I have to rant about something for a second.

I work retail. Retail Management. And I hear people bitch a lot about how hard it is to get good service. Well, guess what. It's hard to find a customer who delivers on their side of the deal as well.

I'm a smart guy. I work in a bookstore. Most of my employees are pretty smart people. People that want to work in bookstores tend to be a bit intelligent.

And 90% of the people who walk through the door of our stores treat us like we're either completely stupid or as if we're some sort of second class citizen. We try to walk people to books and put the book into their hands. And half the time you get no thanks or acknowledgement of any kind. You're left standing there finally having to ask, "um, did you need anything else?"

We encourage people to browse and spend time reading books, it's the culture of our store. That translates for many customers that they should remove 50 books from the shelf and them leave them in disorganized heaps on the floor for us to reshelve. If they do decide to reshelve them, it's usually on a wrong shelf, if not a completely wrong section. But then this same customer will get angry with us when we can't find a book that we're supposed to have on the shelf.

They also seem to think we use Cray supercomputers to do searches for books. "Um, hey dude... I'm looking for a book titled THE SHIP... i dunno who wrote it." "Gosh, sir, that's going to be really hard for me to find, do you have any more information?" "Just do the damned search on your computer" This happens fifty times a day.

The worst offenders are the passive/aggressive late shoppers. People who come into your store near the closing hour and think that because they got in the door before the closing announcement that they can shop as late as they want. They make huge piles of books and refuse to let you reshelve any of them early, despite you politely asking them. They don't start to even think about leaving until well after the third closing announcement that you make. And that's when they realize a pressing need to use the restroom, before they purchase 2 magazines. And, oh yeah, they also need fifty $5 gift cards. I'm not making this stuff up.

There's one woman who is pretty much the last person out the door every night. And every night she makes a big scene, after being the last person to check out and after leaving at least 20-40 books for us to reshelve, because she can't find her car keys. And then five minutes later she finds them in her purse. Sick fuck.

There are about ten people who are consinsently the last people out of our store almost every night. We hate them. We hate them with a passion. But we're nice to them. Because we have to be.

So, do me a favor. The next time you go to the grocery store, Walmart, the Gap or a bookstore, be extremely nice to the person helping you. Go out of your way to be clear in what you want or need, thank them and be sincere about it all. I can't even tell you how much it helps when a really nice person steps in front of you. It can change the whole day. Just remember that. Thanks.

I think I need to start planning a vacation....