Not Economically Viable

In Falling Down, one of my favorite movies of all times, Michael Douglas plays “D-Fens”, an out of work divorced dad just trying to cut through L.A.’s gangland to get to his little girl’s birthday party. Along the way, he comes into contact with violent gang members, a Nazi skinhead, and an asshole fast food manager. With each experience, he trades up his weapons from a simple baseball bat, to a butterfly knife, and then a gym bag full of automatic guns. At first glance, D-Fens appears to be a man just down on his luck. But by the end of the movie, you realize this guy lacks some serious coping skills. He’s the antagonist and protagonist of the story, a true anti-hero for the early 1990’s, a period left gutted by Reganomics and failed policies by the elder George Bush. And I guess it also helps the atmosphere of the flick that it was filmed during the L.A. riots. You couldn’t ask for a better social backdrop than that. Joel Schumacher must’ve thought he had died and gone to heaven when the looting started.

In one pivotal scene, D-Fens stops at a sidewalk stand of snow globes and purchases a gift for his daughter. During the transaction, he witness a protester in front of a bank carrying a sign that reads, “Not Economically Viable”. The man has evidently been turned down for a loan and is upset because he has been a loyal customer for years. Eventually, the police come along and put him in the back of a cruiser. The man looks out the window and sees D-Fens, who is dressed in the same exact clothes, right down to the tie pattern. “Don’t forget me!” he yells to D-Fens, who stands silent and sees himself in the man. Her drops the snow globe in the gym bag of weapons and continues on his journey through the city streets. It’s at that moment D-Fens finds himself at the point of no return. There will be no stopping him from there on out.

I’ve been thinking about that scene a lot the last few days. Last Friday, another supervisor and I went to the neighborhood Target store and put our applications in. It was a knee-jerk reaction to an extremely stressful week and we’d pretty much had enough of our manager’s bullshit. A couple of weeks earlier, a former manager of ours came into the store and told us he had quit the company and found extreme pleasure in being a floor grunt for another local Target store. We asked him to keep an ear to the wall in case anything opened up and he came back about ten days later with good news about the store around the corner from us. They were supposedly looking for “Team Leaders” and the pay was anywhere from ten to thirteen dollars an hour to start. He said he’d have his manager talk to their manager on our behalves and urged us to put our applications in as soon as possible and then give him a call so he could bring the applications to the attention of the managers. So on the 20th, both Karen and I went in and filled out the applications at the employment kiosks. This process took exactly one hour apiece as we had to answer a rather lengthy questionnaire about how we perceived ourselves and our work habits. I left the place feeling pretty confident I had something to offer, even if my asking price was a little high ($12.00 and hour). By Monday, Karen had gotten a call. I had not.

In the end, they kind of pulled a bait and switch routine with us. Even though the kiosk had the “Team Leader” jobs listed, the woman who called Karen said there were only sales floor positions available. (I was told at the time I applied no sales floor positions were available.) When the woman asked Karen if she would be interested in that, she through out a price of $8.00 an hour. “No team member gets more than that,” she told Karen. Of course, Karen turned down the offer and immediately called me. I waited and waited for the phone to ring that night and the next morning, but the call never came. The only difference between our applications was that Karen had put down “negotiable” as her salary whereas I had put down “preferred”. Otherwise, we looked good on paper. Between us, there’s something like 25 years of supervisory experience in all aspects of retail. But I guess that counts for shit when your dealing with an industry that feeds off the bottom line, eh?

I know that this is only the first of many applications I’ll be filling out within the next few months, but it’s still disheartening nonetheless. When you’re young, they tell you great things will happen if you work hard and remain loyal in the workforce. But I’m not finding that to be the case. I’m currently stuck in a job that I’m, at $11.75 an hour, considered overpaid for and barely scraping by with. And yet, I can’t seem to get a full forty hour week. Despite the fact we’re still brining in customers when the rest of the business in the same strip are closing down doesn’t matter. On paper, the company says we’re not hitting an absurdly high budget (nobody seems to know where they got those high figures from, either), so expenses still need to be cut. Hours were the first thing to go back in November. And yet, all the experience I’ve gained since taking my first retail job back in the late 1980s doesn’t seem to count for much, either. How bad are things when I can’t even get a call back from Target? And my wife wants me to start applying for office jobs, something I’m even less experienced at. I look at the papers every day and see that robberies, assaults, and crime in general is up in my neighborhood and I think it’s just a matter of time before we get hit again. But I’m not economically viable. There is no place for me anywhere and no other job to go to unless I want to start everything over from scratch. Or I can wait it out and pray the hours come back or the store closes, at which time I’ll be more than happy to collect unemployment for as long as I can. Because, as it seems, there is no benefit to busting your ass from day to day. People just don’t give a shit about working people anymore, that much I feel is absolutely true. We’re not economically viable anymore. We’re disposable. Replaceable by the younger and cheaper models.

Don’t forget us…