Despite what you may have heard, they don’t teach you common sense at college.  S’matter of fact, they don’t teach it in high school either.  The most profound lessons are the ones that you learn as your feet are burning on the bottom of the fiery pits of capitalistic hell, the ones that are never spoken.  Don’t ever rely on a Harvard business grad to explain how the world’s richest and most powerful nation can have the worst healthcare of ANY industrialized nation, or goes around knocking over countries as though they were gas stations like a thug in the night.  The only thing square suits know is that there’s two kinds of employees, labor and management… and it’s management’s job to squeeze every last drop of blood out of labor.  They call that “innovation,” they call that “progress.”

     Albrecht Rubicon, a bourgeois brat with a B.F.A. and a distaste for lifting heavy things had no idea how ghastly his lack of common sense was until he tried to hack it in the Darwinian world or retail.  Unable, (or possibly unwilling,) to hack it in his chosen profession, this cowardly chap found that a diploma does in fact open doors for you, even if it is to all the wrong places.  He’s hired on the spot to be a manager-in-training at a big-box specialty location of the multi-million dollar international corporation TOYS WE ARE.  Before he knows it, Albrecht finds himself neck-deep in a world where marketing is peddled as culture and the customer is always right, even if the customer is a 300-pound xenophobic army wife that swears louder than an air raid siren.

     Albrecht’s debut is a disaster.  He quickly learns that nothing makes people more miserable than the holidays, the meaning of the words, “world’s most litigious society,” that genetically modified foodstuffs coupled with stressful situations create chronic, mind bending hallucinations, that being promoted ahead of others makes you an object of hatred, and that management should never, NEVER date from the rank and file.  As if pissed off customers, shoplifters, and mutinous subordinates weren’t bad enough, Albrecht must also deal with magical gnomes, crazed comic book action figure collectors, untimely alien abductions, and a band of over-patriotic, S.U.V. driving mad-men.

     Albrecht’s determined to face it all while keeping his sanity in tact.  Can he in fact learn to make customers happy and tactfully decline returns?  Will he be able to make friends out his bitterest enemies?  Can he defend the store from shrink due to paranormal phenomena, get his employees to act like a team, and straighten out his love life and make sure the store meets its sales goal?  Read along as Albrecht and his band of perennial adolescent co-workers rise above mediocrity and struggle to take their place among a pantheon of RETAIL GODS.