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I was hired years ago by the local manager at Williams Sonoma because, as she put it, “I might add some youthful energy to the store.” I had no real idea what that meant until I was formally introduced to my co-workers, a crew of around ten old women, one of whom pinched my cheeks saying I reminded her of her grandson.

The store was located in a glitzy shopping center, our clients coming directly from stores that served champagne to those who tried on shoes. Many of our guests, were soccer moms who spent their weekday mornings lugging around shopping bags and sipping cappuccinos at the local café. I always found it humorous how they saw themselves in such a challenged light: moaning of the sauna session they just endured as if it was akin to the gates of fiery hell.

The store was also frequented by what were known as secret shoppers: analysts sent by corporate headquarters to maintain quality of service. Upon first hearing the concept, I envisioned these shoppers sneaking behind bookshelves and under counters, in an attempt to monitor the employees without anyone knowing, perhaps dressed in the muted blue of the July 4th exhibit as a mode of camouflage. In truth, the secret shoppers looked just like every other shopper and it was the essence of this resemblance that made them truly unidentifiable.

I would have liked to think Williams Sonoma brought me on board because of my kitchen knowledge, having spent many years in restaurants and catering stations making and learning from every mistake known to man. My hands sat scarred from all my mishaps and I showed them, like trophies, to my future boss but after all, I was not hired for my knowledge of food-related items but instead another, more brute force trait.

Williams Sonoma, contrary to the down-home, neighborly image that they like to portray, is run on a very austere corporate platform. It is a line of management that demands the identical layout of window displays throughout the eastern seaboard and one that has taken seriously cautionary measures to defend its inventory from theft and, perhaps worse, people abusing its generous return policy.

It’s the only store I know of that will accept a product back, without receipt, in exchange for a new one or store credit. “You mean, they don’t need to prove they bought it here?” I asked Charlotte upon first hearing this policy. “Like…not that I’d do it or anything…but I could bring back a broken saucepan I bought at Bed Bath and Beyond to get a brand new one here? No questions asked?”

“Well we like to think people don’t exploit the policy, but hypothetically yes you could.” She hadn’t even finished her sentence and my wheels were already turning.

A direct contingency of this policy was the extreme care with which old or damage products were dealt. Products could simply not be trusted left in large garbage cans, seeing as though, as Charlotte explained, “a homeless person could just come up, take the products, then return them as his own.”

I found it far-fetched that a homeless person could come up with such a devious scheme and hilarious the potential scenario of a homeless man walking into the store carrying several broken Cuisinarts or Wustoff knives. “I think I’d just like to return these” he might say, the rags from his arms accidentally knocking over the lemonade samples. “They just don’t seem to hold up with the amount of entertaining we do and all.”

To safeguard from any of these shenanigans, it became my sole responsibility to physically damage and destroy any returned or defect products found in the store. “Here,” Anne would say, handing me a stack of hairline-cracked china plates. “Take these and do your thing.”

“My thing” involved taking the products to the back of the store, putting them in a large double-lined garbage bag, and slamming them on the concrete floor until they no longer resembled their original form. Is everything OK back there? I envisioned shoppers asking when walking past the Employees Only door. They were not sounds one expected to hear in Williams Sonoma—the cracking and shattering. It was a store that advertised itself with the refinement of a Martha Stewart picnic, but behind the scenes, it was a totally different story.

Weeks after leaving Williams Sonoma to return to a Spring semester of college and people my own age, I received in the mail a photocopied print out from the store’s manager, a wrinkly old woman who thought I was too cocky. I always wanted to tell her that she smelled like a rotting onion. On the top read “Secret Shopper Report: Williams Sonoma Store #425” and below that, the words I’d never wanted to see; my own name.

I contemplated throwing the report, before reading it, in the wicker garbage bin my mother had picked up half-price during my time at the store.

In fact, my performance had proven above par. I couldn’t remember it clearly, but apparently I had been approached by a secret shopper calling herself, on the report, Agent Nine. Apparently I had aced the greeting portion of the test by welcoming Agent Nine not but five seconds after she walked in the shop. According to the report, I attended to Agent Nine throughout her visit, suggesting numerous products and ingesting her likes and dislikes like a well-honed taste machine. In the end, I scored on the Secret Shopper Report nearly perfect, a score that topped anyone in history at Store #425.

It was reading this report, from a plastic recliner in my dorm room, sipping on a can of cheap college beer, that I smiled in the face of all the adversity the job entailed. It was made fun of regularly, my semi-out-of-place-ness in Williams Sonoma as it was not common for an eighteen year-old guy to know so much about balsamic vinegar or to feel comfortable around aging homebodies in search of anything nonstick. In the end though, it was just that—my being different in a crowd of Williams Sonoma clones—which wholeheartedly gave me the last laugh.

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Filed under: Culture on May 8th, 2008