Survival

I have managed to survive the week from Hell. The Pit of Despair (my job for those just tuning in) is moving sometime this summer so we are having two big sales, partly to get rid of some things but mostly to make a pile of money to tide us over while we are closed. The Pit has a big sale every June in the parking lot next to our building. We put up a tent and fill it with a ton of stuff. Some of the deals are really good but there's also a lot of junk. We process about 600 customers on average and make some good money. The Saturday of the sale is always the busiest but this year was something else. I have no idea where they all came from but it was a madhouse. You could barely move in the tent and the line to pay stretched out the door and down to the next corner. And they bought everything. Not just the good stuff like cookware and appliances but shelf liners and spoons and mismatched napkins and cobalt blue cow butter dishes (really). One woman proudly told me how she had "snatched victory form the jaws of defeat" by grabbing a pan that she wanted from another woman when that woman left it unattended for a minute. I waited all day for a fist fight to break out over something but we managed to avoid that. We did this for three days, three 12 hour days filled with madness. But we made it, along with a serious pile of money.

We do it again in 2 weeks.