The summer after I graduated high school, I worked at the Gap. I didn’t like it much. I had thought it would be cool to have a part-time minimum wage job, like teenagers did in the movies, but I’d failed to account for the fact that teenagers in the movies worked at cool places like Empire Records and not a chain store in their local mall. Still, there were some perks: I got a hefty employee discount and learned to fold a shirt crisply and neatly. (If you ever look inside my chest of drawers, you’ll realize that I was unable to apply this knowledge to any other area of my life).
On the job.
One thing that was definitely not a perk was the in-store music. Through rudimentary internet research, I learned that the Gap now pipes in Muzak via satellite to every one of its stores, but that’s not how I remember it. When I worked there, corporate headquarters would send us a clean white CD in a paper sleeve, and that was our music for the month. We played it on loop all day, every day. The CD would always include a number of great songs. For instance, all of these songs I like appeared on Gap mixes at some time or another:
“I Miss You,” Bjork
“King of the Rodeo,” Kings of Leon
“Kamera,” Wilco
“Girl,” Beck
However, since I was always distracted while working, and because the hubbub of shoppers tended to drown out the more interesting and subtle sonic elements, it was hard to tell from hearing them in the store that these songs were that great. I know from experience, for instance, that “Girl” in the wrong listening environment just sounds like Beck saying “eyyyy” over and over like a Canadian stuck on repeat. I was pretty surprised, when I heard the song again later, to discover it had a twangy guitar solo and a electrified beat that I love. I had barely registered either of those things in the store, even though I must have heard “Girl” thousands of times while on register duty.
Now that I enter clothing stores only as a shopper, I usually enjoy listening to in-store music if it suits my tastes. There’s a store near me that plays particularly fun, unexpected stuff; they’ve even had an in-store DJ once or twice. It’s usually empty enough when I go that crowd noise doesn’t get in the way of the listening experience, and the music is always nice and loud. I’ve never bought so much as a sock there, but I wander in all the time to pretend to browse and listen to what they have playing on the loudspeakers. It always strikes me while I’m in there, though, that repetition could already have chewed the in-store playlist into a bland, creamed-corn-like pulp from the employees’ perspective, even though it sounds like exciting electronica to me. I guess that’s one more perk of working at the Gap: a perspective on the unique hazards of working retail.
