A Week in the Life of a Retail Assistant 
Hi everyone I’m Oliver and I work in our Norfolk Cigar and Whisky store, you may have seen me behind the front desk or even had the pleasure of me serving you! Welcome to my blog. I am going to be sharing with you everything I get up to and any interesting customer interactions I have. I can tell you this, there is never a dull day in our retail store.
A traditional Monday consists of picking online orders… all day! We get so many orders over a weekend that we spend most of our Mondays here just picking orders. I did manage to find some time however to write an article for the C.Gars Cigar Library about “The History of Japanese Whisky” which you can view here. We had a few of our regular customers visiting as well who I’m always happy to see. The biggest news this week is we have Mac Baren pipe tobacco back in stock!! Since lockdown in 2020 this tobacco has been extremely scarce and I wasn’t sure we would ever see again, so I was astounded upon picking orders when I noticed we had an order going out for it, this order has been on back order since December 2021! Waiting a year for his pipe tobacco, now that’s dedication, I’m sure he will be over the moon this week when it finally arrives.
On Tuesday I spent the first hour again picking orders (which is a common theme), afterwards I updated the images on the screens in our Cuban humidor to promote different brands to our customers, this weeks’ gems included the beautiful Orchant Seleccion cigars and some Adorini accessories. It was another busy day in the shop but in between customers I was able to start taking pictures for my next article.
On Wednesday once I finished my pickings I was needed by our Royal Mail team to help book on our online orders (Jack of all trades me), once caught up, I carried on with a task I have been doing on and off for months which is doing website pictures for cigar samplers, working alongside our humidor manager it helps me recognise cigars that I didn’t even know we had! At the end of the day I received the amazing news from our director that I would be in charge of the standard cigar subscriptions! Which means I get to decide which cigars our subscribers get each month!
Thursdays are always an interesting day for me as I’m usually on my own in the shop so I really take the time to get our lovely shop up to scratch. This time I have one of our apprentices with me who is trying to learn the trade and gain as much knowledge as she can! Stocking up pipes and tobacco is a common theme on Thursdays and Fridays as our online orders take them in droves. However this Thursday I was learning how to edit the leaflets for subscriptions ready for everyone to see.
Friday, the best day of the week! Lovely seeing a few regulars pop in as each time you get to exchange stories and learn more about our customers lives and get updates on how things are going. Fridays always seem to be the busiest day of the week but I love it as I’m always on the go and the day flies by.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading what I have got up to this week and if there’s anything you want to know about feel free to email me at [email protected]
So long for now 🙂
