The Return Policy

I am thirty-eight years old and I spent last Saturday being yelled at by a man in a foam tent hat, and that is somehow not even the worst thing that happened that day.

Let me back up. My name is Gwen, and two years ago I was a senior editor at Calloway House, which sounds fancy until you learn what senior editors make. Then the layoffs came, and now I work three days a week at a coupon blog called Deal Dispatch, where my editor, who is younger than my shoes, asks me to make the copy sound "more fun."

Leo, of course, landed on his feet the way Leo always does. Leo wrote the advice column "Ask Leo Anything" for our rival paper, got fired when it came out that half his letters were written by himself, and somehow turned that into a book deal and a podcast and a standing appearance on a morning show. He was famous for giving advice he had never followed, and famous for being charming about it, and I hated him for eleven years, which is a long time to hate someone you see twice a year at industry parties.

So when the corporate email went out about the team-building retreat, I skimmed it like everyone else. The words "mandatory," "Saturday," and "experiential" were buried in there, along with the actual plan, which was that twenty of us would spend the day working a real shift at Bargain Barn, the big-box store out by the highway, as some kind of marketing stunt. Empathy for the customer, the email said. Understanding the retail journey. I understood it fine. Retail is bad. There, done.

Leo was already at the store when I arrived at six in the morning, standing in the empty parking lot with a coffee, looking like a man on vacation. He had, I noticed with some irritation, aged well. He is forty-one now and somehow looks more like himself than he did at thirty-five.

"Gwen," he said, like we were old friends, which we are not. "They put us on the same register."

"They did not ask me," I said.

"They don't ask anyone anything, that's the whole point of the exercise. Come on, I saved you a locker."

The store manager's name is Marlene, and she is in her fifties and has the eyes of a woman who has watched a thousand people cry over a returned blender. She gave us a fifteen-minute training, most of which was "don't promise things we don't sell," and then she pointed us at register nine and walked away.

Within an hour, Leo and I were fighting.

It started over a woman with a returned lamp. She had no receipt and the lamp was clearly used, and our training had said one thing and Marlene had said another thing, and I was following Marlene. Leo leaned over and said, "Just give it to her, the store budgeted for goodwill."

"That is not the policy."

"The policy is a suggestion with a bad attitude."

"The policy is the policy, Leo, that's what makes it a policy."

He gave her the refund anyway, with my login, while I was restocking bags, and I reported him to Marlene, and Marlene said, "Honey, it's a stunt shift, nobody works here for real," and that stung more than it should have, because for eleven years the entire architecture of my professional life had been the difference between a fact that could be verified and a fact that could not.

"You can't just decide things," I told him. "You did this at the paper. You'd print whatever felt true."

"And you'd sit on a story for six weeks waiting for a second source, and the story would die, and everyone would forget why it mattered." He said it lightly, the way he says everything, and it still landed like a slap.

By eleven the store had filled up. There was a sale, apparently, something about early holiday access, and the parking lot was filling, and Dev, our cashier, a guy in his twenties who I liked immediately, leaned over and told us the PA system was transmitting his thoughts.

"It happens when I'm near the ceiling speakers," he said. "I think about pretzels, and forty seconds later, pretzel announcement."

"That's coincidence, Dev," I said.

"That's what the pretzel lobby wants you to think."

At noon the lights went out.

Not flickered. Went out, all of them, and the PA died mid-sentence, and the automatic doors, which should have failed open, failed closed instead, and four hundred people made the same noise at once. Marlene's voice came through somebody's phone on speaker: grid problem, utility says ninety minutes, nobody leaves, stay calm, sell flashlights.

We sold flashlights. Leo, of course, was the one who thought of it, holding up a five-dollar LED pack and announcing, in his column voice, "Ladies and gentlemen, darkness is temporary, savings are forever," and people actually bought them, dozens of them, and I hated that it worked, and I hated more that I picked up a box and started selling them too, because we were trapped in a dark big-box store and the commission structure, real or imagined, had gotten into my blood.

The store generator kept the emergency lights on, those dim red exit glow things, and the whole floor turned the color of a darkroom. Customers sat on patio furniture. Somebody opened a case of juice boxes. A man proposed to his girlfriend near sporting goods and she said yes, and everyone clapped, and Dev announced it over nothing, no PA, just shouting.

"Nobody's leaving for ninety minutes," Leo said, sliding onto the counter next to me, his shoulder almost touching mine. "We should practice."

"Practice what?"

"Upselling. It's the one skill they gave us that I don't have. You clearly have it, you upsold that woman a warranty on a flashlight, which I didn't know was possible."

"You made the sale. I made the margin."

"See, that's the whole thing with you, you'd rather be right than rich."

"I would rather be right than wrong," I said, and he laughed, and in the red light his laugh looked different than it did in fluorescent, warmer, closer.

"Okay, role-play," he said. "I'm a customer. You sell me something I don't need."

"That is a waste of ninety minutes I will never get back."

"I'll bet you."

That got my attention, and he saw it get my attention, and he smiled like a man laying down cards. "Loser buys dinner. Winner picks the place. And loser has to admit, out loud, at dinner, in front of witnesses, that the other one was right about the lamp refund."

"The lamp refund was against policy."

"The lamp refund made a woman's day. Admit it was right."

I should have said no. I need it noted somewhere that I knew, standing there in a dark store I did not work at, that the smart move was to walk away from Leo and his bets and his laugh. But there was nothing to do, literally nothing, the doors were sealed and my phone was at four percent, and I had not had a real conversation with anyone in months, and dinner was dinner.

"Fine," I said. "But I pick the scenario. You're a customer who came in for one item and you're rational and you have a budget."

"Ooh, hard mode. Go."

I held up a scented candle from the impulse rack. "Sir, you came in for a flashlight. This candle is four