Picture a young child's dream, and I don’t mean a place full of unicorns, candy, and rainbows. Instead there is everything you might want to make it feel like a special holiday everyday -- the glitter covered nail polish sets, the cheap RC cars, the six different types of fake poop -- only here every item must be paid for, for only five dollars or less.The front of the store is a gate, a place where parents hoard to feel separated from what is going on in the back of the store, the zoo, where children run free leaving scraps of their half opened toys, melted McDonalds McFlurries, and sometimes if you get lucky, a snot covered tissue. The floor is camouflaged with toys, that have fallen from their spots on shelves and racks. Aisles everywhere are lined with the wrong products, Do-It-Yourself art sets in the electronics, and birthday cards hidden under T-shirts. Put your hand in the stuffed animal bin and you risk pulling out a phone case packaging from a customer who thought five dollars was just too much to pay, and this is unfortunate because profiting is our goal here. The regulation signs hanging in the snack aisle scolds customers not to eat or drink in our store, but there is always some opened candy, or left over fast food wrappers found around the store. You learn how to pick up a napkin without touching the foul remains of what it is laced with, knowing the culprit who left it, is not coming back. 

The break room summarizes what Five Below is like, hectic. In fact, there really is not break room unless you call a small table and chair crammed to the wall in the storage room a place for a break. Work over a five hour shift, you must take a 30 minute break. Rather, the function of this time is used to hide away from the children and recoup for the next four hours of your shift. You can find freedom, and escape to find food from a restaurant nearby in this time, or stay in the back, where all there is, is a mini-fridge and microwave that seems like it had been picked up off the side of the road, and not used since. Almost everyone here despises children -- or maybe it’s the parents who raised them to act like such savages-- but there’s something about small humans who do nothing but yell, run wild, and complain, doesn’t spark the enjoyment of Five Below employees. Sometimes the mama bears are worse than the cubs. I complain to one of my fellow co-workers that I don’t understand how parents can stand this. “Well, I don’t understand how after this whole show, the parents still spend 50+ dollars on useless toys,” he responds in a tone of sarcasm. Here we feel like zoo-keepers, having to maintain these animals from destroying what we work for. We fold and re-fold shirts, pick up items off the floor and rearrange sets, only to know that in less than an hour, it will look worse than it did before.