“Season's greetings from Jingle Hell” Special to The Globe and Mail, Dec. 18, 2004, L16 

If you're one of those customers whining about the travails of holiday shopping, you should consider what it's like on the other side of the counter.

Don't be fooled by the placid smiles and the gleaming countertops. The retail sales environment is a jungle this time of the year. When the carols start spinning and the glittering ornaments appear, the temperature in Jingle Hell goes up.

“It's supposed to be a happy time of year,” Guess co-manager Chris Morgan at the Yonge and Dundas Streets store says with a sigh.

“But everyone's scrambling, doing their last-minute shopping for New Year's outfits or their gift-giving lists, and the holiday cheer is lost.”

“Service people are an easy target,” says Kingi Carpenter, owner of Peach Berserk in Toronto. “It's a falsehood that the customer's always right. It's so unfair — they throw that in our face.”

Kim (not her real name) has been a luxury-goods saleswoman on Toronto's Bloor Street strip since 1995. She once found a sealed chocolate-flavoured condom in a handbag a customer tried to return. “Madam,” she told the customer, “it appears someone put something in the bag when you weren't looking, because I don't believe it's one of our gifts with purchase.”

Antonio Aiello's worst day on the job was last year during the holiday season. Aiello has been a sales associate at jewellery kiosk Gypsy in the Yorkdale Shopping Mall in Toronto for four years. One night a customer came in at 11, and left four long hours later. She wanted to swap her own jewellery with Gypsy's stock.

“She thought it was a flea market,” Aiello says. “It was the worst day of my life. I wanted to quit.” When she came back this year and asked for him, Aiello hid underneath the booth and his colleagues told her that he had quit.

Customer aggression, says Alicia Grandey, assistant professor of industrial-organizational psychology at Penn State, results in reduced efficiency, and increased burnout and absenteeism.

“Employers need to reassure employees in private that they are not always at the mercy of customer whims and that they are just as valued as the customer,” Grandey says.

A 2004 study appearing in the Journal of Organizational Behavior also concluded that employers need to support employees dealing with pushy customers.

But sometimes it's fellow employees who create the most tension. Back when I worked at a high-end store in Toronto, I was careful to watch my back during the holidays because the competition to make a sale was fierce.

One colleague ripped the hold tag with my name off a handbag and processed it as her own. When I confronted her, she insisted that the tag must have fallen off into the garbage can.

When another sales associate returned a pricey item twice under someone else's employee number, tensions escalated to the point that she fainted.

“You have to stake your claim and sit on it,” Kim says. “The whole nature of the biz is to create that kind of acrimony because that will then drive the business.”

If you don't believe it, walk into your nearest chichi store and pick up the most expensive item you can find. Smile and make eye contact with the sales associate, then pay for it in the next sales area. Return 10 minutes later to watch the tears, venom and clumps of hair fly.

“It's a world of the piranhas and somebody's got to die,” Kim says.

Then there's the long hours and the strain that seasonal employees put on regular staff. Hired to take the pressure off, they can actually increase the work load because they aren't trained properly, Debbie says. “The stores invest nothing in these people and so they get nothing in return.”

Everyone has their cracking point. For Debbie, it's the music. “They are playing carols the week before Halloween, so by the time Christmas rolls around, I am ready to shoot myself when I hear Jingle Bells,” she says.