Hannah Hawes, Shop Assistant

by Admiral Biscuit

Prologue

Hannah Hawes, Shop Assistant
Prologue
Admiral Biscuit

Jim Jam's General Store is packed to the brim with stuff. Stuff that you're intimately familiar with, since you're his sole employee.

It's not a bad job, really. It's much like working retail back on Earth, except that customers are generally more polite. Unlike your experiences working human retail, ponies are rarely insufferable bastards who think that the world owes them something.

Jim Jam has interesting ideas about business, little tidbits he picked up here and there back when he was a young calf making his way in the wide wide world of Equestria with just a cart full of trade goods that he towed from one town to the next.

His first important lesson—trains were faster than a minotaur pulling a cart. There was no use in carrying anything that could be cheaply mail-ordered, a philosophy he’d carried forward in his general store.

Since you'd spent your formative years on Earth and were well-versed in the wonders of Amazon, you had to agree with that point.

He also thought that if ponies had to work for things, they'd want them more, which was why he liked to put the items he considered the most valuable and appealing on shelves that were far above a normal pony's reach. He thought that when you were called upon to get them down for ponies who wanted them, you could spend the time extolling the virtues of that particular item, which would practically guarantee a sale.

There were two problems with that idea of his. First, two thirds of the ponies who came in could either use magic or simply fly up to get what they wanted. The other third sometimes didn't even notice things that were on shelves high above their heads; if they did, they usually asked some other pony to get it down, rather than a salesgirl.

Your reach had gotten you the job.

Not only were your hands useful for working the monstrous Tauran cash register, but you could easily reach most of the shelves. For those few shelves which were too tall, there was a stepstool. Like most things that had been built for minotaurs, it was incredibly heavy but also incredibly stable.

You’d already put two boxes of snow globes up on the shelf, all neatly faced. They were clever little clockwork units that had a music box built into the base, and the mechanism also ran a tiny pump that shot the faux snowflakes into the air.

You glance down the aisle to make sure that there weren't any customers looking, and then reached inside your shirt to adjust your bra strap. It was ponymade, because Earth imports were stupidly expensive, and it liked to slide off your shoulders. Other than that, it was pretty comfortable.

“Hey, Hannah?”

“Yeah?” You grab at the last box and by the time Jim Jam comes around the corner, you're carefully arranging the last of the snowglobes.

“When you're done with those, put the boxes away in the back room and then tidy up some in there, okay? There's some candy I couldn't sell that we should probably get rid of before mice move in.”

“Candy, got it.” You give the shelf a last look and decide that everything's in order. Sometimes you like to crouch down a little bit and get a pony-eye view, just to make sure that the display looks attractive from a pony perspective.

This time you don't bother. You take the boxes to the back room and stack them with all the other boxes, then go back to the aisle for the stepstool.

The stockroom smells of dust and very faintly of fish. It used to be part of the fish market until the dock area gentrified—that's apparently something that pony cities do, too. Jim Jam had bought the building at just the right time, when its value was as low as it would ever get.

He lived upstairs, where he could always keep an eye on his store.

Your first weeks in the stockroom were overwhelming. He'd ask you to get something and you'd have to ask him where it was. There was no rhyme or reason to the arrangements, and the few boxes that were labeled were in dozens of different languages, most of which you didn’t know.

You're no better at Anadolu or Galician or Manipuri than you were when you got to Manehattan, but at least you know where to look for things now.

It doesn't take you too long to find the candy. It's mostly weird Equestrian stuff that you've never heard of before, and oddly enough a few clones of human candy that apparently weren't well-received. There's a dozen bags of faux m&ms—they’ve got horseshoes printed on them instead of ms. They're all various shades of green, and claim to have alfalfa centers. You're not willing to bite into one to find out.

You've taken a couple of trips to the garbage cans out back when you hit paydirt—there's a bag of Jolly Ranchers in there. Assorted flavors, and the packaging is intact. You're pretty sure that Jolly Ranchers never go bad, and it'll be a nice taste of home . . . assuming that there aren't any weird pony flavors in there.

A quick look at the package indicates that they're the normal flavors that you know and love, so you set them off to the side—maybe he'll let you have them.

Comments

[Conflicting views]

Anadolu or Galician or Manipuri

Anadolu?
I know where Galicia and Manipur are, but I don't know that one.

[DreamKitsune]

You glance down the aisle to make sure that there weren't any customers looking

"It’s about time to open."

If they hadn't opened yet there wouldn't have been any customers to look.

[Admiral Biscuit]

8895565

If they hadn't opened yet there wouldn't have been any customers to look.

They could have been looking in through the front window?

Correction made, thank you!

[Walabio]

I finally found the time to start this. I have no idea how you can have a dayjob and write so much.

[Admiral Biscuit]

8937916
I finally found the time to start this.

I have no idea how you can have a dayjob and write so much.
Well, I'm a fairly fast typer, mostly. And I have a lot of ideas. And not a whole lot to do when I'm not at work.

And I also write some stuff when I am at work, mostly on my weekend job.

Heck, I wrote about 10k words on two stories while at EFNW.