Mall Angels

Flashing a megawatt smile, Sopheab Yam looks right into customers’ eyes and doles out “welcomes” like nobody’s business.

Wait, this is her business.

Yam, you see, is the Discovery Channel Store’s official holiday greeter: “Hi there. Welcome. Come on in. Ho, ho, ho.”

Talk about your season’s greetings!

It’s enough to, well, get you shopping. With only 21 days till the day we unwrap the Christmas gifts--and only nine days until the start of Hanukkah--merchants are pulling out all the stops to help you get the job done: quickly, efficiently and as stress-free as possible, because, Santa baby, it’s a war out there.

And on the front lines of the frenetic forays into the Shopping Zone are the fearless, faceless, foot-weary warriors like Yam--squads of sales clerks, store managers and others who, day in, day out, carry out their patriotic duty to serve and protect your sales bill of rights.

They arrive early and stay late. They nod and listen intently--like shrinks--to complaints, pleas and requests. They smile endlessly, so much that it hurts.

But, most of all, they heed the call to search and rescue a Furby from the depths of the stockroom because the customer knows that there’s got to be an extra gremlin back there. And the customer, our brave troops are reminded, is always right.

How do they do it--maintain their cool, stay refreshed and alert and upbeat--amid the hubbub of the holiday’s daze?

We shopped for the truth at Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza--the highest-revenue retail center in the country--where a 96-acre spread is home to several hundred stores and more than 10,000 parking spaces. We learned that salesfolk stay vertical by:

* Knowing how to block out anything and everything--the noise, the loud music, the demanding customer, the squabbling parents, the screeching kids and one more repeat of Brenda Lee singing “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”

* Juicing up on java.

* Making their work fun.

* And most important of all, sacrificing style for comfy shoes.

“You gotta have happy feet,” says Bryan Dunaj, the Discovery Channel Store’s manager who averages 10 to 12 hours, sometimes more during the holiday shopping season, on his tootsies.

“We are open longer hours now, so I encourage my staff to be comfortable on their feet.” He also wants them to have fun in the store, “which will give them a good feeling about working here.”

Especially when it gets hectic.

On this particular day, the store is almost shoulder-to-shoulder with kids and grown-ups, everyone checking out the cool stuff, from interactive games to binoculars to rocks and fossils. Several boxed items have been opened by shoppers and left for dead. A safari-like hat from a back shelf hangs on a telescope.

The checkout line is growing, inching its way past bins brimming with plastic bugs. But, once at the counter, a customer can sigh and add to the bounty a box of homeopathic Stress Mints, strategically placed near the cash register.

It’s so busy that the staff will chow down on a potluck meal; everyone has brought a dish, and pizza will be delivered because they knew it would just be that kind of day-into-night.

“We’ll eat off and on, but everybody has their definite lunch period,” says Dunaj, who has been in the retail business for 24 years, most of that time at Robinsons-May, and knows the importance of such things.

By day’s end, 22 employees, including three assistant managers and the chain’s business development manager, Julie Peterson, who is pitching in, will work various shifts.

Dunaj grabs a yo-yo--one of the season’s hottest toys--and demonstrates a few moves: He walks the dog, goes around the world and does a UFO maneuver. Next, he’s by the telescopes expertly showing customers high-tech features on an LX200 model.

Last week, he spent three hours after work setting one up--an early Christmas present--at a customer’s home because “I wanted to make sure they knew how to operate it. I had dinner with them.”

For Dunaj, it’s all part of the job. It comes with the Christmas territory, just like the longer hours he’ll spend away from home and family. And when he is home, he’ll unwind with a soft drink, gardening and astronomy.

“My family knows that this time of the year is big for me and that they’re not going to see me for a while. They know ‘we’ll see dad on Christmas Eve.’ ”

Michael Jappert, manager at Bang & Olufsen, a stereo and entertainment systems shop, loves his work. But he also looks forward to getting home at night, kicking off his shoes and rubbing his pulsating feet.

“Staying on foot is hard, but you don’t really feel it when you’re busy. When I get home and sit down, that’s when I really notice how tired I am.”

A good night’s rest is the perfect remedy--that and relaxing with music--what else?--after work.

Still, it’s the people who shop in his store who rock his world. No matter that sometimes customers are impatient or downright rude or just come in to take a load off in front of the giant TV screen playing “Jurassic Park” without buying anything.

Still, he acknowledges every customer with a wave or a wink “as if we are entertaining at a party. That helps us get through the day.”

At Sephora, customers are free to test anything and everything in the cosmetics and fragrance store, which is crammed with shoppers spritzing themselves. More than 30 employees answer questions from customers about mud treatment products (big sellers) or which of the 365 shades of lipstick are the hippest for the holidays.

But no one is as popular with shoppers as James Moore--an animated salesman looking nightclub-cool in black, standing in the center of the perfume organ, a bright red spaceship-like pit filled with shelves containing 490 bottles of various fragrances. All--but rarely never more than three at a time--are used in perfume and cologne concoctions, he tells the crowd gathered around him.

Moore is no chemist; he just has good chemistry with customers. Just call him a scentologist.

He knows just about every scent combination found in fragrances made by Calvin Klein, Dior, Givenchy--even Brut, which doesn’t make the cut at this place.

“I’m looking for something spicy,” a customer says.

“How about something woodsy for me?” another asks.

The crowd grows. Moore dips paper strips into the tiny bottles, hands them to the customer cluster. Sniff, sniff. They inhale roots and glandular animal excretions from beavers and Egyptian cats. He then sends them off to try Chanel, Dolce & Gabanna, Hermes.

“We’re always on the move here,” says store director Jeanie Olivar, catching the Moore show. Olivar will manage 34 employees during the holiday season and put in several 12-hour workdays herself. But she and her staff agree the work is “relaxing.”

Relaxing? we ask. Work? In a mall? At Christmas?

“It’s a happy job. It’s real fun,” she says, standing near the spaceship, Moore inside it like a kid at Disneyland. She just might have a point.