No, I'm Not Flirting With You, I Just Want To Keep My Job

“Can you check me out, because I was checking you out?” a voice called.

I glanced up to see a man who looked to be in his 80s or older, holding an overpriced golf shirt. I didn’t say a word, I simply scanned the shirt while the man tried to claim that he’d been joking. I just handed him his receipt and told him to have a nice day. I didn’t tell management, or even another coworker, because he’d already explained his behavior away as a ‘joke’. The manager would likely take his side, or even scold me for making the customer feel uncomfortable.

How do I know which stance the manager would take? It wasn’t the first time I’d had a customer make uncomfortable comments directed at me, but I’d mistakenly thought that I’d aged out of them. I was forced to face a sad truth that day, I will never age out of those comments. Maybe they’ll happen less, but as long as I work retail I’m always going to be subject to comments that sometimes make me uncomfortable.

It was worse when I was in my twenties. A man came to my store everyday to buy beer. He’d get in my line so that he could ask me on a date. I always declined, despite my coworkers' insisting that he was attractive. I simply didn’t know anything about him, and never had a conversation besides friendly small talk. He never attempted to have any conversations with me, he always went straight to asking me out. I later found out that he had a girlfriend, because she visited the store with him one day.

I’d had another man come into the store where I worked everyday to talk to me because I’d simply followed the store protocol of greeting every customer. He would tell me weird things, like that he gave great foot rubs. He’d ask me for my phone number, even after I’d refused to give it to him. A male coworker finally told him something that caused him to leave me alone.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable exchange I’d had was when I worked at Home Depot. I was in the garden center one day when a man stood at the end of the other register. He stared at me for about ten minutes before approaching. He handed me a slip of paper and told me that he lived right down the street from Home Depot. On the paper was his phone number, he hadn’t even bothered to write his name. I promptly threw it in the trash and moved on with my day, but I worried that he would be back one day.

I was no stranger to throwing out phone numbers, as I found it to be an unofficial part of my retail duties. I would end each workday throwing away a pocket full of phone numbers, and business cards. In some cases, the men who approach me ask for help finding something in the store, but it never went deeper than that. I rarely had conversations with any of the men who gave me their numbers, they simply looked at me and decided I was ‘worthy’ of calling them.

I recognize that I am one of the lucky ones. Many women are stalked or even killed when rejecting a man at work.

Workplaces often do little to protect workers stuck in these situations. Sometimes these workplaces tell the workers to be kind to the crude customers in these situations. I was even asked to flirt to sell cars at a dealership where I briefly worked. I never did, because I thought it would be a bad idea to flirt with someone I would be alone in a car with.

I have grown a lot during my time working retail, and I will no longer allow someone to make me uncomfortable while I’m attempting to do my job. I’m more likely to speak up for myself now than I was when I was in my twenties. A job that would punish me for speaking up for myself is not one worth keeping.