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My Unintentional Career in Retail
Penguin
April 2011
On Sale: April 14, 2011
103 pages ISBN: 1591843804 EAN: 9781591843801 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
One woman's midcareer misadventures in the absurd world
of American retail. After losing her job as a
journalist and the security of a good salary, Caitlin Kelly
was hard up for cash. When she saw that The North Face-an
upscale outdoor clothing company-was hiring at her local
mall, she went for an interview almost on a whim.
Suddenly she found herself, middle-aged and
mid-career, thrown headfirst into the bizarre alternate
reality of the American mall: a world of low-wage workers
selling overpriced goods to well-to-do customers. At first,
Kelly found her part-time job fun and reaffirming, a way to
maintain her sanity and sense of self-worth. But she
describes how the unexpected physical pressures, the
unreasonable dictates of a remote corporate bureaucracy, and
the dead-end career path eventually took their toll. As she
struggled through more than two years at the mall, despite
surgeries, customer abuse, and corporate inanity, Kelly
gained a deeper understanding of the plight of the retail
worker. In the tradition of Nickel and Dimed,
Malled challenges our assumptions about the world of
retail, documenting one woman's struggle to find meaningful
work in a broken system.
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