A Day in the Life of a Retail Assistant #48 
Hi everyone, I hope you are all well and enjoyed St Patrick’s day! We are now all getting ready for Easter and the shop is only getting better, with new decorations and displays coming thick and fast.
Over the weekend we made some lovely shisha pipe displays to showcase everything we do. We are also working on a perfect humidor sampler so watch this space!
On Monday it was the usual business of picking a lot of online orders, myself and Porscha worked extremely hard to get these done by midday as I really wanted to get the Easter decorations out in the shop. We started taking down the St Patrick’s Day decorations and immediately set to work putting up Easter decorations. We have gone for a bit of a chocolate theme by putting our chocolate scented snuff and chocolate chip flavoured incense sticks (I have even bought an incense burner for the shop so we can all have a smell).
On Tuesday I had training to become a Fire Marshal! From 9am until around 2PM, myself and a few of my colleagues were learning everything we needed to know about evacuation procedures and the different types of fire extinguishers. It’s safe to say we all passed and are now fully trained Fire Marshals! Later on that afternoon, we rearranged the shop’s alcohol bottles to make a nicer display and altered the pipe room to put more Vauen pipes out as we will very soon have more delivered.
Wednesday came around really fast! I spent my time in the office starting shop newsletters for all of our stores as well as our own, these take a surprisingly long amount of time to complete. I also spent some time creating a new article for the C.Gars cigar library, this time it was all about nicotine pouches, I spent my time researching and taking the pictures for the article and it was very interesting to find out more about them. You can read all about it here. In the afternoon we had some Davidoff training with Anthony, former manager of Turmeaus in Norfolk but now he is an ambassador for Davidoff. He went through all of their different ranges as well as brands that Davidoff worked with including Plasencia, Camacho and Cusano. He really is a wealth of knowledge and has taught us a lot about how to sell Davidoff cigars to the public.
Thursday was a different day for Ciaran and I. Ciaran spent the day in the packing department, learning how to package up all of our different products ready to be sent out in the post, it’s safe to say he did brilliantly! Meanwhile, I was having a refresher on how to book them onto the Royal Mail system. I used to do it often a couple of years ago. However, as it had been a while, I needed to know if things had changed and for the most part they hadn’t, which is good! So I took advantage and learned how to book a parcel with the other couriers we use and they were much more difficult but I certainly got there in the end!
On Friday I did a lot more work on the shop newsletters as well as helping stock up the cigars ready for the weekend. In the afternoon I completed the Cuban stock take with Josh, it is always good for him to do it with me, so he can learn exactly where the products are and how to say their names properly!
I hope you enjoy my weekly blogs and I hope to see you all in store really soon.
So long for now
Oliver
