FIRST PERSON:
By Dr. Al Carlos Hernandez
We were in Rite Aid the other day when this angry guy in a suit rudely cut the line and walked up to the cashier waving the store’s advertisement while pointing to a $4.99 power strip. The cashier was obviously an earnest, articulate, highly overqualified and financially-strapped housewife who was trying to earn a couple of bucks while the kids were at school. She was incredulous at this guy’s brash insistence on saving one buck, but she really needed the job so had to suck it in and remained gracious. All this so the pimply, community college freshman manager in his blue vest wouldn’t write her up for bad behavior or cut her hours.
The customer was obviously a foreigner because he was rattling something off a Peking menu while pushing through a line in the middle of the day and he didn’t have a badge. He treated the cashier like garbage. My observation wasn’t about race, it was about vitriolic rudeness. If you visit and/or sneak into this country there are rules of engagement. A couple of suggestions came to mind as to what Mr. Meglo-moron could do with his power strip, and I was ready to consult him, but my wife was with me and discourages that type of behavior. Besides, she didn’t want to get the clerk in trouble. Working retail is one of the hardest and most thankless jobs you can have. Many customers nowadays are self -indulgent, narcissistic jerks who treat clerks like servants. Having been there after a stellar career in media, I try to think of the clerks as single Moms or kids working their way through college . . . or famous musicians of the seventies.
Well, the tables have turned. Twenty percent of those unemployed now have masters degrees, some have PhD’s. A recession is when lots of people are out of work. Depression is when you are employed and the employment runs out. I know how it feels to work “below your pay grade” (as they say in the military) in order to feed your family, when the economy and a Liberal Arts BA degree has failed you. My experience in retail is remarkably different than the norm. Back in the day, I was a managing partner of a good-sized motorcycle dealership in the inner city and the rules of retail decorum were significantly different. We had a sales guy named “TW” which stood for Tumble Weed, because of his hair. He was an IRA radical who tried to run a sports book off the sales floor. A stout, round wire-rimmed guy with the vocabulary of a Rhodes Scholar, he would eye potential customers. If he knew that they were killing time or were motorcycle wannabe posers, he would come up to the person and say in a measured voice, “Excuse me sir, are you lost?” The mooch would always say, “No, just looking.” My man TW, who worked exclusively on commission, would say, after a dramatic pause, sizzled by manic eye contact, “Then get lost.”
Our axiom and dealership credo was that there are two ways you can leave the dealership: you can walk our or be carried out. The motorcycle business, including and especially Harley Davidson, is no longer like that. It has become sanctimonious and seeker friendly. My only other short-lived retail experience was managing a tire store. I would have to work behind the counter and sell people tires and, depending on their attitude, a bunch of brakes and front end parts that they didn’t need. Since the tire store was part of a larger chain, I would get written-up routinely by the district manager for talking down to the customers, which I still consider an impossibility. First there was the time when a fortune teller, Miss Dora, came in and was yelling at me because she said she didn’t know that her brake pads were down to the metal. I asked her, given her line of work, how could she not know? Then there was the time this Middle Eastern fellow came in and tried to tell me that the tires we installed on his car was making a bippity bump, bump noise on the freeway. I asked if he was sure it is not a bump, bump, bippity, thump? He said, “No way Jose, I remember quite vividly it was a bippity, bump, bump.” I asked him what radio station he was listening to. He said, “News talk, always news talk.” I said, “Oh, it wasn’t the rap station then? You did not, then, run over a duck or anything of that nature?” He started to get really mad, and told me, “So you think I am decidedly stupid with this tire-noise-song thing, Mr. Blue Smarty Slacks?” I paused for an uncomfortably long time, and then said, “No man.” I had the guys check out his car, contrite for being a world class jerk. I might have given him a free tire or two.
You need to know that most people behind the counter don’t want to be there. They are underpaid and verbally abused more often than not by frustrated people who want somebody to pick on. I’ve have learned to say please and thank you because you never know when the economy is going to turn bad for you. You may end up on the wrong end of a discount coupon or a blue light special.