Backstage: Target during the holidays

If the idea of entering a big-box store around the holidays makes you want to curl up in the fetal position and cry, be glad you’re not Guillermo Escareno. He’s an executive team leader (that's corporate-speak for manager) at the West Hollywood Target, a store frequented by Al Pacino, Paris Hilton, the local homeless man and just about everyone in the world doing their Christmas shopping.

Being a manager means dealing with a lot on a normal day, but during the holidays, it’s madness. Which is why we were all the more happy that Guillermo let us tag along with him for an hour on Friday to see just how crazy things are behind the scenes. Next time you complain that your head hurts after a shopping expedition, think of Guillermo. He’s lucky his head doesn’t explode.

There are a lot of things he has to think of during the busy holiday season: Making sure the checkout lines are moving quickly so that people won’t change their mind about the things they’ve picked out; picking up hangers and tissues and paper from the floor so the store looks presentable; restocking shelves and marking down merchandise that the store has decided not to carry anymore. (Frugalists take note:  Around the holidays, there are 3,000 to 5,000 items put on clearance).

When you’re wearing a red Target shirt though, it can be hard to focus on the tasks at hand.

“I’m looking for a chemistry set, a spy set and all the magic stuff,” one woman says as he walks by her. Another woman interrupts and asks about the location of a toy gun that Target doesn’t carry, her children bouncing off the walls. A woman with an acoustic guitar in her cart blocks the aisle. Guillermo waits patiently for her to stop texting and move on. He can only take a few steps before another customer asks him where she can find piggy banks for adults.

He leaves toys for the seasonal section, where a minor crisis is budding among the fake Christmas trees and tinsel. Target has . . .

. . . run out of ornament hooks, to its customers' dismay. “Oh my God,” one customer says when he finds out. Guillermo says there’s nothing he can do but apologize.

As an executive team leader, he has to apologize a lot. For merchandise that’s not available. For sale items that are sold out. For not being able to give cash back for returns without receipts. In his 16 years at Target, sometimes the apologies haven’t been enough. Once, when he refused to let a man return a vacuum cleaner without a receipt, the man threatened him and said he’d be waiting for Guillermo outside after work. He wasn’t. Another woman spit on Guillermo when he wouldn’t give her what she wanted. Another man called Target corporate headquarters to complain that Guillermo wouldn’t let him take a shopping cart out of the store. The man lost the argument.

Guillermo doesn’t mind dealing with people, though. It’s better than the hardest job he’s done at Target: unloading all the merchandise overnight. The midnight shift is never fun, but unloading hundreds of boxes of toys is grueling. This year, boxes are stacked to the ceiling waiting to move up to the shelves. It's slow, Guillermo says. In a normal year, the shelves wouldn’t be quite so full. Last year, people went crazy over Nintendo Wiis. The year before, it was Elmos. This year, people don’t seem too crazy about anything -- although he knows that the day before Christmas, they’ll buy just about anything, he says. Last-minute shoppers don’t make his job easy.

Still, it’s good to be manager, Guillermo says, passing the yogurt shelves to check if any of the food has expired. A girl talks on her cellphone with her head stuck in the refrigerator, oblivious to the people around her. He waits patiently. She continues to talk. Most people would probably throttle her. Guillermo doesn’t mind. He points to a younger man stocking the shelves. “I get to do all sorts of things. But he’s probably bored.”

Such are the perks of management.

-- Alana Semuels

Photo by Stoichiometry via Flickr