I Was a Traveling Free Sample Girl
The job title was “Brand Ambassador.” I was handing out pieces of sausage at Costco.
I should have known better; I had been a “sandwich artist” and a “customer care specialist” in lives past.
But the drudgery of job hunting, the hours of retooling cover letters and resumes to fit ever-incredible job requirements — Social media director wanted! Must have 20 years experience! — just sort of burns out the “I have a bad feeling about this” processes in your brain.
I saw that a meat company was hiring for a “Brand Ambassador” and, too tired to read the description and too desperate to care if I was wrong, applied, saying in my cover letter I was excited for the opportunity to help shape their content strategy and social media presence.
I didn’t learn the job was giving out pieces of sausage at Costco until halfway through the initial phone interview. By then it was too late. I couldn’t walk it back. So I got on a bus from San Francisco to Santa Rosa to learn how to stand for ten hours a day, to serve sausage samples, and to maintain the necessary composure under physical exhaustion, mental strain, and outright verbal abuse to educate customers on the benefits of grass-fed beef.
Sampling is a cornerstone of the Costco experience, and members expect tangible perks of a paid membership. This confluence of factors presents a unique sampling environment, i.e. a goddamn death maze of the absolute worst in human behavior.
We would check into the hotel Wednesday night, run the road show Thursday through Sunday, and then pack up and leave Sunday night. That’s a good 40+ hours up close and personal with the suburbs’ best and brightest.
People will hold up a line to eat every available sample, walk away in a huff, then come back and do it again. Others will reach past the sneeze guard to grab an undercooked morsel off a still-burning grill. They run off with full serving trays, and sometimes throw themselves between other customers and the samples, screaming about GMOs, diabetes, and fluoridated water. One guy in Santa Rosa, upon learning that our beef was sourced from Australia, got so worked up about what side Australia would take “in the race war” he literally shit himself.
There are more stories, for sure. (We once had a guy who found one of my teammates on Tinder and pestered her during her shifts until she agreed to go to some reggae concert with him.) But after ten hours standing up, giving out the same bits of sausage, shouting the same salesperson soundbites — it’s better for you, better for the cow, better for the planet! — all those precious individuals making unique shopping choices just blend and blur into a hostile hivemind that you can never escape.
They’re angry the product is so expensive, they’re disappointed you won’t give them a bigger sample, they don’t realize cattle are neither meant to eat corn nor indigenous to America. They try to “fact-check” your sales pitches. You hear the echoes of their hate when you soak your feet in the hotel room or have dinner by yourself at some Olive Garden in Rohnert Park where the waiter keeps singing to you because he thinks you’re eating alone because you’re going through a divorce or something.
Costco is a business with an identity crisis. It’s a company that professes a dedication to diversity, but remains remarkably disparate internally. I liked working the morning shifts because those were my people: tatted, inked, foul-mouthed but good-natured, the way workers reviled by their superiors can be. As opening time approaches, those people fade into the mist and are replaced by jerks who delight in verbal abuse—and talking back to them is a fireable offense.
In one city, one of them tore through our booth area because it wasn’t clean enough, calling us embarrassments and disgusting and saying he’d be ashamed to have been our parents. My coworker walked off her shift in tears. That was on our sixth week? She lasted longer than others; one woman broke down sobbing and walked off muttering “I’m nobody’s slave” before the lunch break of her first day.
Costco’s in-house sample people (you know, the white hairnets, aprons, etc) get it worse. They’re paid less, for one. When we got a bad rating from a secret shopper, our boss would just send out an email. They get their secret shopper ratings taped to the wall so everyone can know who let the team down. They get patted down before leaving for the day, in case one of them wants to try smuggling some once-frozen orange chicken nuggets to sell on the black market.
Those women, the people that make your Costco experience decadent and magical, are often the most vulnerable: young mothers, seniors, immigrants. And they all have stories. This is the sort of work where people’s defenses and boundaries are so worn down, they’ll tell you just about anything when you meet them. But forming relationships—even working relationships—isn’t necessarily a good thing. Once, we let one borrow one of our hairnets (which were black, not white) and that person was shunned by the rest of the store for cavorting with the outsiders.
This is consistent with Costco’s cult-ish collective mindset: I was once made to wear a nametag that just said “#2” on it, and in one store a manager kept preventing me from tossing our garbage in their cans, insisting we walk our trash to the compactor in the back because we “weren’t one of them.”
You endure so much normalized humiliation on a daily basis. I haven’t even told you about the traveling massage chair sales dudes who use the chair as a way to get female employees in a compromised position and proposition them, but those guys are at every fucking store. You think nothing of telling a complete stranger of your recent suicide attempt or that you’re squirreling money away to escape an abusive husband.
It could also have been that I was just crying all the time. I was in that middle stage — much older than my coworkers but much younger than the grandmas who were, compared to me, frankly fucking metal. My knees were always giving out. My knuckles and wrist throbbed from cutting sausages all day. My skin was so salty and corrosive I swear I burned a hole through some hotel stationery just by touching it. I was lying down a lot, pretending I had something under the table or in the coolers to look for. I once fell asleep standing up and collapsed onto the grill.
But what are you going to do? You’re one of two, three if you’re lucky, “Brand Ambassadors” in the whole region (for us, the whole of Northern California). There’s no one to swap shifts with. You’re in a strange city, with a name lifted from the Bible, and if you called it quits then you’d have a three-hour bus ride back home to think about how bad this will look on a resume.
This blockhead, future employers will say. She tried doing food service after being a professional writer and she sucked at it. What an idiot. I can’t hire her.
And they wouldn’t be wrong. On the first day of my first show, without a supervisor walking me through the opening process, a part of the sample stand fell out the window of my friend’s car and broke into pieces on the highway. Like, the most important part, the base. For six weeks we held up our $1,200 custom-made sample stand on empty cardboard boxes. I remember yelling “You’re talking a lot of mad shit to someone holding a knife” to someone. I don’t remember who. But that’s probably not the point.
I’ll have you know, though, that in the eight weeks I worked this job, I only used my paid-for hotel room for weird hotel sex once, and it wasn’t even that much fun because having this job put me in a state of constant anxiety and dread.
Being a writer sucks. It doesn’t pay well, and you never know if you’re actually good at it because social media has clouded how we evaluate writing. But for all the love of worker solidarity in my heart, I hate workplaces.
I simply don’t have the capacity to process or endure rudeness. Every day, I would come to work a little more tired, a little more irritated, a little more ready to scream and throw a box of organic pesto ravioli at the first person who called me “sir” or made a joke about deporting people (which I heard a lot at the hotels I stayed in).
I’m ashamed to admit this: I would see all the other people working the sample booths and think “fuck, I have to stop this before that’s me.” And that is incredibly uncompassionate of me, not only because it flies in the face of my pro-labor politics, but also because people are more than who and where they are when you meet them. I don’t have the right to write them as tragedies; only they can decide if where they’re at is a net gain or loss.
At heart I’m a fuck-up. Maybe it’s somewhat vapid that my politics align with a more utopian future where fuck-ups like me can thrive and not starve to death or lose our healthcare simply because we’re bad at knowing how to apply for the right jobs and keeping the jobs we’re not good at. But keeping a job I know I’m not suited for, one that is driving me towards depression and self-harming behavior, for fear of losing face or owning up to an error in judgment only proves that the system works and that it’s strong and our friend. It’s none of those things.
I’m not even going into the irony of men wearing MAGA hats shopping at Costco, a company whose ethos and price structure is a lot closer to socialism than they think, because this has already run long and we gotta get to the part where I tell my boss about applying to the wrong job.
I actually told her what I thought “Brand Ambassador” meant on day one. (Internet sausage, not real sausage.) Then I stayed for two months because I respected her and appreciated her giving me a job despite being afraid I’d endure a lot of harassment for being a trans woman (I did, a lot, I even wrote a letter to Costco corporate about it). I left on good terms — as good of terms as you can be when quitting a job and saying “well, hey, if you need someone to do your social media…”
I haven’t been back to a Costco since. I can’t even take free samples at the grocery store. And I’m poor! I need every calorie of cheese I can get! But it’s still too fresh. All those memories and those stories are too close to me.
Now that my roommates have finally eaten all of the product I took home and stuffed in the back of our freezer (which took months) I may be able to finally put this behind me. It’s not like I put it on my resume or anything.
Jetta Rae is a writer, an intersectional alchemist, and a born-again heel. She can be found on twitter at @jetta_rae
