In case it isn’t already obvious to you, I work at a Chain Name Bookstore. I love working there. I love helping people find new books and music to enjoy. I love the variety of people I encounter. But I HATE a good portion of our customers who behave terribly while in our store and get away with it. And the following post is my rant on the matter. Ignore or be entertained at will.
Someone on an informal Internet forum for employees of my company posted a list of behaviors that people only seem to do in bookstores, and nowhere else. This person is on to something, and I thought i’d paraphrase.
Do you wait in the checkout line at the hardware store to ask a question? No! You go to customer services, or find someone on the floor. Clearly the person working the register is working the register, and you wouldn’t like it if some idiot waited in line ahead of you to ask a question and stop the line from moving, would you? And yet people do it all the time. If I have no one in line, sure I can help you. But if there’s a line, the person at the register only wants your money. Leave them alone until you have the product you want to buy.
You don’t go to Walgreens, grab a stack (STACK!) of magazines or the latest James Patterson mass market and sit in the pharmacy area for hours reading, do you? NO! You BUY them. LIBRARIES are places you can sit for hours. They’re government funded. There is no exchange of money. At a bookstore, we are in the business of SELLING things to you. I’ve even read books that advise you to go to the bookstore, grab a stack of magazines, and sit in the cafe for a few hours (for various reasons), and I want to SMACK the author for perpetuating this bad behavior! If you’re just coming to the store to sit and read, you’re taking space from paying customers, and using product so no one will want to buy it. This means we lose money, and the economy continues to tank.
Will someone please tell me why they think it’s acceptable for a person or group of people to camp out at the bookstore and have a picnic with food from outside the store’s cafe? I really don’t get this. I once had a pair of business ladies bring their “power lunches” to the store, drag chairs from the cafe to the OTHER SIDE OF THE FLOOR and proceed to have a pleasant hour of conversation and eating. Seriously, WHAT THE HECK?! You don’t go to Applebee’s with food from McDonald’s, do you? In addition, why do you leave a mess for me to clean up after all that? Seriously? No, if you’re going to sit in our cafe for a few hours, at least buy something from it! A coffee! A cookie! Anything to pay “rent” on the chair and table you’re taking up. And please be nice to the baristas. They have enough cranky people to deal with. (They get the brunt of it, I think, because they deal in caffeine.)
Ooh, and then there’s the people who think “retail” means “unpaid baby-sitter.” This hasn’t been as much of a problem at my current location, but at my last store, a woman brought in her two kids (both under the age of 10), left them in the kids department, sat herself in a chair out of eyesight, and proceeded to talk on her cellphone for a few hours, ragging on about her impending divorce and idiot husband to whatever friends she had on the other end. I wanted to maim this woman. Her kids were terrors and made a disaster area of the kids department (clearly in need of discipline and attention), and were all but ignored by their mother. My manager had to talk to her two or three times before they finally left. They came in again the following week, but we were all better prepared and told those kids to stay with their mother. We were militant. They were not to leave her side. They didn’t stay long. And were essentially banned from the store.
I do watch out for those little ones who run as fast as lightning for the door, but their parents are never far behind. But you DO NOT let your children run amuck in the kids department, messing up our products to no one else will buy them, and then leave a mess for us to deal with. How would you like it if I went to your office, took a box of your letterhead, tossed it all over the floor, and took your dry-erase markers and drew all over everything? Then left it for you to pick up? You wouldn’t like that, would you? Well, don’t do that in my work, either.
And you know what I really hate? People who decide that the person helping them find a book is their therapist. I don’t want to hear about your marital problems. I don’t want to hear about your kidney stone. I don’t want to hear about all the financial trouble you’re in. I don’t want to hear about the kid you kicked out of the house. These are not things to tell the bookseller. We have other people to wait on besides you. We can’t offer advice. We just sell the books. If you come in regularly, are nice, and buy things once in awhile, we could become friends. But until then, keep your problems to yourself.
Sigh. I feel better. I didn’t even had a bad day today, I just had things building up that need to come out in a constructive manner. Please be kind to the wage slaves. A few less idiot customers makes a better day for everyone.
