recognize me from when I worked there five days a week. So when I’m at the shop, I’m the face of the shop, and according to the assumptions of most customers, the owner of the shop. I get asked some version of Are you the owner? almost every shift, usually after the customer has showered me with compliments about the merchandise, the way it’s displayed, the way sunlight streams through the windows and fills the sales floor, and so on.
“No, just the shopgirl,” I always answer, and every single one of them responds, “Not just!” — as if being a shopgirl is equally important to the goodness of the world as being, say, a nurse, or a teacher, or a mail carrier.
They want me to love my job. They need me to love it, actually. If I seem unhappy or too vacant, they won’t want to buy my forty-dollar candles. I get it. It’s a fantasy about small business that Portland’s locals and tourists alike hold dear: workers in the bars and restaurants and shops are toiling not simply for basic survival, but because they’re passionate about their industry. That could be true for some retail and hospitality workers who have perks like health insurance or opportunities for advancement, but it’s not true for shopgirls like me.
The highest position those in my position can aspire to is manager — which, again, often entails “managing” only yourself. It’s sometimes, but not always, a salaried job, but such salaries aren’t enough for a single person to sustain a working-class existence in Portland, which is why I currently live with my parents.
Management-level jobs in corporate retail have some advantages (like paid time off and sick days), but also some distinct disadvantages. Take, for example, a shopgirl friend of mine. We met while she was working at a corporate clothing store, one of those chains whose presence on the peninsula has long been a local lament. This was the kind of business that has keyholder positions (everyone who works in a boutique has a key to the front door), and where you can’t leave for lunch before someone checks your bag for stolen merchandise.
By comparison, I don’t get a lunch break. I’m expected to find the time to eat my homemade sandwich between other tasks. I usually have my meal beside the pile of packing peanuts under the video monitor, so I can see when someone comes in. If I didn’t pack a sandwich and have to go buy one, I hang a “Be right back!” sign in the window and lock the door behind me. But no one, of course, checks my bag or reminds me to clock out and clock back in when I return. There is no clocking. I keep track of my hours on a Post-it note.
My shopgirl friend was a manager at the corporate chain, so she had benefits, including health insurance. But she was unexpectedly laid off when her “position was eliminated” within the company, whatever that means. The only time I’ve seen someone fired from one of my shops was when a girl who came on to help during the holidays forgot to unlock the door one morning.
Corporate retail can become a career. You see a lot of middle-aged women working the register at chain stores, because at the corporate management level, the hours are regular and the pay and benefits are sufficient to maintain a tolerable work/life balance.
Becoming the manager of an indie shop doesn’t promise the same stability. You’ve landed the highest position you can hold in the company, and that job still requires working weekends and finding (or keeping) a spouse with employer-provided health insurance you can piggyback upon. The only alternative is to open your own shop, which is how most boutiques I’ve worked in were born: shopgirls striking out on their own. In that case, you won’t be able to pay yourself for the first five years (if you’re lucky enough to last that long), and you’ll go into debt paying your shopgirls, but at least you can make your own hours.
My shopgirl friend now manages a locally owned boutique much like the one where I work. She’s the only employee there, other than me, but I’m there temporarily, helping on weekends until they find someone else, so my friend doesn’t have to run the store alone for ten hours straight without any mandated breaks. Ten-hour solo shifts don’t happen in corporate retail, partly because who knows what mischief a keyholder could muster with all that time alone, and also simply because the stores are bigger. But across boardroom conference tables and mom-and-pop’s kitchen table, the refrain is the same: “It’s so hard to find ‘good help’ these days.”
•••
I’m not a shopgirl because I love it. If this makes your shopping experience less enjoyable, so be it, but I can confidently say that no one in my position does this job because they love the work. Retail is the “career” many creative people choose so they don’t have to sit at a desk all day, like we just did during a dozen or more years in school.
I have a second job, freelance writer, that likewise won’t cover rent, offers little chance for advancement and no benefits. But writing provides the emotional and creative fulfillment that retail never will. Still, I’m grateful that, for a few days a week, I’m earning money doing things that demand less brain power than writing does. It’s monotonous labor and often requires a degree of self-erasure that makes me question my life choices, but at least I’m on my feet, problem-solving, communicating, looking at pretty things, arranging and rearranging those pretty things on shelves. I can get out of my head for a while.
That does not mean helping you pick out a gift for your mother-in-law brings me joy, or even satisfaction, especially when you tell me her entire life story (as if that will help me determine which style of tea towel she’ll hate least) without even asking my name. These one-sided encounters fill me with disdain for people I might otherwise consider perfectly lovely. It always starts with a kind, if inane, observation like, “What a nice store,” followed by something like, “Do you think these blankets would make good groomsmen gifts for my son’s wedding?” And then they’re off on the elaborate tale about their son’s fiancé, how obsessed she is with homesteading, how this son was never so picky before he met her, but now insists he wants to give his groomsmen “monoculars” and is refusing to listen to reason.
“You must love working here, being around all this beautiful stuff all day,” people say to me.
“It doesn’t suck,” I respond. Because, of course, it could be worse — in the grand scheme of things, I am extremely privileged. But really, I respond that way because my job is to be nice to customers.
Being nice to customers is especially challenging in places like the Old Port, where most of the shoppers are tourists. Maine was Vacationland long before I started selling its candles and craftwork, but I grew up in Portland and have witnessed firsthand the explosive, unprecedented growth of the tourism trade here this century, as people all over the world discover our wondrous culinary culture.
When I was a student at Portland High, the Old Port was our cafeteria and playground. My friends and I hung out at Bard Coffee or Bull Moose (R.I.P.) after school and saw movies at The Nickelodeon. There were tourists in the summer, but if you didn’t venture below Middle Street you were unlikely to encounter them in great numbers. Other than being “Old” and having a lot of bars we couldn’t go in, the Old Port wasn’t much different to us than the rest of the city.
These days I go to the Old Port to work, drink or shop, and there are always tourists, on both sides of Middle. Tourist season doesn’t end anymore, it just slows down in January and February. We could probably close shop for the first couple months of the year and the difference in profit would be minuscule. But we don’t.
The tourists who enter the Old Port shops I’ve worked in think of me as their concierge to the city. They expect me to appraise their interests and attributes on the spot, then deliver personalized recommendations as to where they should dine, drink, or otherwise experience Maine’s unique charms. “How far of a walk to the lighthouse?” they ask, or “Which way to the ocean?” They always want “a quick lunch” or “just a sandwich” or “somewhere kid-friendly.”
I really can’t help them with that last one, but I have my list of standbys (which will remain nameless; I’m not here to make enemies) that I offer when they want a quick bite, because I know they don’t want to be adventurous. Sure, they traveled all the way here because they heard about all the interesting restaurants and breweries and distilleries and dispensaries, but really, by their own admission, at this very moment, they just want a sandwich, a burger, something comforting and normal, preferably for under $15. When I ask them where they’ve been so far, or where they have reservations for dinner, they all reply with some combination of “Eventide,” “Scales,” “Fore Street” or “Duckfat.” Those are all great places, but they barely scratch the surface of Portland’s deep and diverse food community.
If customers seem young or cool or make a face when I recite my usual list, I’ll reveal to them that pretty much all the bars around here have good food and there’s fun to be had in other parts of town, too. “Get the meatballs up the street at Hunt and Alpine,” I’ll say. “Skip the wait at Duckfat on Middle and go to their Frites Shack in front of Oxbow Brewing, then drink and eat your way down Washington Ave. and into ‘Yeast’ Bayside.” “Walk up to The Jewel Box on Congress for a cocktail and check out some of the shops along the way.” “Stop at Bunker for a pilsner on your way to the airport.” If they want a nice dinner for which they don’t need a reservation, I tell them to go to Isa, the bistro in Bayside, and get the fennel salad with a side of fries (the secret best fries in town), or I’ll unveil another hidden gem.
Part of me feels guilty giving these places away (I don’t want them to get overrun and ruined), but another part of me, the part that grew up dutifully doing the Art Walk every month and going to Flatbread for every special occasion, wants these strangers to see more of Portland, especially where it’s rough-around-the-edges. They’ll experience aspects of the city that can make it hard to call home, but also those that make Portland a place that never lets me down — if I just wait around long enough to see what happens next.
Most of them stay in the Old Port, though. One could argue that in the last quarter of the 20th century, when a host of colorful characters — shopkeepers, craftspeople, brewers, chefs, musicians, artists, even real estate developers — brought this commercial district to life while downtown Congress Street withered, the Old Port was the best representation of Portland’s distinct culture and tenacious spirit.
Not anymore. Now the Old Port is the shiny, faux-nostalgic part of town where even seagulls aren’t welcome to roost. For example, five years ago, when I started working at a stationery store on Exchange Street, many tourists, drawn like moths to The Holy Donut a few doors down, would wander into our shop. With some regularity, everyone in the store would freeze, stop chatting and perk up their ears, listening to a strange trilling outside that slowly got louder, then softer as its source drifted by.
“Oh, that’s just The Whistler,” I’d tell them. “He’s a legend.” And they’d look at me like I was just too charming to believe.
Locals didn’t always find The Whistler’s tuneless tic charming, but we considered him part of the neighborhood. These days it seems such misfits aren’t allowed in the Old Port. They’re pushed to the outskirts to sleep in a tent under the bridge, then pushed out of there into whatever’s beyond the outskirts.
This is the part where I’m supposed to complain about gentrification, but what do I say when I’m part of the problem? I grew up off the peninsula, in the suburbs. My parents aren’t from Maine — they’re former Manhattan theater people who moved to Portland in the ’80s because it offered the urban lifestyle they were accustomed to, but you could drive a car. I think of myself more as a Portlander than a Mainer. I don’t think I went north of Freeport before I was 16.
I’m 28 years old now. I know the Old Port doesn’t look much like it did 50 years ago, when gentrification started displacing fishermen and processors on the waterfront and then crept ashore block by block. But it still looks pretty much like it did when I was in high school. A lot of locals point to the cancellation of the Old Port Festival as the beginning of the end, but I was too young to have fully enjoyed the party. It was just a crowd and some fried dough to underage me, and when I started working as a shopgirl I dreaded the festival, knowing I’d have no business all day except drunks taking a break from the sun.
Most of the gentrification happening in Portland, and the Old Port especially, can be blamed on tourism. I work in that industry. I guess that makes me a gentrifier.
But it also makes me one of the district’s fiercest defenders. I still get a little misty when I walk to work and see a tiny sliver of ocean peeking through the buildings. I look forward to the holiday lights going up every December. When I see the rare, brave seagull emerge from a trash can with a whole slice of pizza in its mouth, I applaud.
I can’t do anything about gentrification. The best I can do is be a representative of the version of Maine I know and love, a place that requires work and doesn’t always love you back. Staying anyway is what makes you a Mainer.
•••
Years as a shopgirl have shown me the mythical, mystical place Maine is in the minds of most Americans: a foggy, densely wooded realm where lumberjacks whittle their eating utensils and sailors drink until they’re pickled. Portland, in this imaginary Maine, looks a lot like Bar Harbor. It’s a storybook village of butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers. The artisans of the gas-lamp-lit Old Port (which is, effectively, the entire city) hibernate between Christmas and the Spring Equinox. Such is the timeless quality of this enchanted burgh that a visitor may spy horse-drawn carriages bumping down cobblestone streets, rustic loaves baking in brick ovens, ales brewing in giant copper vats!
“How do I get to the old part of town with the cobblestones?” a customer once asked me, having just trod upon said stones to get to our front door.
I want to ask these people: “What were you expecting, Sturbridge Village?” But remember, my job is to be nice to them. So I just smile and shrug, and they get distracted by a tea towel or a candle. Then they say the magic words: “I assume everything’s made locally.”
Not, “Is everything made locally?” Not, “Do you have any locally made products?” — which we do, and which I would happily allow them to purchase. No, they assume everything’s made here.
Why must they do this? Would they walk into a store in any other part of town, or any other part of Maine, or any other United State, and make the same assumption about all the items for sale?
There’s work on the walls of my shop by numerous local artists, and second only to “Are you the owner?” comes “Are you the artist?” “God, no,” I answer, and they always laugh at that one. Do they seriously think I run this store full of lotions and linens and paint landscapes on the side?
Sometimes I fantasize about answering, “Yes, everything is locally made,” or, “Yes, I am the artist. Aren’t I talented?” Frankly, I lie about something every shift just to get by, but harmless stuff, like, “Yes, I have read that book about manifestation, and I love it. I manifested this job!” It’s not like I’m going to sell a painting to a tourist anyway, no matter who painted it. They’re due back on the cruise ship in less than three hours, and what are they gonna do, lug this masterpiece with them through the crowd at Highroller Lobster Co.?
Even when tourists do want to buy something locally made, they often look at the price and wince. “Fifty dollars for one mug? Seriously?” a visitor once asked me.
“They’re handmade,” I offered in response.
“What do you mean, ‘handmade’?” she exclaimed. “They all look the same!”
“Well, yes,” I replied. “She’s very good at making mugs.”
The boldest denizens of those inland highway towns with their one Walmart and two dollar stores will look at the price of something and ask, “Can you do better than that?” Instead of saying, “No, of course not, this isn’t a swap meet,” I just say, “I’m sorry, our prices are firm.” One guy once asked if I could price-match with Amazon. The book he wanted was $12, but Amazon had it for $10.
I think they assume I sleep there, on a cot in the backroom, and dream of little else besides shop business, like how children assume their teachers live at school. One of these days I’m going to unload on one of them: I’m not the owner. I’m not the artist. I’ll never meet most of the very talented people who made all this stuff. Honestly, some of it was made in China, but you don’t want to know that. You’d prefer to believe my third cousin sewed that blanket by the woodstove in our family’s cabin, which has been passed down for generations. You want everything to be locally made, by hand, but you don’t want to pay for craftsmanship. Guess what: making stuff by hand is more expensive. The maker needs to make money, the store needs to make money, I need to make money. That’s how this economy works. Buy the mug or don’t and get out.
I even get locals who ask me if something is made in Maine, and when I say no and they look disappointed, I say, “But I am!” And then I watch them realize how stupid they are, because they’ve forgotten that shopping local means coming to me instead of Target. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t love that table runner from Lithuania. We love it too — that’s why we’re selling it. Please buy it. We need the money.
•••
In a tiny shopping district like the Old Port, we shopgirls all know each other. It’s an insular, sometimes incestuous (in the sense of sharing employees and, often, products) community. And as in all small social groups, there’s gossip. So yes, just like Santa, we know who you are (some of you tell us so much about yourselves), and we talk about you when you’re not around, so be nice!
Just kidding — kinda. The gossip among shopgirls is mostly harmless. We do confide in each other about annoying customers, about our aches and pains and how we can’t remember the last time we went to brunch. We don’t necessarily think of each other as competition. When a customer is looking for something my shop doesn’t have, I send them to another local boutique that stocks it, and I get a lot of customers who tell me another shopgirl sent them my way. We’re all small fish in the same small pond.
But some store owners don’t see it that way. They think this town ain’t big enough for all of us. There are certain tactics these stores employ that give them a bad reputation among fellow shopkeepers and shopgirls. For example, at the aforementioned stationery store, they took the exclusivity clause in the deals they had with some brands very seriously and sent cease-and-desist letters to retailers that sold those brands’ products, but would often pick up merch by brands other local stores carried, not caring whether a similar exclusivity arrangement existed there.
Most boutique shops order a variety of products from any given brand and only a handful of each. But some buyers place big orders for one or two products, knowing they’ll sell through them very slowly, just so the brand will stay loyal to them and not sell to other shops in the area. You might go to one of these product-hoarding shops looking for said products and never find them, or discover a stash buried in the back of a display, because selling the stuff is less important to the owner than keeping the brand off competitors’ shelves.
Also, every shopgirl worth her salt knows when she’s being scoped out; when managers or longtime shopgirls walk in and put on a show of browsing, but they really just want to see what you’re selling and for how much — either so they can sell the same products, stop selling those products, undercut your price or send one of those cease-and-desists.
For example, there’s a Maine chef, who shall remain nameless here, who recently attained nationwide fame. Since then, every other tourist who walks into my shop has bought her cookbook and asked me if I’ve been up to her rural restaurant (I have not), which has its own gift shop. I have, however, heard that she and “her people” have been, shall we say, less than warm in their business dealings with those laboring beneath their lofty level. Now I definitely won’t be going to her restaurant.
A few weeks ago, three women came into the shop on a sleepy Tuesday afternoon and I instantly knew they were shopgirls. I’ve learned to recognize the way we move through retail spaces. When shopgirls pick something up, they put it back neatly, front-facing. If they want to buy something, they ask if I have some in the back, so I don’t have to restock the sales floor. They’ll ask detailed questions about products and brands that reveal they know more than the average customer. They make a point of looking me in the eye and smiling. They do not, ever, come in five minutes before closing. (Stop doing that. Seriously.)
But I’ve also learned to recognize enemy shopgirls. These are the ones who avoid my gaze and do a swift lap around the store, their eyes glancing over the products like they’ve seen it all before. They often hold their hands behind their back like grandfathers walking through art museums. They never, ever buy anything.
The three women who showed up that Tuesday were enemy shopgirls, and they were paying particularly close attention to the Chef Who Shall Not Be Named’s book. After greeting them and giving them a few minutes to browse, I tried to wear them down.
“Are you ladies visiting or are you local?” I asked while straightening some candles on a table nearby. This is the question I use to determine how to talk to such people — whether I can be real or if I have to perform.
“We’re just down from upstate for the day,” one of them said without meeting my eye. The other two scurried to another corner of the store. So, I thought, a performance it shall be.
“Oh, fun! Girls’ day!” I said, turning the naivete higher than its normal setting. “Have you been to [insert name of famous chef’s restaurant]?”
“Mhmm,” was the sound the shopgirl still hovering over the cookbooks made, straightening up, suddenly ready to speak. “We actually work there, in the market,” and with this she gestured to her friends, who nodded as if participating in the conversation from afar. I clocked the use of the word market, as opposed to shop or store — a classic tactic of shop folk trying to make their store sound classy.
“Oh, wow, that’s so cool!” I gushed. “We get so many people coming in asking about you guys. They think it’s so charming, your little restaurant in the middle of nowhere!”
That last bit got her. She looked me dead in the face and gave me that grimace you give to people taking up too much of the sidewalk.
“Well, let me know if you have any questions,” I said, then returned to my post behind the register.
“Has business been good,” she said as she followed at my heels, her voice failing to rise to indicate a question.
“You know how it is, tourist season never ends anymore!” I cheerily, faux-wearily replied, and she grimaced again like she hated my guts. By now the other two had rejoined her and they were all huddled around a display of landscape paintings by a local artist, whispering about the prices. I normally keep the background music fairly loud, since it’s a small store and I don’t want customers to think I’m eavesdropping. This time, I hit pause.
“Oops! Sorry, the Wi-Fi’s acting up again,” I lied again, pretending to click around on the iPad. They hurried toward the exit. “Thanks for stopping in! Good chatting with you!” I shouted as they left without saying goodbye, the door slamming shut behind them.
It doesn’t make me feel good, antagonizing and being antagonized by fully grown women. We’re not curing cancer, after all.
•••
I still shop at local stores whose owners hoard products or send threatening legal letters, because each shop’s survival depends on the success of the whole shopping district. Plus, I know the shopgirls there and I know it’s not their fault. All independent businesses are manifestations of the owner’s peculiar personality.
Remember, this is a job with no HR and no higher-ups beyond the proprietor. A shopgirl’s success and workday well-being depend, therefore, entirely on her relationship with the owner. In this regard, I have mostly been lucky. Mostly.
I left the stationery store on Exchange Street to work as the manager (and sole employee) of a store on Fore Street selling locally made handbags (it’s since moved out of the Old Port). This brand was like Sea Bags, in that the products were made from fishing equipment. It was not Sea Bags, but that didn’t stop every other customer from asking, “Are these the bags made from sails?”
The owner of the store started sewing and selling the bags herself out of a hole-in-the-wall in the Knightville neighborhood of South Portland, then gradually gained recognition and became a local celebrity of sorts. I’d had one of her wallets for several years and was excited to finally be selling something locally made, but otherwise I knew little about her or what to expect.
I’ll cut to the chase: she was the worst person I’ve ever had the dissatisfaction to work for, and my brief employment there constituted some of the unhappiest months of my life.
I started the job in the fall of 2019, and even during the height of the Christmas shopping season I spent most of my days there utterly alone. So few customers walked in that one time a man fell asleep on the stoop, leaning against our front door, and napped uninterrupted for several hours before I noticed and shooed him away.
I saw very little of the owner, but some mornings I came into work to discover the sales floor had been entirely remerchandised overnight. The first time this happened, there was a note left on the register that read, “I want it to look like a showroom!”
I would clock in at 10:50 a.m. on the app she’d downloaded to track my hours, sweep the floor and restock anything that had been miraculously sold the day before, then open the door to the public at 11. She texted me one morning: “Please don’t clock in before the store opens.” She just wanted to pay me for business hours, excluding the time I was there before opening and after closing to clean her store or make sure there were quarters in the cash drawer. Hell, why clock in at all?
I never found out what a real showroom looked like to her, because COVID hit and I was furloughed. “I think we should close until this blows over,” was the only communication I got. That, and the time I was so desperate for toilet paper during those early days of lockdown that I texted her to ask if I could take some from the shop, which had at least a six-month supply. “I’ll Venmo you for it,” I assured her.
“You can take two rolls as long as you promise to replenish them when we reopen,” she replied. Remember, I was the only employee, so I would be replenishing them for myself.
As I filed for unemployment and the world burned around me, I heard nothing from my boss. Then the Black Lives Matter protests happened downtown, and when I drove by the store one day I noticed she’d boarded up the windows. That seems like an overreaction, I thought. When I got home I went to the brand’s Instagram profile and, under the “Following” tab, searched for the word “Trump.” When I saw the result, I decided I would not be working for her anymore.
But before I could quit, she e-mailed me asking if I could start work again in the coming weeks, as some businesses in the Old Port were reopening. In addition to our fundamental moral and political differences, it felt too soon to be working a public-facing job. I was still worried about going to the grocery store and spreading the virus to my 67-year-old parents, one of whom had COPD. And, with nothing else to do for so many months, I’d applied to grad school and got in. I explained my concerns to her and said I didn’t think I could sustain a full-time job and a graduate school course load, and humbly cut ties.
“Wow, I’m surprised to hear this so close to businesses opening up again,” she responded via e-mail. “Good luck to you.”
I started looking for part-time work and continued to file for employment, having reported that I’d been offered work at my previous job, but had declined. Then I received an e-mail from the Department of Labor stating that my previous employer told them I’d quit without giving her a reason why.
“But that’s not true. I explained my situation to her. I have the e-mail,” I told a DOL worker over the phone.
“Can you send me that e-mail?” she asked. I did, and they agreed I’d given ample reason to reject my previous boss’ offer. Almost a year later, my current employer sent me a DM on Instagram, asking if I wanted a job.
Despite all my complaining, this is a job that inspires — if not passion, then loyalty. Most of the women I have worked for and with have become my role models and my friends. I have witnessed their triumphs and their tragedies, and they mine.
My current boss is more than just an employer — we go to movies together and send memes back and forth; she buys me bottles of gin for every birthday and special occasion (she bought me one to celebrate the publication of this essay) — and, most importantly, I am more to her than just an employee, just a warm body who makes her money. I’m not saying we’re family, because that’s a word corporate managers twist to exploit their workers, but we are something special: two adults who run a business together, respectfully, and outside of that business we still respect each other. She can’t offer me health insurance, paid time off or a 401(k), but she respects me as a human being. She knows this is not my passion and doesn’t hold that against me. She tells me I’m good at it anyway. She will have a job for me as long as I need one, and I will work for her as long as she needs me.
When neither of us needs the other for work anymore, I’ll still shop at her store. And I’ll never complain about the prices.
Read more of Emma Chance’s writing at The Overshare via emmachance.substack.com.
