My store split its inventory into five basic categories: makeup, skincare, body, hair, and nails. From there, all products were reduced to one of two classes: mass or prestige. The former meant drugstore. The latter meant expensive. Prestige makeup, hair care, and skincare occupied the store’s upper right quadrant, and mass, its left. Shelves of nail polish marked the boundary between prestige face and prestige hair. Hair tools, both mass and prestige, intermingled in the lower left. The salon abutted them. Fragrances rose along the back prestige wall. The registers were neither a supermarket-style row of parallel bays, nor a station along the wall. Instead, they sat around a ring-shaped counter in the middle of the store, arranged so as to be nearly panoptical. We stood anchoring the center.
I started at Ulta in October, having graduated from college the previous May. I’d spent the summer in Chicago getting rejected for unpaid positions at music agencies and copywriting jobs at Groupon, only to crawl back to my parents in August. While I was in college, they made a permanent move to the South Carolina beach town we had vacationed in for much of my childhood. To me, it was a place without time or adulthood or anything but heat and stillness. My mom picked me up from the airport. We passed the Towne Centre mall in landlocked Mount Pleasant, with its twelve-foot-tall stone horses standing sentinel in front of the P.F. Chang’s. We ascended the sloping bridge that connected Mount Pleasant to the island beach town where my parents lived, at the top of which sat an American flag and, for a tall minute, a sweeping view of the Atlantic Ocean. We pulled onto the island’s main drag, lined with palms and clogged with tourists, the pickups and surfboard-laden jeeps trundling along in a slow parade. We turned onto their street, which was a half mile long, no curbs or sidewalks, just a short strip of asphalt bookended by the ocean on one side and marshland on the other. Since the ’90s, houses there were required to be built on stilts so that hurricanes could, rather than sweep the houses away, simply flow through them unobstructed. An old, thick pug stood still in the middle of the street, staring at our car as we veered around him. That’s just Dudley, my mom said, driving past. My parents’ right-hand neighbors had a dolphin-shaped fountain in their yard. Their left-hand neighbors owned a small bungalow that sat flat on the ground, which meant it had survived Hurricane Hugo. Between me and my parents’ front door was a long flight of stairs and a fifty-pound suitcase. I lifted the suitcase gently over the first stair. I could feel beads of sweat forming already on my neck and rolling down my spine into my ass. The air felt like morning breath. Lugging the suitcase up the second stair, I let my arms slacken a little, then on the third stair a little more, until I was dragging the thing behind me, letting it bang violently on every single step. You know I hate that, my mom sighed. I reached the top, breathing hard as I shoved through the stacks of Amazon boxes that would be replaced by a new batch the next day. By the time I started punching in the door code, I’d lost all sense of forward motion. I was again a bored and restless child.
My sleep schedule quickly reversed itself. I would wake up as my parents ate dinner and go to sleep to the sounds of my dad making his morning SodaStream. I didn’t need money but I did need a job, any job, something to differentiate living with my parents at age twenty-three from living with my parents at age fourteen. I applied to and proceeded to hear nothing back from Applebee’s, Target, Costco, H&M, the Container Store, Panda Express, an ice cream cart at the zoo, and Urban Outfitters, which required that I take a personality assessment, the sole purpose of which seemed to be divining if and under what circumstances I would be stoned at work.
Only Ulta called me in for an interview. I sat down with Melanie, who had crimpy blond hair that she clipped half up, a southern accent, and the type of black, stretchy, flared trousers that are marked at $89.99 but always on sale for $59.99 under names like The Aubrey and The Blythe and are, somehow, the uniform of every female retail manager at every mall store across the country. She didn’t ask me many questions, but when she looked at my résumé and saw that I’d majored in English, she asked what my future plans were. I paused. My parents had told me to conceal anything that might suggest I had an exit strategy. Ulta, they reminded me, did not want a liberal arts girl with rich parents for whom retail was merely a way to kill time on the way to Brooklyn, graduate school, or both. I’d learned this in high school when I’d looked for summer jobs only to find that summer jobs didn’t really exist anymore, because the people who fill them don’t really exist. If you have money, your summer job is pre-collegiate grooming rituals, all your unpaid internships and philanthropy. If you don’t have money, your summer job is the job you already have. Ulta wanted someone who was likely to stay put. Ulta’s ideal employee was someone who needed Ulta more than Ulta needed her. But in the moment, with my nose ring in my pocket, I panicked and accidentally told the truth. I kind of want to be a writer. She nodded politely.
Our store was located in the upscale-but-not-luxury Towne Centre outdoor shopping mall in the upscale-but-not-luxury town of Mount Pleasant, which was nearly on the water, but not quite. The town is nestled among old-money Charleston, with its million-dollar prewar mansions, some midsize middle-class towns, and a handful of small fishing villages. Mount Pleasant had itself been a small village, but 1931 brought the highway and 1989 brought the hurricane, which decimated the barrier islands. In Hugo’s wake were insurance payouts and talk of new beginnings and, quickly, a real estate boom that never really ended. By the early 2000s its population doubled and became predominantly upper middle class. The new mall opened. Another highway was built. Now, ten years later, its population had doubled again and was sliding toward rich. Not quite Rich rich—Rich rich being an ineffable, ancient stratum of culture and wealth in which almost nobody in America believes themselves to reside—but statistically rich, the kind of rich that thinks it’s upper middle class because it eats at the same chain restaurants as the masses.
On my first day at Ulta, I descended from my parents’ gleaming SUV and walked among the rest of the gleaming SUVs looping endlessly through the Towne Centre’s sprawling parking lot, their reflections shimmering across the windows of the Ann Taylor Loft, the Qdoba, the Hairy Winston Pet Boutique. The white pavement and the shiny cars seemed to magnify the sunlight. It was unseasonably warm that day, so hot the air looked wavy. The brief interludes of heat between icy car and icy store came as a series of shocks to the body, which may in fact be the entire point of outdoor malls: reminding you of your good fortune to be alive in the age of central air.
Dawn, the assistant manager, ushered me to the back room. I wore black pants and a black blouse I’d had to buy from the Old Navy next door. All of my other shirts either had non-sanctioned colors or had been cropped with scissors. My hair was a strange auburn color, the aftermath of a DIY bleach job I’d done a few months ago after watching Spring Breakers. I’d put my nose ring back in after the interview, and Dawn eyed it. That’s fine, she said, aiming to reassure herself as much as me, you’re allowed one facial piercing.
I sat on a folding metal chair as Dawn hit play on a training video. She handed me a headset. The Ulta CEO welcomed me to the family. A robotic female voice told me how to enter my time.
She stood next to me as my first customer approached. In life, my voice is boyish and jocular, but the one that came out was a breezy trill. Did you find everything today? I cooed. Nobody had taught me this phrase or this voice. It’s her first day, Dawn explained as I tried to remember what to press on the register screen. Thanks for bearing with us, I said. Nobody had taught me to say us.
I relished the novelty. I’d always been a shopper, never a seller, and I delighted each time the curtain was pulled back. I learned about the locked perfume cage in the back. I learned new names for the mundane: theft was shrink, a thief was a Thelma, free products were gratis, a customer was a guest and an item they plucked from the shelf and later abandoned was a go back, checkout was the cash wrap, a shelf was positioned by a planogram, a shelf was positioned by mandate from on high, a shelf was a gondola, a shelf was an endcap, a shelf was an étagère. I learned the satisfaction of a workday that dissolved in an instant. The sweet finality of clocking out. I learned just how pale my skin and just how pink my cheeks were. I learned the acute chemical effect of being called pretty a few times a week.
It is perhaps a mark of my comfortable upbringing that the prospect of working retail excited me. But it is also something else. For Christmas one year, my older brother received a toy cash register. I think the idea was to make math fun for him. He abandoned the register after a few hours, but I didn’t. I rang things up well into the evening—I sold myself a Lego, a pop-up book, a wheel for my doomed hamster, a petrified piece of licorice. The items were beside the point. It wasn’t the things that I loved so much as the transaction, the beep of the buttons, the receipt paper smooth between my thumb and forefinger. The way the machine shivered when the cash drawer clicked shut. A friend of mine once declared smoking the perfect sensory experience: you smell it, touch it, fingers, lungs, hot on the inhale, visible on the exhale. It is perfect because your nerves sharpen, then calm. You witness the fact of your steady breathing. You make a habit of it.
Guests who belonged to our loyalty program earned ULTAmate Rewards Points with every dollar they spent. Compared to Sephora, whose Beauty Insider program exchanged dollars not for discounts but for deluxe samples, Ulta’s rewards system was thought to be better, as it provided the illusion of savings. At the time, spending $250 at Sephora got you three-twentieths of an ounce of Intenso Pour Homme. The same sum at Ulta saved you, on the dollar, three-hundredths of a cent.
You needed one hundred points before you could get a discount. I’m sorry, I learned to say to those with fewer, you haven’t yet reached the threshold for redemption. A guest’s point balance was always displayed to me at checkout, but on my first day I was warned never to divulge this freely, at least not before they swiped. The points are an incentive for guests to spend more, said Melanie. If you give that up before they pay, it’s just a free discount.
Instead, I was to do this: Print the receipt and smooth it flat on the counter. Lean over. Underline the fine print. Here is a link to our guest satisfaction survey. You could win a $500 gift card. Raise my eyebrows as if suddenly impressed. Wow. Circle a number at the bottom. Looks like you have 732 points. That’s almost $30 off. Guest frowns. Wait. Couldn’t I have used that today? Well. Conspiratorial. Just another excuse to come back soon. With my neon highlighter I drew a wonky heart.
The slickness of my little script felt balletic. It was a good kind of alien. Soon, stock phrases became mantras, became prayers, became muscle memory. Hi there, If you could just swipe one more time, I apologize for the wait, Are you a rewards member, I’ll take the next guest, You have a great day! I could do it in my sleep.
