this happened just tonight.

a guy walks up to me with the new michelle malkin book, she being a conservative author and columnist(the only asian woman i've seen that thinks internment was a really good idea)

this guy then says "how come this book isn't up front?"
i say "um, let me check, ok, it looks like we just got it yesterday and the new hardcover table you're asking about doesn't usually change until sunday or even monday night"
him "uh huh, just seems odd that a book exposing liberal conspiracies wouldn't be up front"
me "we don't, as a store, have a political philosophy"
him "(laughs) uh huh" walks away

we get people all the time pissed that we don't have their favorite book, or more copies of it, or Even more copies of it but something about the political book people always comes with this nasty air of suspicion.

as a funny note(to me at least) the book was up front, just in a different place than the table he looked on. plus i didn't get his logic that we went to the trouble of stocking, shelving, and in this case "facing out" a book that we didn't really want to sell.

bfields wrote:I'm not sure how stupid this is, but it's sure interesting. I was working at a cigar store and it was the holiday season. The store was crowded with mothers shopping for holiday cigars for Dad. So, one of our regulars comes in for his usual, a box of Hoyo Excalibur #2's. He is an older Cuban man with white hair and a sinister looking face. So I open up the box for him to inspect the cigars, and he sticks his face right into the box and takes a big inhale. He then says, "Ahhh, just like a young girl's pussy!" The store immediately empties. I rug him up for $80 worth of cigars, but we probably lost about that much from the people that booked out of there!

-Al

Made my day. Going to sleep now.

Salut!

A guy came up to me on the first floor of the bookstore I used to work in and asked for the way out. He couldn't find the way out. There was a huge escalator in the midlle of the floor, right behind him where he was stood talking to me, and we were on the first floor. Yet, he had been walking around the first floor looking for a doorway out of the building.

Does it count if they're mentally ill?




Someone came and asked for books on butchery once. I sent them to the military history department.



One hot day, the lad who ran the military history department realised when he got to work that he was wearing a brown shirt, shorts and boots, and had to spend all day amongst the Hitler-obsessives dressed as a giant member of the Hitler Youth.

whiskerando wrote:we get people all the time pissed that we don't have their favorite book, or more copies of it, or Even more copies of it but something about the political book people always comes with this nasty air of suspicion.

We got this all the time when the anti-Kerry Swift Boat book came out (I've actually put the title out of my head). It wasn't due to be released for a few weeks when all of a sudden, the Vets were all over television saying that the book was out TODAY. Except nobody told us, and nobody told our company. So we started getting calls.

"Do you have book x?"
"Our computer says it's not out for a few weeks yet."
"OH IT'S OUT, IT CAME OUT"
"Uh...okay, well, we don't have it."
"WHY NOT?!?!?"

and we'd explain that it wasn't at the warehouse yet, we could pre-order it but we weren't sure when it would get in, and they'd hang up sounding very suspicious. After about a week of that, it got really obvious.

"Do you have book x?"
"No, we haven't received it yet."
"OF COURSE YOU HAVEN'T RECIEVED IT YET BECAUSE THERE'S A LIBERAL CONSPIRACY THAT"

This is the only time I've ever hung up on a customer.

I never understood it. We're a retail store. We're capitalist. I've seen some of the most disgusting, repulsive books I could ever have imagined come through the store, and I will sell each and every one of them to you, with a smile. Because that's what we're there for.

I used to work in a fine art suppliers store (really strict on the 'fine art' front - not even any photographic paper/film), where we had a running log-book of 'questions of the day'...
this was some years ago, but I can still remember some of the classics...
"Do you sell posters which detail the natural habitat and feeding cycles of sea birds?"
"how big are your pocket size sketch books?"
this one really stumped me - "do you sell those coloured pencils the firemen use?"

as well as the genuinely misguided customers, we also had regular drunks, jakeys and day-release weirdos who drank cans of special outside the student theatre opposite, coming in occassionly to show off their fresh knife wounds and ask if we'd sell them blades. ("My day carer thinks it would be a good idea if i got into someting creative - can I buy some surgical razors?")

one particularly scary guy would always say things like "My pussy likes moist turkey" - but that's probably for a different thread...
some how, I never expected these things when I interviewed for the job.
the disregard that the everyday shopper shows for people in the customer service industry more than justifies this thread, and no, the customer is not always right, that's just an americanism which, although designed to make life easier for all (responsibility-free minions like myself included) doesn't take into acocunt the veritable assholes who get a kick out of inflicting a little bit of torture.

Alpine wrote:as well as the genuinely misguided customers, we also had regular drunks, jakeys and day-release weirdos who drank cans of special outside the student theatre opposite, coming in occassionly to show off their fresh knife wounds and ask if we'd sell them blades.

Alpine, is this shop in Edinburgh? Sounds like a familiar setting...

At work today an employee friend of mine was out in the back of "Ye Olde Reckid Shoppe" dumping out the vacuum cleaner into the dumpster.
While doing his menial task he noticed 4 gentlemen (i use this term in the most loose of senses) are getting into their raised,offroad, monster truck.

No big deal.

The driver then proceeds to dump all of the trash contained within said behemoth truck out into the parking lot. Quite a pile of drive thru wrappers,
old food, beer cans and so on and so forth.

Employee is agape in disgust and stares the said douche bags down with yon "Stinkeye". Not being a confrontational fellow.(we are record store geeks fer cryin out loud.) Well, unless you try to school us with the useless
Music store knowledge, we can get pretty ornery!

So employee catches the eye of the driver and gives him the thumbs down.

Idiot littering, Backward baseball cap, hate rock loving cocksmoker driver of the big useless offroad vehicle counters with a Zeig Heil salute and yells "white power!" while his stormtrooper buddies laugh long and hard at their unpercieved ignorance.

If i found myself to be in this fuck-tard's position i believe i could have come up with a more relevant yet scathing comeback.


The employee was white by the way, Not that it really matters.
What does matter is that the world is chock full of sincerely stupid people.
Stupid people that litter.

"why'd you make the kick drum so deep and big? can we autotune that higher?"

"what do you mean you don't use much compression? i went to recording school. i compress everything."

"Are you on Myspace?"

Bitch.

my former co-worker at a local record store got a phone call once where the caller asked if we had any queen albums before they were gay...