Over Abundance

Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes at your favourite yarn shop? Do you ever think how nice it must be to knit all day? If you’ve ever considered getting a job at a yarn shop, this is the post for you!

Below is a summary of how my day goes, start to finish, on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. These are the 3 days I work from open to close at the shop.

Wake up late, get dressed, drive to work in really terrible traffic.

Get the story ready for business by cleaning and feeding/watering the bunny. Also field pre-open phone calls from vendors, customers, and telemarketers. The phone calls do not stop throughout the whole day.

10 AM, unlock the doors and begin serving customers. People are, literally, standing on our doorstep most days and it is very strange to be vacuuming while people stare at you wondering why you won’t let them in. Why? Because I am cleaning, and also discussing business things with my boss and manager. Things that concern the running of the shop, any problems we faced the day previous, and also making sure that my manager has had enough coffee to function appropriately.

From 10 until we close, I do some mixture of the following.

• Check a shipment to make sure the company sent us what we ordered, and not what some crack monkey thought we wanted.
• Label and stock new yarns. Our shop is 3000+ square feet, or so I’m told. This is a LOT of yarn.
• Restock old yarns.  Ditto square footage and amount of yarn above.
• Answer questions about knitting, yarn, patterns, gauge, blocking, finishing, screw-ups, mistakes, and also why I don’t have something in the exact same shade as their grandbaby’s eyes.
• Picking up the phone to field vendors, customers, orders, troubleshooting the website, inquires about our hours, yarns, patterns, classes, and sometimes wrong numbers. (I once got asked “Is this Nova Outpatient?” and I said “No Ma’am, nobody here wants to recover from our addiction.”)
• Running messages to my boss and manager.
• Handling problems such as “I backordered my yarn yesterday, why isn’t it here?” and “All your yarn is itchy.” (It is not. There are summer breezes itchier than some of my yarn. I admit I am very defensive about my yarn.)
• Continuously greeting customers as they come in.

Somewhere in the day I am usually told to go eat something before I faint, or I whine incessantly about my poor imploding stomach until I am sent off to consume some nourishment. Somewhere in the day I will get to go to the bathroom at least once, I hope.

In this day, I will probably talk to over 80 people, I will disappoint at least 3 people by not having what they need, I will delight approximately 4 people by having exactly the thing they were thinking of, 2 people will find the exact yarn their pattern calls for in a colour they love, and more people than I care to count will walk out without having bought a thing or asking any questions and I hope it’s not because they felt neglected since I almost feel stalkerish in my tendency to follow people around sometimes.

Some days are busier than others, but to be honest ever since Heather bought the store last year I don’t think I’ve had a truly lazy day. There is always yarn arriving that has to be processed before it can be labelled and that can take hours, and it’s not something I’m trained to do so I get to restock, and help customers, and clean, until finally I get to do all those things and help label 15 boxes the size of several small children worth of yarn.

The perks for all this work? I love helping people. I love my regulars and my coworkers like family. It is so easy to thrill somebody by handing them a skein of cashmere to touch that it gives me giggles and goosebumps every time. The yarns we get are interesting and beautiful, and I get to share them with all of my best friends - That would be You. So I love my job. I love coming to work. But I work very, very hard. And most of the people I work with? They work even harder than I do. I can’t fathom it, lest I start to feel ill. So if you think it’s nice to be able to knit all day, come hang out at the shop with me, have some lunch in the cafe, and enjoy my favourite place to be while you knit. I probably won’t be able to sit with you much, but I will like having you there all the same.