Locusts

(From notes in August, 2010)

Some days I can have a dozen sales and see nothing but cheerful, kind, polite, patient people, who put things back where they find them, who don't unfold anything - or who refold neatly the things they do unfold - and are generally pleasant people with whom to work.

Then there are Locusts. It only takes one Locust to knock a big hole in the day, and if there is a Plague of Locusts, it makes a day exhausting and draining. They cause headaches and high blood pressure, makes one's jaw ache from having to clench one's teeth. They seem to go out of their way to create extra work, and to try one's patience. I think to many of them, it's a game, a form of evil entertainment, to see how hard they can make life for the employees they inflict with their presence.

A Locust, in retail terms, is a shopper who is demanding, impatient, clueless and messy. They are impolite, interrupting with a question or demand before you have finished answering the previous question. They will unfold towels, coverlets, shams and even sheets, if you are not quick enough to stop them, and leave these items strewn about like wreckage, too dim or lazy to attempt to put things back. In clothing stores they pull things from the bottom of the stack, try on twenty items, demand other sizes and colors, and leave the dressing room in the same state as a charity clothing donation box. They demand items that are not on the shelf, then act as if the sales associated have hidden the one item then "need",  just to make them mad. They can be, and often are, quite abusive.

I have had three sets of Locusts in the last two days at work. On Friday, it was a couple from New York, as was obvious from their accents. The man was short, stout and scruffy-looking, wearing the men's summer uniform of t-shirt, shorts, sandals and baseball cap. A strong odor hung around him - garlic and spices and grease. Most unpleasant. His voice was gravelly, his manner coarse, terse and demanding. His female companion was bottle-blonde and pudgy, with poor posture and too much makeup. They argued with each other and with me about sheet sets and prices, and I knew they thought I should give them a better price just because they wanted it. Never once did they say "please" or "thank you" as they kept me running back and forth, looking for stuff for them. It was "Gimme a pair of king shams," and "I want this coverlet." They spent almost $2000, but it felt as though that money had been taken from my hide.

Today the first Locusts were in before noon - a terrible way to get the day started. They didn't strike me as Locusts right off the bat; they looked like a normal, polite, engaging young couple, soft-spoken and polite. They went straight to the sheet sets in the clearance area and picked up a king set in an austere black-and-white pattern.

They brought the set to the counter and asked what was in it, so I read aloud to them the big label taped to the top of the package. King duvet cover, flat sheet, and three pairs of shams - king, euro and boudoir. I then had to explain about the sham sizes, show examples, and explain again that there was a pair of each size sham. The total for the set: $875.

They discussed it, and asked me for more of a discount. I said, it's already half-price. They hemmed and hawed, and then the woman said, "Wait, I don't need euro shams. Can I switch them out for something else?" I should have seen that as a red flag, but agreed to swap the euros for a pair of standards. I adjusted the price, wrote the receipt (the computer is down, dead and gone, and we have to hand-write all our sales slips), and peeled the label off the set to enter into the computer when we get it back.

Then the couple looked the set over, and said, "Hey, there's no fitted sheet in here." I said, "use a plain white fitted." They asked, "have you got one?"

Red flags - alarm bells - I said no, not on sale, but looked around and found a king fitted in a delicate white-on-white damask pattern of small ferny leaves. The woman didn't like the pattern, said it didn't go with the black-and-white stripe. I thought, What the heck, you never even see the fitted sheet!

Well, since the fitted sheet didn't fit their taste, and the only white coverlet (they wanted one of those, too) in king size was full-price, and $560, they decided against the black-and-white set, and looked around again. This time they lit on a very different pattern - two, actually. One was a white percale with a big pink peony and a spray of bright green leaves, and the same floral pattern printed on a misty green-gray sateen, with an undertone pattern of white and gray leaves under the peonies.

They chose the last complete king set in the greeny-mist pattern. "We'll take this," the woman said, slapping it onto the counter, "not the black and white."

I ripped the receipt for the black-and-white set out of the pad and wadded it up as the couple wandered away. "Start again," I muttered through my teeth.

Then the woman came back. "I want to change something. Do you have the duvet cover in white? And I don't want the euros or the bouds. And we want this coverlet."

She tore the set apart, and substituted a white king duvet cover, and she wanted standards to replace the euros, but we do not have standards to match, and she was on the point of changing her mind again when her husband gently intervened, and said they could use the plain white pillow cases I offered, and would look for something to match at home.

I got them added up, bagged and out the door after wresting over $1400 from them, then had to go repair the damage - put sheets away and find homes for the things they'd taken out of the set.

Early in the afternoon, another couple came in, trailing with them a son about 12 years old, with a terrible case of hiccups and a worse case of boredom. The woman was the driving force in this couple. They were looking for a coverlet in king; she wanted a plain white one ($560); the husband, who I sensed often bent before his wife's more forceful personality, wanted a white matelasse coverlet with a delicate pattern of silver-gray leaves embroidered around the edge ($650). They had to look at pattern books and swatch books, and compare swatches with other things similar to what they already own.  Back and forth they went; I said I would order the leafy coverlet, but they were not obligated to buy it. With that issue tabled, they turned to towels, and the woman asked for white towels - bath sheets, guest towels, bath towels - what's this size? How about this pattern? How about that pattern? How many do you have? Do they go together?

They unfolded more than a dozen towels, and chose four, but not before they'd had a good long discussion about them. Then they went back to the coverlet issue; the woman couldn't seem to let it go. She asked me to unfold a coverlet similar to the plain white one so she could better visualize it, and get a sense of its weight. I spread out the only one of that pattern than we have already open - a black one. She said she couldn't see the white one in the black one, but wanted the white one anyway.

So I wrote up the slip: towels and coverlet, plus pillow protectors and a nightgown. Then she started looking at embroidered silk sofa pillows, and the matching embroidered silk throw - she was getting out of control. She added two pillows and the throw - crisp snow-white silk embroidered with pink cyclamen flowers (the throw alone was $750), and added tea towels and sachets... sort of in a frenzy of buying. I kept adding to the total as she kept adding to the pile, and by the time she finished, the total with tax was over $1500.

That shocked her, and I went over the slip item-by-item with her. She thought the silk throw and pillows were on sale, and put them back.  I scratched them off the receipt. She then conferred with her husband, and put the coverlet back, and said they'd go with the gray-leaf one, which I'd have to order. I scratched off the coverlet, and re-totaled the order, now a mere $325. Her husband seemed relieved, and handed me his black AMEX card, thanked me several times for my help and patience, and followed his wife's slipstream out the door.

This left me with a pile of towels, shams, pillow protectors, a throw, a coverlet and silk pillows to fold, sort and return to their respective shelves. And still people kept coming in, and I'd have to stop and read labels to them, or tell them that a pattern they HAVE to HAVE has been out of stock for three years, or tell them that the reason their sheets are falling apart is that they have been boiling them in caustic detergent, and want to tell them that they'd come apart at the seams, too, if they were treated the same way.

It is after 5pm now; I have had a cup of milk, a cup of tea, a dozen grapes, a mouthful of chicken and half a liter of orange seltzer. I am too tired to eat the lunch I bought.

*******
The gray-leafy coverlet came in a couple of days later, and I called the number the couple left and told them it was in, and did they want to purchase it?

I never heard back from them.