Perks: Office Supply Store

As much bitching as I do, I did love working at the office supply store. There were some nice perks that came along with working there that I couldn't get working anywhere else.

Discount

The office supply store was one of many stores in the mall. Whenever anything new opened up in the mall, the employees were obviously the first ones to hear about it. Most places that opened up had a preview day for only employees of the mall.

When Jamba Juice opened up they didn't only give a discount, they gave us free drinks for the day. There was a cap on the amount of drinks that each store could get but it was still pretty cool. My manager told me to go get drinks for the crew from the newly opened Jamba Juice in which I replied:

"What's Jamba Juice?"

I didn't know what Jamba Juice was or what it served. I was later informed that they sold smoothies which is something else, in the 19 years of my life, I had never tried. I went over there and lost my smoothie virginity (all other virginity's still in tact by the way) and it was quite the disappointment, which is the same way my friends felt when they lost their actual virginity.

 I'm just not a smoothie person but just a few short months later I became hip to their Chunky Strawberry Topper. I instantly fell in love.

Another new store that came to town was Chipotle. Chipotle wasn't handing out free burritos but we did get a discount for ordering from there. Once we heard about the discount Chipotle became our breakfast, brunch, lunch, snack and dinner go to at the office supply store. We ordered so often that they gave us a stack of order sheets and their fax number so that we could just do an easy pick up.

When I quit the store I gave up the perks but they will never be forgotten.

In-Store Perks

Employees get discounts. It should be in the Constitution.  The office supply store gave the worst discounts I've ever seen in retail. The percentage off of the price for employees was laughable. There were three categories to discounts:

Electronics/Big Ticket Items = 5% Off
School Supplies = 10% Off
Candy/Soda = 15% Off

I almost never used my discount, none of us did. Our discount barely covered the taxes on the purchase so we had to create our own perks.

One perk was during the Christmas season when we got in all of the really good merchandise. The closing crew the night before we had to display all of our Christmas items and discounts, got to get what they wanted first. We each were given a hand basket or shopping cart that we were allowed to fill up and purchase at a later date. It had to be held for us. Even if customers saw our carts tucked away they still couldn't purchase the item that we were out of on the shelves. It was a great perk and it made for great Christmas gifts.

My favorite perk became my favorite perk because I was in college. PRINTING. I had a terrible printer at home that seemed to eat the ink rather than use it. I got tired of buying ink so I'd print out all of my reports at work. Our manager said it was fine depending on the number of copies we had to make. Obviously if we were making hundreds of copies we would have to pay for them but between 5-10 prints/copies was really no big deal.

I was even able to save money because of it. It got to a point when I was in college that I just stopped buying textbooks. I would purchase them and then never even crack open the seal. I'd end up losing money just to try to sell it or return it. There was always one over achiever in the class who let me borrow their book so I would take it and copy the pages needed based off of the syllabus. I could also bind the book the book the way I wanted to because I worked there. I was probably the only college student that spent less than $200 on books during four years of school.

Of course the biggest perk was gaining the knowledge and friendship that I did during that time but that shit is just way too sappy for me to write about.