June 27, 2006 - Window Job Shopping

If you’re looking for a job in Santa Barbara, you're in luck. In the last 24 hours (at the time this is being written) 59 Santa Barbara based jobs have been advertised on Craigslist. If you’re a nanny, a computer scientist, or a payroll clerk there’s something there for you. But, as the dedicated staff of edhat.com found out yesterday, you don’t need to log on to find work. You don’t even need to pick up the newspaper.

All you have to do is go downtown - listen to the music of the traffic in the city, linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty, and look for help wanted signs in store windows. It turns out that the windows on State Street provides equal employment opportunities to any website.

There’s a big demand for service employees these days, retail and otherwise. And there are a whole bunch of stores, restaurants, coffee shops, and copy shops waiting for you to walk in the door, fill out an application, and talk to the manager. Sure on-line is big, but in-store is much bigger. And businesses need help selling their goods and services to live customers with expendable income in their pockets and unfulfilled needs.

Of course, the stores don’t want to hire just anyone. At the Gap, for instance, they want motivated, enthusiastic, committed, and exceptional people. At American Eagle they want people (like you) who are genuine, hard-working, and passionate. At Brookstone the ideal candidate is unique, dedicated, fun, energetic, professional, and a leader. Are you creative and professional? Then Celadon House wants to hire you. Or, are you friendly and have basic knowledge of cameras? If that’s the case Russ Camera has a spot behind the cash register with your name on it. Anthropologie is looking for talented individuals. And at Chico’s they want their employees to be energetic.

American Apparel, a new store that will be opening at the spot that was Left At Albuquerque before they left (moving to where Ma Dolce Vita was), is recruiting intelligent, friendly, and hard-working people.

And if you are happy and peppy and bursting with love - and you have a good work ethic, too - the promise of more than just a time clock awaits you. Most stores offer employee discounts. Some offer even more. At L’Occitane they claim that every day is a trip to France. At Express they claim that work there is like a party. You get paid to party – that’s right up there with being a beer taster at a brewery or the judge in a bikini contest.

Yesterday, the dedicated staff strolled from Sola to Haley and back (with a detour through Paseo Nuevo) and counted the number of job listing in the window. We found 52, a Craig List worth of opportunity all in nine short blocks. As part of our job we had to make a few judgment calls. We decided to count each of the three “love what you do” ads in front of the three separate but equal downtown Starbucks. And under a similar interpretation of the rule, the two identical Gap ads in front of THE Gap and Baby Gap where counted as two separate signs.

And, in case you care, we also decided that Italy shouldn’t have been awarded the game deciding penalty kick at the end of their World Cup match.

Apparently our dedicated subscribers are all gainfully employed or independently wealthy, i.e they don’t do much job hunting. Most contestants guessed way low. SBGolfin’s guess of 51 was the only guess that hit the green. He is another repeat winner to claim a prized t-shirt in the last week.

We took pictures of all 52 Help Wanted signs

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