A Nightmare

Yesterday was a very busy day at work. The regular summer people are here now, and the big horse show is under way. This is frequented by the 1% of the 1% - not just run-of-the-mill rich people, but the uber-rich. These people fly their highly-pedigreed horses in from all over the country and all over the world, and then give each other tens of thousands of dollars for riding said horses around in circles and making them jump over sticks. Ten grand is pocket change to these people. They think nothing more of dropping $5000 on sheets than I would of buying a pack of gum. Less, probably.

Anyway - yesterday was busy. A $4000 sale, a massive special order for almost nine thousand dollars, other "smaller" sales in the $1000-$1500 range. It's all good for my commission, so I swallow my egalitarianism and paste on my customer-service smile and say have a good day.

But... I had a nightmare last night. Not my first nightmare about work, only the latest.

I was in the store, and a couple had bought a certain set of sheets, and then kept coming back for more pieces, one at a time, and unfolding them all, and piling them on the counter. The computer stopped working properly, and I had to figure discounts on the fly. The floor around my feet was littered with shams, plastic packages, scraps of cardboard. The counters were covered with boxes of this and that - business cards, promotional postcards, and just junk.

Then a couple came in with about 5 children, and the adults proceeded to ignore the kids (ranging in age from about 8 to about 14), who ran amok through the store, making noise, knocking things over. They all had rollerskates, and hit upon the idea of putting one of the expensive side chairs which we have on skates, and taking it out on the sidewalk. I was in the middle of folding up the crumpled shams the first couple kept handing me, when I saw these little blonde devils pushing the chair, with the youngest kid on it, out the door.

"Stop! Wait a minute! You can't do that!" I yelled as I sprinted for the door, but it was too late, and I saw the chair and the kid tumble down the concrete steps.

When I reached the scene, the kids were picking up their little brother, and all were laughing, and the chair lay shattered at the foot of the steps. "You just broke a thousand-dollar chair!" I said, but they laughed. Their father appeared, and I said the same thing to him. "That chair cost a thousand dollars, and you're going to have to pay for it."

"A thousand dollars?" he asked. "It doesn't look like it was worth that much."

"Well, that's the price the company put on it, and I can't just write it out of stock. You're going to have to pay for it."

I went back inside, where the mother, a trim, polished blonde, wearing a shocking-pink beaded blouse, was still shopping, oblivious to the carnage outside. "Your kids just broke a thousand-dollar chair, and I need your information so you can pay for it."

"Oh, okay," she said, still browsing.

"Let me get a paper so I can get your name and address." I went back to the cashwrap, where the first couple was still standing, waiting for their shams. I searched through the litter on the counter, looking for a functioning pen and an index card - notecard - scrap of paper - anything to write on. I finally found one, and went to find the couple with the vandalizing kids - and they were gone.

"They lied!" I shouter. "The stinking liars!"

Shaking with anger, I went back to the cashwrap, where the remains of the broken chair now mingled with the other stuff on the floor, and finally rang up the couple with the unfolded shams, and apologized to them for the delay. They were okay with it - patient or unaware - and left me with an unholy mess.

The thing is... though this was only a bad dream, it's not entirely impossible for it to happen - which makes it even scarier!

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!"

Dishonesty

About 3 weeks ago, a woman came into the store, looking for pillows. We had on hand the ones she wanted - two soft standard down pillows. She also wanted pillow protectors - cases that zip tight around the pillows, inside the shams, and protect the down from sweat, hair oil, drool, blood, etc. We did not have two standard pillow protectors on hand, but I said I would order some for her. She agreed, and paid for her pillows, and before she had even left the store, I had placed the order.

The customer called a few days later, asking where her pillow protectors were. I had said it would take about 5 business days to get them (they were showing as available in the warehouse), so she was impatient. When they hadn't arrived after yet another week, and the customer was getting snippy, I fired off an e-mail to our retail support person, asking what was up. Well, the warehouse inventory listing I had seen was inaccurate, and there were none, and the ETA on a new order from France was weeks away. I asked him to pull some from another store to satisfy my by now justifiably miffed customer, and he did so.

The pillow protectors arrived early in the week; the customer was informed, and came in to pick them up on Saturday. Here's where the dishonesty comes into play.

She said she'd already paid for them. She hadn't, of course; we NEVER take money for things that do not leave in the customer's hand. We never, never pre-sell merchandise, having learned the very hard way, many years ago, what a rotten idea that is. She had paid for the two down pillows, but not the pillow protectors.

But.... she insisted that she had paid for them. There was no documentation to prove otherwise, and so this dishonest (thieving) woman got away with them without paying, and I was left a stern, admonishing note from my manager, reminding me to always indicate whether or not an order has been paid for...even though she and I both know we never take pre-payment.

What has this taught me? It has taught me to never trust a customer. It has taught me to assume the customer is going to try to cheat. Did the customer think about this, and would she have cared, if the thought had crossed her selfish mind? Would someone who would be so petty as to outright steal two pillow protectors, lying to my manager's face in the process, give a damn about how her own dishonesty would erode my faith in humanity? Would she stop to consider how her action tarnishes the reputation of every other customer who sets foot in the building? 

If she had really been interested in getting some pillow protectors posthaste, she could have gone to any number of stores or websites and ordered them, for far less than ours cost. But maybe she was ticked off because it took so long to get them, and thought a little payback was in order, and by prevaricating about having paid for them, she got them for free - sort of flipping us off for having made her wait. Isn't that juvenile?

Well, I just trust that karma will come down on her for her dishonesty. I have to hope for some cosmic settling of the books, because if I didn't, and believed that the bad guys always get away with it, and the good guys always get the shaft, then I would be a very unhappy person indeed. I don't want to be an unhappy person. So I have to believe that someday, sooner or later, she'll get hit right in the noggin with the result of her own dishonesty.

Overheard II

A Very Wealthy Woman, in the midst of placing a $9000 special order, is looking over her pillowcase options.

Mandy, my manager: "Now, these shams come in pairs - two to a packet."

VWW: So.... I have four pillows... how many packages do I need to buy?"

Honest to god.

Demanding Flake; Matched Set

At work I run into a lot of different sorts. Today it was the Demanding Flake. L.M. came in and asked in her soft flaky voice about sheets without a pattern, just white, you know, with a little color on the edge. She fastened upon a white percale with a spring-green line of embroidery, a simple embellishment. She asked how much a set would cost, apparently not quick enough of wit to take the packages off the shelf by herself and look at the price labels.

What size? I asked? Queen, she said. I got down the flat queen sheet, and read the label to her - $144. She then said she needed pillowcases. I found a pair - $86 - and she said she needed three pairs. I gathered the three pairs, and she spread the packages out on the bed and looked at them. Then she turned to me, with her empty pale-blue eyes, and wisps of flyaway hair escaping her untidy ponytail, and said, in her feather of a voice,

"Add this up for me."

Not "Please add this up," or "What does this come to?" or "let me see, three times eighty-six, that's, hmm..." No. "Add this up for me." In her breathy, twitty voice, the voice of the Demanding Flake.

I bit my tongue, and added it up for her - $402, plus tax. She then said she'd have to think about it, and asked for the fitted sheet - a plain white, in king, but it had to be the same white as the top sheet. I found her a king fitted in the same white percale, and she looked at the green-striped flat sheet. "What size is this?"

I masked an indrawn breath of exasperation and showed her the label, because she apparently didn't know enough to move the stacked shams off the sheet and read it herself. "This is a flat queen," I said.

"I need a king," she answered, her inflection telling me that she thought I was a little bit slow. But she had told me she needed a queen. I had had to move several king sheets to get to the queen.

She didn't buy anything, of course. She had me set aside a couple of other things for her to come look at tomorrow. Glory be, I have tomorrow off!

********
L.M. is not the only Demanding Flake who pops in regularly to try our patience.  Ms. H. is another. My first encounter with her went as follows.

I answered the phone one morning to hear a breathy voice on the other end, most of the sentences inflected as questions, even when they were statements. "Hi, this is G. H. I was in last week and bought some shams? And now I want the other shams that go with them."

"Okay," I said. "Do you know the pattern name?"

"Well, they were a Kenzo...?"

I went to the clearance baskets, the only place where we had a few Kenzo-designed boudoir shams left - three or four very bold patterns, none of them at all attractive. "Okay, we have a few different patterns. Can you remember what they looked like?"

"Well, they were a kind of textile pattern...?"

I rolled my eyes, and looked around the store at the hundreds of "textile patterns". "Well, if you can remember the specific pattern name, that would be great."

"Well, they were a Kenzo...?"

"Okay, but Kenzo is the designer. There are several different patterns under the Kenzo design label."

"Well, I know Kenzo is a designer," she said, snotty and huffy. "I was in the trade for seventeen years."

"Okay," I said, seething. "many people don't realize that. But we do have a few Kenzo patterns, and if you can remember the pattern name, or something more specific about the pattern, I'll see if we have what you're looking for."

After a few more repetitions of the "It was a Kenzo" line, she finally remembered something about the pattern that allowed me to pick out the one she was looking for - a dreadful dark rusty-brown with pseudo-batik pattern in orange, pale blue and sickly pink designs, scattered in a sort of frenetic patchwork. Shockingly ugly, but it was just what she was after. I asked her how many she wanted.

"Oh, just one pair."

All that back-and-forth for one pair of $10 boudoir shams. My commission on that sale - five cents. Literally - one nickel. As a part-timer, I make one half of one percent commission. One nickel for my own out of that sale.

*******

There are the women in their 50s and 60s, and even in their 70s, with tummies bulging their shirts and white shins sticking out from trendy capris, white ankle socks, white sensible shoes and nearly identical short curled hairdos. I saw three women thus attired, in varying but similar pastel shades, slowly pacing up the street in perfect unison, right hands clutching Vera Bradley purses, in step as if their ankles were chained together.

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. 

North or south?

A customer called, asking how to find our store after flying into Burlington, VT.

Mandy, my manager: "We are about 2 hours due south of Burlington."

Customer: "What happens if we go due north?"

Mandy, after a stunned pause: "You'll end up in Canada."

Customer, as if she has never heard of the nation to the north: "Canada? ... Canada?"

(Why do you suppose she asked what would happen if she went due north after being told that the place she wanted to go was due south? That's a head-scratcher, that is.)