Well, needless to say, I got a lot of experience in the retail market. So I went away to college and became an English major, and once I graduated, I ended up in the expected place. No, not a bar, drowning my jobless sorrows. I ended up working at a bookstore. And let me just say, you get the bottom of the barrel in the way of questions at a bookstore. You know, those people that have only ever walked into a place selling books so they can pick something up for required school reading. Those people where you're slightly shocked they could read the list to figure out what three books they needed for their required reading. The dregs of society come into a bookstore at sometime or another. I once actually had this conversation with a customer:
Incompetent Customer: Excuse me, I'm looking for this one book, and I was wondering...what is Shakespeare's last name?
Me: *Incredulous look* Shakespeare...
IC: Yeah, him, what's his last name?
Me: His last name is Shakespeare.
IC: Are you sure, maybe there's another Shakespeare?
Me: *Incredulous look* Nope, just one Shakespeare.
IC: Well, I guess I'll look, but if it's not the right person, I can bring it back, right?
Me: *Nods head and walks away slowly for fear of another question*
Really. That actually happened. I swear I would have at least one conversation a day that would make me feel like my IQ dropped by a number of points. Now, there are plenty of intellectuals that come into bookstores, I enjoy helping those people, or people who want to find good books for their kids...but ohhh the rest of them. I mean, being asked about that "one book that's about that old dude and he's in a boat with a fish or something." Yes...they did mean The Old Man and the Sea. The person who used this line, had actually just finished reading the book in class, and wanted the cliff notes as they didn't really "get" the book. I never would have guessed. Shocking really.
But within retail, I've discovered that, beyond your average, fairly competent and decently polite person, there are several types of customers you will run into while at a bookstore (or while working at one).
One of the ones that I think pops up in the South more than anywhere else (though I'm not saying we have the market cornered on these), is the Religious Reader. These people are the ones that want to tell you the beauty of their religion as soon as you bring them to their book, regardless of it's in New Age or Christian Fiction. They also are the ones to become offended the easiest. I once had a man come in and ask for our religion section. I asked him if he meant general religion, Christian living/fiction, or New Age. Evidently this was not a proper question to ask, as I was lectured for a solid ten minutes on how "Of course" he meant Christianity because all other religions are...well, I'll clean up what he said, and just say he thought they were wrong. I've also had customers that wanted to know why I never read books like The Secret, and would then tell me how these books have indeed changed their lives, at which point I start desperately looking around for the heaviest book I can find to drop on my head, causing, hopefully, hearing loss, or at least enough of an injury to excuse me from their presence.
The next customer type we got plenty of were the Know It Alls. These people know exactly what book they want and where it should be and think you obviously have the IQ of a small electrical appliance for not immediately recognizing the name of the obscure french play they need for their class on how to be a misanthrope. Really, everyone who doesn't know the social ramifications for Sir Whoseit's book truly have no reason to be alive. They are obviously incompetent.
These people, while annoying, are not nearly as bad as the MUST KNOW NOW shopper. These people tend to think that you should know the title and location of every book in the store and God Forbid that the one copy in the store was sold earlier that day and the computer hasn't updated the quantity. They don't care that it really isn't in the store...They want their Damn book NOW! And Heaven Help you if you actually bother to spend ten minutes looking for said book on the off chance that there might be a rogue copy lingering around just to make you look like an idiot when it's found...you obviously are just waisting this persons time, and you look like an idiot anyways.
That group is really a more of a rabid off-shoot of the ever popular Last Minute Student. These are the teens, college students, or parents who come in the day they're suppose to start reading the newest book for class. These people really have no concept that the teacher might not have called the book store and told us that we need to be sure we have eleventy billion copies of Cold Sassy Tree so that every student can have one. When that parent shows up and you don't have any copies of that book left...may God have mercy on your soul...as no one can bitch, moan, and complain, as well as someone on the verge of an assignment. Especially parents, who are already pissed that their child/wildebeest didn't mention before ten minutes ago that they had to have the entirety of War and Peace read the next day, and must have a thirty minute presentation complete with props ready. I mean, that's totally my fault, right? Right?
Now, I love kids as much as the next person, but teens are always a little harder to work with. I mean, what says difficult like someone who hates authority for authority's sake? Now, I was one of those kids (I, surprisingly, never got suspended, but I was a smart ass through and through), so I can't hate too much, but the Manga Kids, for some reason, just really got under my skin. I once said, "Oh yeah, I'll show you where our Manga's at" pronouncing Manga "Maine-ga". Only to have a girl who I could crush by sitting on her, and who was currently having an obvious rebellion against personal hygiene, tell me "It's pronounced Mah-n-ga." And roll her eyes at me. I wanted to stab her with her eyeliner. Really Emo child? Really? Mah-n-ga kids also have no qualms about reading an entire series of books while sitting in the middle of an aisle...just thinking about this makes me want to get out my eyeliner to use as a weapon... or maybe I'll just use soap.
The group known as Sitters were obviously some off-shoot of Manga Kids when they were little, as these are the people who will walk around the entire book store, gathering books, like some sort of literary squirrel, and then they'll find a chair to camp out in...where they proceed to read Every Single Book they picked up. Or read through them. Or maybe just glance at them before they put them on the floor. And before you know it, this person has a small fort built around them in books. Now, while this is annoying to some degree, it would be forgivable, if it wasn't for the fact that these people LEAVE the books by their chair when they get up...obviously not purchasing a one. I mean, really!? What type of house were you raised in? I mean, it's one thing to leave a mess at home, but do I come by your work and take all of the napkins and condiments out and leave them on the counter of the Burger King you work at? No, I don't. Because I have some semblance of respect for my fellow man. I think there is a special level of hell reserved for people who do this right before the store closes. Really...they'll be rocking out with Hitler and Ivan the Terrible before they know it. And by rocking out, I mean hopefully being painfully tortured...maybe in a bookstore.
The last of the types I found, are the ones that started this whole rant and process of defining...that would be the Incompetent Mouth Breather. If you've ever worked in retail, you can spot one of these from a mile away. These are the people who don't understand the concept of a coupon that says "Cannot be used with any other offer" means that, no, they can't use the coupon with the three other coupons they've been hoarding for this specific moment, especially considering that the other coupons have already expired. These are the people that think when you pull the book Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank out of the autobiography section, you are pulling the wrong book, and they think that the Anne Frank Diary is different, and how stupid can you be not to know this. These are the people who ask Shakespeare's and Hitler's last names. These are the people you dread your child will turn into one day. And while later, these will be the ones whose questions will provide hours of entertainment and years of quotable material, when you are actually working with them, they make you want to punch things. Usually them. Hard.
So those are some of my observation from working in a book store. The place where the intellectuals mingle with those who struggle to tie their shoes, where the emo kids mix with the jocks. These places really are the melting pots of our country.
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