I was lamenting to a friend recently that I don’t have a scooter here at my home in California. I have one at my parents house in texas and I scoot the shit out of it when im there. I should probably get one for here too. I told him how I “used to sell them like [name of mututual friend]’s dick at [name of place that I am censoring]” back when i was a “Toyologist” at Toys R’ Us (my first “real” job) and it reminded me that that job has not been covered on Richardland.
A little over a decade ago I was hired by a company that has since gone out of business (probably due to losing me as an employee) that helped brands with marketing and sales, called TMG Solutions. They hired me as a “Toyologist” in various Toys R Us stores that needed the help every weekend and needless to say: I kicked ass at it.
Will perform in-store toy demonstrations each weekend in Toys “R” Us store…. Will be standing in a staging area in the front of the store, greeting the guests and showing the toy to the children, inviting them to participate in the demonstration!
Must be able to close the sale also!
TMG will supply red ‘Toyologist’ apron!”
TMG/Channel Solutions Group
I was assigned a product and then set up a display in the front of the store and just had to greet every customer as I “demo’d” (played with) the product and answered questions/forcibly put one in their cart. At the end of the shift I did inventory again put away my display, then filled out survey and got the store manager to sign the survey. Then put the survey information into the computer web site then mailed the original form.
It was there that I re-ignited my love of scooters. I was supposed to just demo them at the front of the store but on slow days id scoot around and poach shoppers. some mom would be in the Barbie aisle to get a dress for her 4 year old daughter and BAM – fore she know it – bitch is checkin out with a mothafkkn scooter.
It was awesome. $11 an hour, awesome [which was more money 11 years ago than it is now]. for saying hi to people, playing with kids and playing with toys. I was the youngest one they had. they’d notify the store to order extra shipments of that weekends demo toy for the times I was gonna be there, I was so hott.
The lady who hired me and who was really awesome got promoted for making such great decisions as adding me and her replacement was a super bitch who didnt like that I was so young, smart, charming and kick-ass at my job. One of my greatest regrets in life is that I do not remember the name of the woman who was so nice and competent (and called me “Frank” as a running gag) but I DO remember her replacement who was a snotty irritable woman (named Rosanna Trivelino). It was from that point on that I took care to reallocate the storage in my brain to increase the memory-quota for positive occurrences and good people and to decrease the folder capacities for the negative and crappy people.
But that Rosanna woman was my first and last experience with a bad boss. In addition to being snippy on the phone, she started looking for excuses to fire me because…I was too awesome at the job and was making everyone else look bad (including her, since only 1 member of her team was doing gangbusters, so rather than make everyone else step up their game – she preferred to just get rid of me).
It was always an annoying challenge when she’d try to handicap me by assigning me shitty toys like hula hoops with water in them or “The Twirlin Whirlin Garden” (a baby toy that you can literally do nothing but press the button to demonstrate how the plants spin in a circle…)
(I climbed inside the demo one slightly less)
Unfortch for that ho, I sold more hula hoops & shitty spinny plastic gardens than the whoorld had evhar seeeennnnnnn.
& yet, she promoted one of the guys i trained & outperformed every week instead of me, anyway. betch.
Didn’t matter in the long run. It was still a good time and 100% of the money I earned from it went towards buying my first computer, as the website based business I had recently started was outgrowing the limitations of my parents desktop.
That computer allowed me to expand my growth and build something wonderful that the government could later take credit for.
All thanks to playing with toys as a job for awhile.
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