So, where DID I work?

One of the things I've never talked about online is where exactly I worked.

There were a variety of reasons for it. One of them was that the company adopted a pretty draconian social media policy so I didn't talk about it because it wasn't worth my job for people to know and sometimes I'd say something that might have been considered less than complimentary and that is/was, under the policy, a fireable offense. Which is funny. Freedom of speech is the foundation of the business the company I worked for engaged in. Without it they'd have the doors shuttered in days, hours maybe.

I worked for Romantix. When I started it was Goalie Entertainment, an innocuous name that gave no indication that it was one of the leading adult book store chains in the country. I started as an overnight clerk in a little store in Fort Dodge, Iowa and worked my way up to Regional Manager with 25 stores in a bunch of states (East of the Mississippi plus Texas) and then through the company being sold and then the name change and the stores & areas being redisctricted, torn apart & sewn back together over the years I wound up being the Central Iowa DM. That included Missouri as well as it happened. Our District names are always more serving suggestions than hard and fast rules.

So, yeah. Romantix is the answer to the longest running question I've not answered for the longest time here online.

As you can imagine, with 19 years of time in the adult retail end of things there is a book's worth of stories I could tell but I probably won't. As surprising as it will be to most to hear this, the adult part of the business wears off pretty fast. It's not as interesting, funny, etc as you might think. Sure, that first week or month, I was seeing things I'd never seen before... but the new wears off fast and soon when I was looking at a wall of erm... toys, I was seeing where it needed to be straightened or worked. I'd notice good selling items in the wrong spot and slow movers in the prime space. The interesting wore off of the product long ago.

One of the questions I'd be asked most by customers was, "You must get real freaks in here huh?" Oddly, they never seemed to include themselves in that group. And mostly no, I didn't get a lot of freaks. I got normal people either in couples or singly in looking for something they could have fun with either together or by themselves. The thing about the "freaks" was in MY stores I knew who they were... when you run into them out in the world... yeah, they look just like everybody else.

Maybe there'll be stories later but I doubt it. Not because there aren't some funny ones, there are, but because honestly... it seems a little disrespectful to violate the implied trust my customers were giving me when coming to my stores to shop. They expected discretion and they've always gotten it. I don't see that changing now just because I don't work there any more. To tell tales now would be tacky and rude I think.