RECORD STORE TALES #1064: “Mean People Suck”

Working retail, year after grinding year, can wear you down.  I have friends who have been doing it for over 30 years, and I don’t know how.  I barely lasted ten.  In the end, I checked out before hitting my twelfth anniversary.

I outlasted T-Rev by a couple years.  He had been complaining to me a long, long time about retail.  He managed our Cambridge location.  He was really tiring of the predictable daily routine.  People arguing over prices, condition, or the right of the customer to use our washroom or not.  (Not!)  I worked at his location for many weeks one summer.  They had a cutout from a magazine in the bathroom that said “MEAN PEOPLE SUCK”.  They modified it to read “PEOPLE SUCK”.  Not the kind of thing you want your customers to see.

It was true though.  We were inundated with a such a myriad of stupid and flat-out meanness over the years that it could wear down Mt. Everest to gravel.  I’ve been called an asshole, four-eyes, deaf…and you’re just expected to take it all.  You have to take it with a smile on your face when a customer tries to pull one over on you.  You have to absorb all their rage when you screw up.  Just take it.

I couldn’t always take it.  Some of these guys triggered me and I lashed back verbally.  And I was better at it than any of them.  It happened three times, that I can remember.  And let me tell you, they had it coming!

I paid for it in spades, but they had it coming.

One thing that I blame for this was management’s strict rules about things like returns and reservations.  I didn’t like getting yelled at for accepting returns that I shouldn’t have, so I erred on the side of caution.  I probably could have gotten away with things, like a return without a receipt, and I think other people probably did, but instead I got blasted by customers.  It was kind of a lose/lose.  Having said this, if I remembered the person buying the CD, no problem!  If I didn’t…

Here’s something funny, a lot of customers expected you to remember them.  “Hey!  I’m back!” was a phrase I heard frequently from strangers.  We had regulars that we knew by name, but there were always total strangers who would say, “I was here two weeks, and you sold me a Skynyrd CD, remember?”

When I was a kid, grade 3 or 4, I remember being put in charge of selling things from a table at a school sale.  I had to take change and sometimes make change.  I loved it.  I loved the interaction with the other kids, and all the smiles.  I  think I was only there for an hour, but I felt amazing.  I came home from school that day all aglow, telling my dad that I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up.  It’s a shame the reality didn’t live up to the childhood expectation.

Smiles were infrequent.  You’d think people would be happier buying music.  I am.  On the other hand, just as those customers who berated me on every visit didn’t know me or anything about me, I also did not know them.  Their reasons for their ill tempers were none of my business.

I think we can still all agree on one thing:  mean people suck!