Retail workers are reaching their wits’ end with Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You.”
Anyone who has worked in retail can attest to the headaches that come from listening to the store’s playlist loop six times within an eight-hour shift. Christmastime only exacerbates this issue. Hearing once-beloved Christmas songs over and over this season ruins them for retail workers. Familiarity truly does breed contempt.
Kiyah Coleman, an employee at an appliance store in London, told The Wall Street Journal that as soon as she hears those haunting opening chimes, she finds respite in the stock room.
Despite retail workers’ contempt, Mariah Carey continually tops the charts each year. Newsweek reported earlier this month that “All I Want For Christmas Is You” was the number one most-streamed Christmas song on Spotify of all time.
Last year, the song hit a milestone by joining the Spotify Billions Club, a collection of songs that have hit one billion streams. This is an exclusive club featuring only 335 songs. Spotify has only been around since 2006, meaning, on average, these songs must have accrued over 62 million streams per year since the streaming service’s founding.
Haters of the song have even gone to Change.org to get people to sign petitions — three at last count — to ban the song from the radio. One petition states, “‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ has become a symbol of holiday dread and cabin fever due to it’s (sic) extensive airplay on both holiday radio and store overhead music.”
The maker of the petition claims a “staggering percentage of people during the holiday season deal with extreme annoyance and aggression thanks to the mere exposure effect from which constant exposure to sound can trigger mental breaks.”
Laura Garrison, general manager of Dallas bar Stoneleigh P, has gone so far as to ban the song in her bar before December 1. She also enforces a rule that during December, the song can only be played once per night, protecting her own ears and those of her patrons and staff. There’s even a sign on the wall as a reminder.
“She’s the ruler of Christmas and I’m the ruler of this bar,” Garrison said. “These four walls is mine, baby.”
Bartenders are equipped with a remote that enables them to skip the song if anyone tries to play it before December 1.
“We hear those little twinkles,” Garrison said, describing the song’s intro, “and it’s done.”
Carey reacted playfully to the bar’s policy by tweeting a photo of herself on a medieval battlefield, wearing armor, sword in hand. Although the tweet had no text, the implicit message was that she’s ready to go to “war” over the song. Her tweet had fans laughing and cheering her on.
Listen to the original All I Want For Christmas Is You instead. It’s much better and never grows old and stale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8HWHd0EYJA