Clerks

I’m Not Even Supposed To Be Here

Clerks, starring Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson and directed by the infamous Kevin Smith, follows the day of two store clerks, Dante and Randal, and the glamorous life in retail. Dante works at a convenience store and at the start of the movie is called in because someone was sick and thus starts a not too unusual day in a retail job. Randal works across the street at a movie rental store and is just about as excited about work as Dante. Throughout the movie they deal with the normal annoying customers, salesmen, people from their past, perverts, drug dealers, all while trying to fit their own lives into the day.


Retail isn’t a very fun or interesting job. Especially when your job is working at a convenience store. No one treats you with respect, everyone thinks that you know everything just because you work there, and to top it off, you don’t get paid very much. Dante, even though he had other plans that day, comes into work because another employee got sick. His boss told him that someone would be in by noon, so he opens the store and plans to only be there for a couple of hours. Just within the first couple of minutes that Dante is there, he runs into a couple of hiccups. He has to go run across the street to grab a stack of newspapers because his store didn't get them that morning and he found that someone had stuck gum in the two padlocks covering the front windows.

“Buncha savages in this town”

-Randal Hicks

Dante, being quick thinking, ends up just making a sign and hanging it on the two metal doors covering the windows assuring the customers that the store is open.





Not too long after the store is open he runs into his first troublesome customer. First of many, who starts to preach to every customer looking to buys cigarettes that they are bad for you and that you should buy gum instead. He actually turns out to be a salesman for the gum. Dante tells him to leave but of course, he won’t and it takes Dante’s girlfriend with a fire extinguisher to break the mob up.


Dante points out a lot of things that are interesting about people who come into stores. At one point, he and Veronica are just hanging out behind the cash wrap and he has a sign next to the register saying leave what you owe, take change when applicable.





Veronica asks him how he is so trusting of customers and he replies with “If someone sees money just lying there, they will only take what is theirs because they think they are being watched.”


Not to long after, Randal comes in. He first makes a big fuss about the movie store not being open to a customer who is waiting in front of the store and bets her $20 that she won’t be able to rent the movie she came there for. He then walks into Dante’s store, grabs the key to the movie store that we find out he works in. Randal hates the customers and treats them the way he thinks they should be treated. The same way some of them treat Dante and himself.

“I could do without the people in the video store”

-Randal

“Which ones?”

-Dante

“All of them”

-Randal

There are many occasions where Randal is disrespectful to the customer whereas Dante tried to be as respectful as he can. Randal talks about “ripping” into the customers just to vent your frustration, while he does a lot while Dante denies that there are any customers that even annoy him at all until Randal convinces him otherwise. F***ing Customers.





There are many occasions where Dante and Randal try to make time for their personal lives. The first occasion is when Dante and Randal close their stores to go to a viewing which Randal ends up ruining and the second time is when they close their stores to play hockey on the roof of Dante’s store. There are multiple other times when both of them close their respected stores to hangout at the other.


After Dante finds out that he has to stay there till close, he decides to make the best of it by having his hockey game, that he had planned to have today, up on the roof of the store, even if they only get 12 minutes into the game before some guy decides to hit the only ball they had off the roof.








Along with all of this, Dante is also faced with the personal decision of what to do about his girlfriend Veronica and Caitlin, his ex who wants him back. He plans on taking Caitlin out but events occur that prevent that from happening. Veronica later finds out about Caitlin from Randal, and confronts Dante. Dante then finds out that it was Randal who told Veronica about Caitlin and thus confronts Randal which leads to a store wide brawl between the two.





They have to deal with customers being snotty, and inept while dealing with their own problems and trying to run a store. Clerks is full of laughs, especially if you have ever worked in retail. Pretty much everything in this movie is blown out of proportion but surprisingly not by much. Clerks follows the these two normal guys in a more or less normal day in the glamorous life of retail.


The entire movie is about work and the daily struggles that come with it. I work retail and I always get customers like the ones I saw in this movie. Either asking where things are when they haven’t even looked for them, or expecting us to know every single title of every single movie ever made and then get mad at us when we do not know it. This movie takes what almost every person who works retail experiences and blows it way out of proportion, which is why I found this movie so funny. I recommend this movie to everyone, especially those who work bad retail jobs because they will be able to relate to every aspect of it.





Works Cited


"Quotes for Dante Hicks." IMDb. IMDb.com, n.d. Web. 05 Jan. 2015. <http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0026904/quotes>.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9khHJTztKk Clerks Video Clip


Clerks. Dir. Kevin Smith. Prod. Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier. By Kevin Smith, Kevin Smith, and Scott Mosier. Perf. Kevin Smith, Scott Mosier, Brian O'Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Marilyn Ghigliotti, and Lisa Spoonhauer. Miramax Films, 1994. DVD.