Book Review: Malled

Caitlin Kelly was a successful journalist who never thought much about the people she interacted with daily: retail workers who sold her everything from food to clothing. Then the newspaper jobs started drying up and she was faced with the need for supplemental income, and she found herself on the other side of the cash register.

Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail is a memoir of the two-plus years Kelly spent working at a large outdoor clothing store in a New York shopping mall. She turns her journalist's attention to both the difficult working conditions and the satisfaction many retail workers find despite those conditions, the dysfunctional culture of large corporations and the contrasting example of small family businesses, the wealthy customers at her high-end store and the coworkers who often live in a state of endless debt and near-poverty. The book is full of things you might expect - stories about difficult customers and unreasonable demands from faceless corporate officers - and things you might not, such as her anecdotes that reveal what it's like to work in journalism. Malled is informative, maddening, and enlightening, and might change the way you look at that next person behind the register. -Michelle (Sunset)