10/13/04’s illustrious band:
Free Ice Water
Brought to you by yet another side trip down employment memory lane.
You've seen them. If you've driven I-90 through Minnesota, South Dakota, or Wyoming, you've seen hundreds of them; elsewhere, perhaps merely dozens. You know what I'm talking about. The signs. The endless, endlessly inane signs advertising that all-American landmark, Wall Drug. I know them all too well, because (A) I've spent more hours on that interstate highway than in church in the past 17 years and (B) I used to work there.
That's right, the latest of my weird job memories involves Wall Drug, the commercial amoeba that later spawned such super viruses as the Mall of America. You can take exit 109 to enter Wall from the west, or exit 110 if you're approaching from the east -- on your way home from college or from your swingin' bachelorette life in the Cities for the holidays, let's say. Exit 110 spits you out at the gas stations and the giant green concrete brontosaurus with the glowing red eyes you can see for miles across the nighttime prairie. The same family that owns the drugstore owns both gas stations (and the brontosaurus), so it doesn't matter which one you choose.
The philosophy behind Wall Drug is simple: Build a tiny drugstore in the middle of nowhere, put up an obnoxious number of signs along the highway to advertise it, lure weary travelers in with free ice water and 5-cent coffee (so bad you should get change, according to my Dad), turn the little store into huge, cheesy tourist trap, get people to put up "XXX miles to Wall Drug" signs all over the freakin' world, and end up owning a town. It's worked for the Hustead family of Wall, South Dakota, since 1931, and it could work for you, too.
I myself worked for the Hustead family during the summers of 1988 and 1989, between undergrad years at the U of SD. I stood behind the counter in the Calamity Jane Jewelry Emporium, down the hall past the flaking life-size caricatures of homesteaders, dance hall girls, and gold miners, across the way from the western wear store. I sold Black Hills Gold jewelry to the tourists 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, and spent my free time reading Stephen King novels and riding my bike along deserted country roads, terrified to wreck because there were probably rattlesnakes in the ditches.
Every summer, Wall Drug hired a hundred or more college students to staff the counters during tourist season, paid them lousy wages, and packed them into ramshackle company-owned houses that made frat houses look like something out of Martha Stewart Living. You set down 8 or 10 college kids in the middle of the Badlands with one grocery store, one liquor store, at least three bars, and 60 miles to the nearest movie theater, and you're just throwing gas on a fire. Hell yes, people drank, and drank hard. The TV reception was lousy that far from civilization, so there was nothing else to do if you didn't like to read. Nerd that I was, Mr. King and I had the dorm to ourselves more evenings than not.
It was an open secret that the cute girls got the glamour jobs in the jewelry and clothing stores, where wealthy gents might be lured by their winning smiles to buy pretty trinkets for their wives, so I cling to my posting as proof that I was cute. The less attractive girls ended up in the out-of-the way nooks or working the night shift in the bakery. Returning employees with experience in several departments got the coveted break girl jobs, rotating from shop to shop to give other employees a chance to go on break. The guys, unless they worked in the kitchen, were all chore boys who circulated throughout the premises with mops, buckets, trash dollies, and tool kits. Break girls and chore boys, because they got around to all areas of Wall Drug, always had the best gossip. When one of them came into our store, it was like a stagecoach stopping in an Old West town, right down to the gingham-and-denim uniforms we wore.
It was also an open secret that when it came time for certain members of the town's ruling family to pick girlfriends for the summer, they usually chose among the cute jewelry/clothing store girls. Fortunately, I was spared that distinction, but a coworker of mine the second summer was rumored to be carrying on a torrid affair with one of the married scions. Judging by the frequency with which he stopped by to check on traffic in our little corner of the world while she was working, I believed it.
Selling Black Hills Gold is decent work, for retail. The merchandise is pretty, there's no heavy lifting, and you only have to memorize a few facts:
- Yes, it's real gold. They mine it in the Homestake Gold Mine up the road a piece in Lead.
- They get that pink color by mixing a little copper with the yellow gold; the greenish tint comes from adding nickel (I think).
- Hand lotion can get a size 7 ring off a size 10 finger.
- Applying yet another squirt of Windex to the glass cabinets is an easy way to look busy without really doing much.
- Of course jackalopes are real. They're native to the Badlands, but they're nocturnal and very shy; that's probably why you didn't see any as you drove through on the tour.
Yes, selling the jewelry was easy. Hot, sweaty people, their extremities swollen from hours of either tromping around the shops or eating at Sodium Central, a.k.a. the Wall Drug Café, came into the store and leaned heavily on the unreinforced display cases. Some would set droop-diapered babies up there and let them bang their heels against the panes. We sales professionals would guess the women's ring sizes and haul out precious after precious for them to jam over their knuckles.
If the babies fussed, we handed them the shiny ring of rings, the collection of silver hoops in graduated half-sizes that allowed us to find a finger's true circumference. The happy tots used the cool, jangling metal as a teething toy. To my shock and disgust, the parents often followed their example: If a ring got stuck on a distended digit, many would slick it with saliva until it slid free, then hand the glistening mess back to me without a second thought. I made at least a couple trips per shift to the ladies' room with a pocketful of gold to wash them off. Baby spit: sort of OK. Grown-up spit: not OK.
Every summer, the student staff were allowed to take over the café and throw the annual Tacky Tourist party. All manner of fashion roadkill paraded through our shops day after day, and we mercilessly skewered every last plaid-and-paisley ensemble, crack-wedged skort, and sock-and-sandal combo at the TT party. We were treated to free food, door prizes, joke awards, and rambling speeches from management. Then we all retired to the Badlands in the dead of night to drink some more.
I served my first summer sentence at Wall Drug because it was a novelty and my second because I neglected to make other plans. The work itself wasn't bad, but the cultural isolation was. Most of us made the 60-mile trek to Rapid City on every day off to shop for groceries, check the Rushmore Mall for nontacky fashions, and see a movie, whether there was anything good playing or not. A few went to the exotic big city bars, but most took a day off even from that.
When that third summer break rolled around, I made sure to have not one but two jobs lined up back in Vermillion. I will never wear a blue-and-white gingham shirt ever again. I will never voluntarily live with half a dozen college students ever again. I will never drink a fuzzy navel ever again. I will never live more than 5 miles from a movie theater, bookstore, or Chinese restaurant ever again.
But Wall Drug is where I learned to put gravy on my french fries, so it wasn't a total waste of time.
Wall Drug —> 546.53 miles
Today around the world: October 13 is House Day here at Sensational Acres. It's been 4 years since I moved in. HUZZAH!!
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