Before we all go to see BARBIE, I suppose now is the best time to relay my one and only Barbie story, and it's a PTSD story.
The following story should be read while listening to the motion picture soundtrack to PLATOON.
In high school, I enlisted, as many of my classmates did, foolish and naive of what I would experience. Enlisted in TARGET, that is. Front line retail grunt.
I was put in the toys section. Day after day, week after week, it was monotony. Cleaning up aisles. Fixing knocked-over displays.
But then there was... BLACK FRIDAY .... before it was commonly called that. The brass had warned us, there was a storm coming. The suburban population in the local village was due for an uprising. Turns out, our supply lines had been disrupted and our logistics team had failed. We were going to be out of the most crucial item within minutes that morning:
The $1.99 BARBIE.
They had put a major-markdown special price on the most generic version of the doll. It even came in a no-frills package. Unlike most of her peers, this Barbie didn't have a cardstock backing with a photo showing the doll dressed up in a fashionable outfit. This was just a box, the size of the doll, and the doll. No clothes, no nothing. Just, a Barbie. For a buck ninety-nine.
That morning, second highest-ranking leader came to see me. That was unheard of. That level of brass never mixed with the foot soldiers. I was given a donut and a warning. “Go to your station, take a pen, and as many RAIN CHECKS as you can find. And under no circumstances let them speak to me personally.”
I scarfed down the donut. Glanced at the oncoming hordes lined up ready to attack. I had never seen so many of them waiting to get in. We usually opened at 10am, but this was a special event and we were to open at 7:30am.
I ran to my station. In the center of the doll aisle, the “$1.99 Barbie” section had been cleared out in the middle of the aisle - and it was already mostly bare. The shipment hadn’t arrived. So we only had about a dozen of them. They were all gone by 7:32am.
The first woman who wasn’t going to get a Barbie approached me. She looked like a Norman Rockwell painting of a Soccer Mom. I smiled and informed her the dolls were already sold out.
Soccer Mom transformed into Demon in one second flat. Eyes turned blood red. Steam poured out of her ears. Her incisors grew an inch, becoming fangs. He polished nails became daggers. I did not then, and still cannot now, comprehend why the inability to get a two-dollar Barbie inspired such a volcanic response. But it did.
Before I could utter the phrase, “I’m sorry, but we can offer you a rain check to get the doll at the advertised price,” the second Previously-Soccer-Mom-Now-Demon behind the first one screamed, “YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!?”
Two more Previously-Soccer-Mom-Now-Demons had approached from the other side of the aisle. “THEY’RE SOLD OUT ALREADY!?”
“I need to speak to the Manager.”
“Yes, we all need to speak to the Manager.”
I tried to remain calm. I said, “I’m sorry ladies, but, there is nothing we can do, nothing the manager can do, but if you give me your name and number, we will give you a rain check and inform you when we have them in stock and you will receive them at the discounted price.”
One of the more Eagle-eyed demons took note of the meager stack of rain checks I was holding. “Looks like he’s gonna run out of rain checks too. We best get ‘em before those run out too.”
The first one gave me her name and number. Each rain check required hand-writing the customer’s information, the SKU number of the toy, the promised price, and a signature of a Target employee. That would be me. I began doing this.
By the time I was finished filling out the third rain check, the entire aisle was jam-packed with Previously-Soccer-Moms-Now-Demons.
CAMERA CRANE SHOT RISES ABOVE THE AISLE, SHOWING THE SWARM COLLAPSING ONTO MY POSITION, FLOWING FROM THE ENTRANCE, SURROUNDING ME AND SPILLING OVER INTO NEARBY AISLES
TRAGIC BATTLE MUSIC SWELLS
At this point, the cacophony of complaints was dizzying. I no longer had the duty of informing each customer what had happened. There was an organic game of retail-telephone going on, where the semi-concentric circles of customers closest to me would communicate back to the next few circles of customers, and so on, until the far fringes of the aisles were receiving “updates.”
As such, the conversation kept evolving. Instead of complaining about the audacity of being sold out within minutes, the critiques meandered toward many targets. “Why aren’t there more people to help you? Why isn’t the manager here? Why did you run the ad in the first place if you couldn’t fulfill the promise?”
I ran out of rain checks in about thirty minutes. A co-worker who was aware of the situation darted through enemy lines, and dropped of a stack of five batches of rain checks, laughed at me, and disappeared, ignoring all of the comments and questions thrown in their direction.
Take their name. Take their number. Write the SKU. Write the price. Write my name. Apologize. Listen to their version of complaint. Repeat.
I wrote rain checks non-stop. At that point in my young life, I didn’t really have a “signature” per se. I didn’t have a lot of legal items to sign, so, until then, I would just write my name in cursive, as neatly as I could.
The mad rush of customers, and the need for speed, over the next few hours, led me to create what became my actual legal signature that I still use to this day - a quick scrawl with a barely discernible “M” and “L” and some squiggles emerging from each.
After about five hours of non-stop rain-checking, I got my first break. The flow of customers had finally started to slow back to a “normal busy” day. I took a lunch break.
The afternoon wasn’t as bad. They finally gave me some back-up.
At the end of my shift, on my way to clock out, the store manager stopped me. Thanked me for my service. Told me that I’d broken the Target record for the most Rain Checks ever written. I don’t know if that was true.
When I was younger, retail jobs were pretty much an us-against-them dynamic. But…
Looking back, we did not fight the enemy. We fought ourselves. There are times since, I've felt like the child born of the $1.99 Barbie. I can’t have been the only Target employee to endure the hordes that day. Those of us who survived have an obligation to build again, to teach to others what we know, and to try with what's left of our lives to find a goodness and meaning to this life.
Wow, I think I remember that day. Brings back some “war memories” about that place myself. But your recounting of that story is so telling about our obsession with our pop culture totems. The proof is in the fact that on “Barbenheimer Day,” Barbie has been elevated to the same cultural iconic status as Oppenheimer and his “deadly toy.” And what does it say about our culture that two unrelated films about these respective icons have been fused together in an amalgamated meme.