A Little Late, But…

It’s the end of January, and something struck me while walking through the mall the other day while my wife bought a new suit for job interviews: the mall is a lot more tolerable when it is not around “the holidays.” It’s not the crowds that make Christmas shopping so unbearable… it’s the music.

I remember shortly after New Years I was at CVS and the cashier ringing me up started singing along to the music being piped into the store. I smiled at the situation and she suddenly remembered herself and she commented, “I just really like the music today for some reason… oh yeah, they stopped playing the Christmas playlist.”

So here I am, bitching about the few hours I have to spend listening to the same stale Christmas tunes for a few hours a day, and I forget that people who work in retail have to listen to that tripe 20, 30, 40, even 50 or 60 hours a week , many at two jobs (over five percent, more than 15 million Americans).

So I make this plea: I’m no enemy of Christmas, but I beg for leniency from the torture of Christmas music playlists. Sure, after Thanksgiving you can slowly work a song or two in, culminating in maybe even a fifty-fifty mix in the last week or two, but why is it non-stop Christmas music from the day after Thanksgiving until the day after New Years? Aren’t the horrible wages and zero benefits torture enough on the people stuck ringing up and bagging our purchases?