Eric Keshishyan

As a retail associate at The Home Depot I am hit with so many tasks and scenarios of customer service where at times it can be overwhelming. I remember a time around this time last year where the holidays came around and the lines at the store would be ridiculously long. I work at the front end as a cashier, however this was my first time working the holiday season as it was still my first year as an associate there. Normally during this time we would have enough cashiers to help out with long lines, but unfortunately we happened to be very short staffed at the time and now a lot of the responsibility fell on the ones who would show up consistently along with myself being able to work more hours than scheduled for since I am a part-time associate. Now there was one situation where I remember the line had built up all the way to the main front entrance of the store which is several yards away from the checkout area where we worked and I remember specifically having just three cashiers available that day, the head cashier along with myself and another cashier. We had all been up there non stop for many hours, but we could not take breaks that we are by law allowed to take after every two hours. After constantly helping out customers I felt I had to take it to another level so I opened up a register and began to help customers out as fast as I can on my own terms because usually in our store the self checkout registers are the ones mainly used, so after I helped people out as fast as I could I realized the line getting shorter and shorter and it just shows me that things go well when I take initiative without being told what to do specifically.