THE RETAIL MANAGER/ASSISTANT MANAGER WHO IS WAY TOO INTO HIS JOB
Hey! Are you a screenwriter, struggling to emphasize how Important your protagonist is in the grand scheme of things? Then you need a gung-ho retail manager (or assistant manager). Nothing illustrates importance like somebody who’s really into retail, because retail, as we all know, isn’t important at all. Your protagonist has so much more to worry about than weekly sales targets or the new discounting initiative!
I would like to stress I’m not calling retail work an awesome life calling or anything, because mostly it isn’t. But the Gung-Ho Retail Manager/Assistant Manager is particularly grating every time they show up, because in real life, they do not exist. There are retail managers who are serious about their job, of course, but they are mostly people who are desperately afraid of getting fired: sole providers, single parents, people working their ass off to pay down debt. There are also retail managers who genuinely enjoy the service aspect of retail, helping people find the product and/or service they need.
However, in real life, there are practically no retail managers or assistant managers who use war metaphors to describe the retail struggle. There are honestly precious few retail managers or assistant managers who will hold up their MANAGER tag and say “you need to have heart to get this.” The vast majority of actual retail managers and assistant managers do not particularly consider their job a calling or of any great importance at all.
But on TV and in movies, just about every retail manager and assistant manager is a self-absorbed, self-important dickface. It’s terminal laziness, a shortcut of the most annoying type – especially when you know the annoying dickface is just going to be a one-episode appearance to remind us all how Comparatively Important the protagonist’s struggle is. (That we have already seen a gung-ho manager show up on the season premiere of Heroes should surprise absolutely nobody, considering “let’s take a lazy shortcut” is part and parcel of that show’s plotting style.) There’s also a dickface assistant manager wannabe on Chuck, but that guy actually has a role for the entire season so maybe they’ll develop him a bit beyond being the butt of “hah this guy is so dumb he thinks he and/or his career is special” jokes.
To sum up: if, in the process of writing your show’s pilot, you have your character encounter/work for an egotistical jackoff retail manager/assistant manager, please spare us all some grief and write in some other character instead.How about a fanatical dogcatcher? We haven’t seen a fanatical dogcatcher in years.
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9 users responded in this post
What about Jim Taggart on Eureka? Spent the pilot obsessed with catching a dog.
The series is great, it’s best described as the Warehouse 23 basement (http://www.warehouse23.com/basement/) where the best boxes are expanded into an episode.
Eureka is very hit and miss for me. Some really clever science fiction ideas, and some episodes that simply don’t pop at all.
I like the Terrible Stock Characters series already. Any chance we’ll see trading cards?
Dear God yes. That aspect of *Heroes* had my eyes just about rolling out of my head last Monday.
I am really looking forward to more stock character writeups.
Chuck has one too but there’s the more realistic manager as well: His motto (and I paraphrase) is ‘the better my staff is the longer naps I can take’. Worked for a few of those…
Almost every retail manager I ever had back in the day was a self-important dickface, but never anywhere near to the degree presented in Stock Characterville. It’s as bad as most portrayals of computer geeks.
I mean, they’d talk down to us, insist that we should care about stupid price or sales initiatives, should take stupid little ‘points games’ to get weak prizes in lieu of commission or better pay, and make up work for employees to do if they had finished regular tasks and had no customers. They were also generally people who had ended up in management jobs because they got a college degree with no idea what they wanted to do with it, and CompUSA or Wal-Mart was hiring.
Regional Managers, now those are the real devils.
I’ve worked for some breathtakingly bad retail managers in my time, I must admit. Most of them were ones who had bought into the lie they try to feed you: that if you’re obedient enough and zealous enough and work enough unpaid overtime and repeat the corporate philosophy enough times, you’ll be promoted up the ladder and become rich and happy. They’re the people who buy that crazy bullshit about “Your income is a measure of the value you provide to others” and so on, so they figure they’ll impress the “others” with money with their zeal and enthusiasm.
They are, in short, suckers.
You’re absolutely right, the retail cliche is completely overused. However, it is also what allows the idiots of North America to “relate” to the character and “Brings the character down to earth” – which is highly overrated in my opinion.
Cool post on Terrible Stock Characters, #1 (in a series)!