Never Learn

I once worked for a while at a company-owned store of an online alcohol retailer.

The main reason I chose that job was simple: I had never been exposed to what people like to call “new retail.” Compared to that, my previous job at a bookstore felt old to the point of being almost antique within the broader category of retail. Other reasons included—but were not limited to—the fact that I had some interest in alcohol. I thought that might count as an advantage. Though, if I’m being honest, the people with the real advantage were probably the alcoholics.

The first store manager I worked with struck me as almost comical. She had previously been a liquor promoter in a supermarket, yet knew nothing about alcohol.

She also had virtually no computer skills: she didn’t know how to delete a row in Microsoft Excel, didn’t know how to use “Save As” in Word, yet had to deal constantly with various documents sent down from headquarters. That’s how I ended up becoming her tutor.

She didn’t know the difference between Champagne and sparkling wine, didn’t know that whisky and cognac are not the same thing. When chatting with friends about work, I often found myself saying: My god, a liquor store manager—when customers asked about whisky, she would confidently point at a bottle of Martell Cordon Bleu and start talking.

But I never blamed her. From the day I joined the company to the day I left, no one ever provided even the slightest training related to alcohol. Not even reading materials.

She was, in fact, a good person. Short-tempered, yes, but always looking out for the three of us clerks.

When the company set absurdly high sales targets, she cursed them along with us. When our wages were too low, she tried to fight for extra subsidies.

Once, I fell off my electric scooter on the way to work. She told me to go straight to the hospital and started thinking about whether there was any way the company could reimburse my medical expenses.

After I figured out how to hack the store’s time clock to avoid getting fined for being late, she didn’t object—she even seemed to enjoy it.

Another clerk had previously worked as a supermarket cashier. She had zero knowledge of foreign liquor.

Wine, to her, came in only two categories: “sweet” and “astringent.” She said she only liked sweet ones, yet had no idea what ice wine was.

Whenever customers needed her to introduce a product, she could make things up on the spot without changing her expression.

At first, I couldn’t understand why she would take a job like this.

One day, while we were slacking off in the storage room, she told me her husband had been arrested for gambling and would be locked up for a long time.

Once, she came to work carrying a big bag and said she’d be going to the detention center after her shift to deliver things to him. She said she was trying to find people who could get her husband out.

I felt she would be very easy to scam.

There was also another clerk, a nineteen-year-old guy. Unexpectedly, he was responsible and always saw things through, though he was also willing to cooperate with me on certain non-compliant operations.

His work philosophy was simple: finish fast, rest early.

Like the other two, he didn’t understand alcohol. On top of that, he was allergic to alcohol and couldn’t drink at all.

Lacking any firsthand experience with the products, he adopted the same sales strategy as the manager of another branch at the time: only push bottles that came with commissions—and preferably the highest commissions.

I often wondered what our customers felt when facing us.

Some of the more straightforward, socially adept ones would say things like, “You guys don’t really know anything about alcohol, do you?”

The manager would smile awkwardly and say nothing.

Eventually, that manager left.

The new one was probably in his late thirties. He drank, and I suspect he was also the loud, boastful type at drinking tables.

One day when we were on shift together, we talked about sake. He immediately said, “Japanese sake is disgusting. It’s bland as hell. Only the Japanese drink that stuff.”

So he was even dumber.

Around the same time, a new regional supervisor joined.

He took away the responsibility of interviewing clerks from the store managers and decided to handle it himself.

His first question was always whether the candidate was married.

He said that going forward, they wouldn’t hire anyone under thirty, and wouldn’t hire anyone unmarried.

He kept saying he was “very direct,” as if that were a virtue.

He said he came from the mountains, started doing small business in college, built everything from scratch, and now had managed to secure an apartment in the city.

Between the lines, he tried to package his story as some kind of success narrative to motivate subordinates.

But perhaps precisely because he was from the mountains, his writing—aside from making people uncomfortable—produced no other effect.

Shortly before I resigned, the company began urging stores to study its “corporate culture”—an abruptly issued internal document with no sense of writing whatsoever, filled with slogan-like sentences, as if hastily stitched together.

By then, I had already figured out what the company’s real culture was, at a macro level: if it’s not urgent, don’t do it.

In all of this, the fact that Champagne is a place—not a drink—never came up.♦︎