I’m watching Telemarketers and it’s reminding me of shady jobs I’ve had in the past.
I worked for Rent-a-Center doing collections. It’s a place that preys on the poorest people in America, getting them to pay extortionate interest on rent to own furniture, appliances and electronics. We had customers who would end up paying thousands of dollars on a couch that wasn’t even new when they got it. Even worse was people who would hit hard times and get their stuff repoed and end up with nothing to show for thousands of dollars in payments.
My job was to learn when these customers got paid, or when they got their disability or welfare check and hound them over the phone or in person. If they didn’t pay, I’d be sent out to knock on their doors. If that failed I’d be sent to repo it.
It was a soul crushing job. I’ve had shit jobs, but I’d never had a job that made me feel like I was doing harm to people before. Some of my coworkers would deal with this by demonizing the customers, acting like they were all deadbeats who deserved to get fleeced. Others would blame the customers, saying shit like, ‘Anyone stupid enough to buy here was going to get ripped off by someone, and it might as well be us’.
I couldn’t do that, so I started getting fucked up at work like Pat Pespis. I started pretending to do my job, dialing the number and then hitting the flash button and faking the calls. I’d get sent on a repo and my coworker and I would go out to eat or to the mall and pretend they wouldn’t answer the door. I expected my collection stats would fall low enough that I’d eventually be fired, but they barely moved at all. It turned out that hounding people to pay a bill wasn’t actually doing much.
Working retail always made me feel like a scumbag when we were forced by the boss to upsell.
The worst was working in pet shops, dealing with living creatures as commodities was pretty terrible.
The fish and live pet food are treated the worst. I don’t want to talk about it any more than that.
I remember working a job that was technically retail, although that was only a small part of it. I fortunately had plenty of time without any bosses breathing down my neck, so I was constantly telling people “Don’t buy this, it’s so overpriced it should be illegal” and “this does not do what it says it does” and “you should probably google this before trying it” and “I have been told I have to say x” lmao
When I worked food service, unless my boss was staring down my shoulder I would auto-apply any coupons that made things cheaper
I did this for three years. In our case the fish did okay (I became a big fish guy and did tons of research) but we had many animals who nobody was ever going to buy and it was pretty shitty for them. We had tegus and monitors with very nasty temperament who were neglected. Then there’s the whole thing with the “feeder” mice / goldfish / crickets.
It had its moments though. It was fun to walk around the store with a mouse in my shirt pocket or a tarantula on my shoulder and freak out the customers.