path: root/tnf.txt

In 1995 I dropped out of college for the first time[^1]. I had made it through three semesters, which was pretty good I thought, especially considering how much college had been in the way of my life, which at the time consisted mainly of hiking, climbing, surfing and generally living outdoors. It wasn't an expensive lifestyle by any means. I shared a single bedroom trailer a few blocks from the beach (location, location, location) for which we paid, I believe, $220 each. Everything I needed save the mountains and desert was within walking distance.

My biggest expense was gear. Rock climbing gear especially tended to be both expensive and, due to the often brutal conditions it existed in, short lived. It was all good and well to live on bean burritos, but smart climbers did not try to overextend the life of ropes and cams. 

Looking around for ways to fund this lifestyle I did what countless others before and after me had done -- I got a job at the nearest outdoor retailer that would have me.

In my case that turned out to be The North Face[^2]. My girlfriend through high school had worked at the Gap so I new the retail clothing drill more or less and I definitely knew outdoor gear. I ate, slept and breathed it. Aside from obscure punk and hardcore, there was little I knew more about that retail gear. I turned in an application and after one short interview, got the job. 

I was quite proud of myself. I had set out to do something and just did it. I won't try to unpack the privilege going on here, I was 19, I thought I had skills. I got some inclining of how little skills and how much unearned privilege I enjoyed later when my manager Kristine confessed to me over after work drinks that I was horrible at interviewing and she almost didn't hire me because I never looked her in the eye. But she thought I was cute, so I got the job. 

I also go the job in part because it was nearly summer and half the regular employees would be departing soon for seasonal work around the west, guiding white water trips, leading climb expeditions and otherwise doing the sorts of things that people (and The North Face itself) expected North Face employees to do.

This was back a bit, when The North Face (hereafter TNF) still appealed primarily to those spending their lives outdoors. I was selling gear mainly to fellow hikers, climbers and campers. Most of them didn't need the expensive gear they were buying, but then again nobody did until they did and then you life depended on it. Or so we all told ourselves. I just the other day sold a jacket I bought there 20 years ago that I had literally never put on outside.

Still, back then a job at TNF was a highly coveted thing for someone with my aspirations. I got the job because I wanted one of the four season tents. I dumped probably 25 percent of what I made back into gear and you know the one thing I never bought? A tent. Naturally.

While the perks were good and the pay enabled me to get by and do what I wanted to do, the job itself was little different that what my ex-girlfriend had been doing at the Gap. It was retail clothing sales. There were a few things I enjoyed about it. I enjoyed helping out the occasional thru-hiker calling from somewhere along the PCT in need of new gear or a warranty repair. The TNF back then had the best warranty in the business. If an item could be repaired it was repaired. If it couldn't be repaired, it was replaced. Very few questions asked. In fact employees like me could make the call, though the ideal things to do was send it in to the warranty department. But for PCT thru-hikers, I just sent out a new bit of gear, sometimes without even seeing their old one. This was before the internet; people were more trusting.

Another part of the job I enjoyed was the gear testing. It didn't happen very often, but a few times, maybe four or five times in my nine months working there  the San Francisco headquarters would send out some prototype piece of gear they were thinking of making into a product. They'd send out a few tents to all the stores or a dozen jackets and the employees would take them out on their next trip. On one hand it was free gear, on the other it was possibly defective gear. It added a bit of spice to your trip.

I have no idea how other stores did it, but at our store the gear shipments would generally come in on Thursdays. If there was gear for us to test we would all look over the schedule, see who had the weekend off, sometimes call unsuspecting fellow employees and try to switch shifts and then make a group trip to the desert. 

After work on Friday we'd meet up at the Goat Hill Tavern, a terrible, brightly lit bar with sawdust and peanut shells scattered all over the floor, chosen chiefly because it was across the street from the store. One unlucky soul would be the designated driver and the rest would proceed to drink themselves silly. When the bar closed we would all pile in Roy's wood paneled Dodge minivan and high tail it out to Joshua Tree National Park. We'd get into the campground around three or four in the morning (yeah, we were those people), in varying states of exhaustion, bleary-eyed drunkness and sometimes already hungover. We would then proceed to do any tent testing. If anyone could get a prototype tent set up in the dark, it passed muster. We'd give it rave reviews. Most of the time though we just threw sleeping bag in the dirt and crawled in for a few hours of sleep under the Milky Way before the blazing desert sun found us early the next morning. Then it was a full day of hungover climbing and a long drive back to the beach.

The other thing I remember about working at TNF was the incredible amount of downtime. In fact, if my memory is correct there were only about 100 customers the entire time I worked there[^3]. There were stretches on mid-week afternoons when no one would come in for four hours or more.

There was a small climbing wall which we regularly reconfigured in a futile effort to challenge ourselves, but by and large we read books and magazines. There 

I got a great many other things out of working at TNF, including things I would never have expected, like connections to some branch of the Mexican mob in Santa Ana and an introduction to really good Thai food, Thai food so good I wouldn't taste better until I finally made it to Thailand. But 

[^1]: I would drop out four more times from three different schools before finally graduating from the University of Georgia, 12 years and 3000 miles from where I started.
[^2]: I had originally hoped to get a job at a privately owned shop named Adventure 16, but they were not hiring at the time I was looking.
[^3]: This is no doubt a slight exaggeration. However the store I worked at did eventually close for lack of business and in fact entire shopping center did the same a bit later. Last time I was in the area it was largely abandoned and in the process of being converted into loft apartments.