Carefully holding the waistband of a pair of soiled cotton underwear, I stood behind the counter in disbelief, realizing that maybe I hadn’t seen it all. I quickly threw them into a plastic bag — along with the rest of the returned underwear — and headed straight for our alterations department, making sure the customer’s note was right side up before I left her kind gesture on a table and ran like the wind: “they’ve been washed, too itchy, please trim edges,” she declared in black ink.
I wish I could say it stopped there. But it didn’t. The gentleman who called the department frequently was on the line, igniting a choir of “not-its” from my fellow sales team before I got stuck listening to such minutia as to how long the strip of cotton was in our thong underwear. “Would you say it’s precisely three inches?” he asked, rattling the phone, his words quietly coming through the holes against my ear… right before a suspicious groan. It was a banger of a day, a real party. And just when I thought it was safe to take my overdue lunch break and hide in my car on the seventh floor of the parking structure, my manager found me. “There’s a customer in room four who needs help.”
Unfortunately, the customer turned out to be a young girl, maybe pushing nine-years-old, wearing a Spanx body slimmer. The tears framing her tired eyes prompted me to quickly close the door and step to the side as her mother took over. “I’d like to smooth all of this out,” she said, running her hand along the young girl’s stomach, her tone flat and demanding. I stood looking around the dressing room at the variety of shapewear styles, all wadded up and carelessly discarded.
“Uh… okay,” barely left my mouth as I watched the girl cover her tummy with her hands. “Is this to go under something specific, like a costume or something?” I asked, wondering why a child was wearing a body shaper. I’ve worked with some crazy ass pageant moms whose tires I’ve wanted to slash in the parking lot, but this felt like a completely different experience, and I wasn’t sure I could hang.
“I’m sorry?” the woman bit back, staring at me with a set of big, bulging eyes. “It’s to go under her clothes and if you could bring us some smalls that would be great.” I closed the door and walked out to the sales floor. I could feel my insides boiling, and my face, normally the color of snow, had heated up to a bright red. Never had I felt so conflicted, knowing that if I brought back more shapewear, the little girl would think that it was okay. And it wasn’t.
I hated myself as I searched the department for size small Spanx. But before I went back into the dressing room, I quickly made it my mission to grab a few pairs of cotton briefs from the girls’ section. My recommendation didn’t go over well as I handed the girl the underwear, “overstepping” my bounds while “lacking customer service.” And as I stood staring at a cluster of blue stars atop stark white stitching, I could only wish that the unemployment office was close by when I closed the door and left for my lunch break.
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