Caitlin Kelly, born in Canada, has for some time lived and worked in the United States. There are two Kellys present in Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail: one is the newspaper reporter fed up with getting mistreated by management despite her respected reporting and, finally, a casualty of the shrinking print media, “sliced out of my career with surgical speed” in July 2006. Not able to “face another year of all-day solitude” as a freelancer, she goes to work part-time for a North Face outlet in a mall near her home in New York State. The experience allows her to garner anecdotes from colleagues while learning what it is like on the floor level in retail. It is also a good opportunity for her to use her research skills, and Kelly provides useful and interesting background and statistics on how retail merchandising operates.
“Retail, certainly at our low level, doesn’t really lend itself to introspection or philosophizing,” writes Kelly. Ignoring her...
Jeff Bursey’s literary criticism has appeared in American Book Review,the Review of Contemporary Fiction and the Literary Review, among other publications. His first book, Verbatim: A Novel (Enfield and Wizenty, 2010), is a satire, set in a parliament, told only in lists of members, letters between bureaucrats and political debates.
Advertisement
Advertisement