Before the real work begins

Hi, welcome. Name’s Jonah. You can call me Onah, that’s my nickname, does that make sense? Not really, but no one cares what I think. It’s casual, and that’s what we are here: casual. Speaking of cool and casual, one of the things you’ll be doing here at Mickey’s Thrift for Men is unrolling all the sleeves. In fact, at least for a little while, that’ll be all you do.

As you can see, most of our men’s shirts are plaid long-sleeve button-ups — I dunno why, that’s just the trend. No one pays me to figure out what causes trends, they pay me to follow them. Ostensibly, the other trend is that no matter what the weather is like, all guys have to roll up their sleeves. Why that is, I don’t know, I don’t ask those questions, that’s not my job. My job is to maintain a casual atmosphere in the store, which starts and ends with rolled-down sleeves.

Nowadays men shop more than they used to. If you asked me why that is, I’d tell you I honestly, truly don’t know. But it’s true, just look at this shop, it’s all men’s clothes, sometimes I dream in plaid.

What you’ll come to realize, standing in one place outside the dressing room for six hours at a time, is that most men will walk in with ten or eleven long-sleeve button-up shirts, roll up all of the sleeves, and then bring them back out, sleeves still rolled, and take only one or two.

VERY IMPORTANT: if a man walks into the dressing room with eleven shirts, and decides he’s going to buy just one of them, but only gives you nine shirts back, you still must roll down the sleeves of all ALL NINE shirts. This is non-negotiable, all sleeves when returned to their racks must be rolled down.

IF A MAN is spending a long time in the dressing room despite having only three shirts to try on, DO NOT RUSH him. I’ve seen a man take a single shirt into the dressing room and stay in there for over an hour. What he was doing in there, I don’t have an inkling, I don’t spend my time guessing as to what people do in the dressing room, but it’s not good business to rush people, unless, that is, you’re rolling down sleeves, in which case you need to hurry because that’s merchandise that could be on the racks.

On busy days you will be unrolling HUNDREDS OF SLEEVES in a single hour. This is going to seem hard at first, but I can assure you it gets easier. How unrolling hundreds of sleeves hour after hour gets easier, I just could not tell you, but Marsha has gotten very good at it and can roll down 4 sleeves at once, and I’m told she sometimes gets tips, which is another thing that’s not allowed here. We had to fire Marsha, hopefully you can learn from her mistakes.

Since you’re new, this is going to be something you’re asked to do often. As you can see here I have three shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Why don’t you try rolling them down?

Very funny. Like I’ve never heard that one before. If you plan on working here for a while, I’d rethink making that joke again. The amount of times I’ve asked someone to do something and they’ve said, “O, nah,” makes me sick to my stomach in an extremely real way. Now get to rolling down those sleeves. The midafternoon rush is gonna hit soon, and these men are going to be hankering hard to try on some shirts. You know what that means.