Just another day

(This is something I found in a notebook from a few years ago.)

July 15, 2010.

A quartet of Southern ladies came into the store shortly after noon today, just as the word "lunch" began to drift into my thoughts. They were sweet and polite, and full of compliments about the store and the products, and spoke with tupelo honey dripping from their voices... and they went though the store like a phalanx of rototillers.

They unfolded shams and crammed them willy-nilly back into the packages. They put sheets in the sham baskets and shams in with the duvet covers, and two-thirds of what they picked up, they put back upside-down. (I can do a whole post about this business of putting things back upside-down. It's so weird!) I asked if they needed help, but they said no, they were having fun vandalizing looking at everything. I followed where they had been, down in the clearance area, and straightened some things - turned six or seven packaged right-side-up, took a duvet cover out of a basket of boudoir shams and put it back where it belonged, and then went back to fighting with the computer as it struggled to print shipping labels. (Our 15+-year-old computer can't cope with the new UPS program, and kept having the vapors.)

The four Southern belles moved on out of the clearance area, and I returned to pick up after them - refolding crushed shams that had been jammed into packages without care, and so on. While I then returned to the cashwrap to hold the computer's hand for a third try at a label, the Belles went back into the clearance area and started all over again!

There's a big basket of sample shams near the front of the store - a rummage basket. Despite the fact that it's an informal display, and the items are inexpensive, that is no reason to leave that basket looking like a heap of unwashed laundry. They pawed through those shams and strewed them around, much in the manner of a family of raccoons rifling through an unsecured trash can. Once they had made as much of a mess of those poor shams as they could without actually ripping them up, they went back for a third whack at the clearance area.

They eventually left with smiles and "Thaynk yew!" and "Y'all have a guud ayfternewn!" All told, they were here about an hour, and spent a total, among the four of them, of about $200.

Someday, when I have nothing to lose by it, when I see someone being careless and messy in the store, I'm going to ask them, "Why do you do that? You can see that you've left a mess. You can see that you put that in the wrong place, that you put it away upside-down. Why do you do that? Do you do that in every store you shop? Do you do that at home? Do you let your kids see that you think it's okay to leave a mess? Do you let your children make a mess and leave it for someone else to clean up? Who told you it is acceptable?

"Because it's NOT!"