In general, the Central Park Conservancy is a good organization. They actually are the ones responsible for the park not looking like a 1980’s shit hole (not the Park’s Dept). The CPC is a non-profit ran by wealthy donors who live around the park. There is only one major problem with them and its their retail outpost called, THE CENTRAL PARK DAIRY.
I worked there as the only stockroom guy for a little more than a year and as a job it had it own brand bullshit attached to it. Here is why it sucked to work there:
NO FOUNDATION
As I said, I was a stockroom guy so I basically maintained the inventory single handedly. The stockroom; however, was basically a WW1 trench dug into the ground and bricked up some with the goofy store/cottage built above it. Soild, mud, and bugs were everywhere down there. Bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling were the only light sources. Truly the stuff of horror movies.
NO VENTILATION
In the summer (when the shop does the most business) there is no ventilation aside from the front door. They have AC units on the floor that don’t work so its even hotter in the damn shop than outside.
SMELLY Asst. MANAGER.
Ugh, I had one pain the ass Asst. Manager while I worked there who always liked the door open even in the winter time. I didn’t realize the reason until one day when we had them closed. She sweats and stinks like a pig in even mild heat (see reason two for added effect). She was just funky as hell. So it was basically a choice between freeze to death or die of suffocation when she was working.
NICKLE AND DIMING EVERYONE
They would charge everyone a shit-ton for even the dumbest item and expect the workers to guard them with their lives. Sorry, but no way I was gonna tackle a guy because he walked out with a paper map that we are charging 10 bucks for!
THE IMPOSSIBLE TASKS
For some ungodly reason they would get the products delivered to an office outside of the park and I being the only stockroom guy would have to push the damn thing on a hand-truck all the way from the street into the park, uphill, all the way to the shop at mid-park. Do that in a NYC blizzard and you will understand what I mean by the impossible tasks.
CREEPY MANAGEMENT
There was one manager who for some reason decided to randomly take me on a car trip to get some more product he had at another location and the creepy fucker was giving me “the eyes” the whole time along with awkward silences. And I had to come at him like “What are you staring at, dude?!” I was waiting for a creepy thigh touch so I could commence to beat his creepy old brains in.
POOR NAME OF LOCATION
They kept the old name of the place “the dairy” even though there is no freaking milk or ice-cream there. So you have to deal with lots of random people going “Where is the ice-cream?! This is supposed to be the dairy.”
IMAGINE
I used to think “Imagine” by John Lennon was a great song; until, I heard it played on repeat for 8 hours a day, every day for over a year. Now, I am convinced they should use it to torture POWs and suspected terrorists.
ALL THE WORST TOURISTS
We would get every kind of the worst tourists imaginable. From the douchebag that tried to take a public dump next to the shop in the bushes, to the assholes who let their kid run rampant in the store. There was no shortage of foreign and domestic dimwits coming through every day.
Working for CPC was truly one of the worst experience ever. There were times I would hide out in the stockroom trench pit under the bare bulb and brood about the nothing that was my life at the time. So glad that that chapter in my life was so brief.