Obviously this didn't happen today. I don't think I need to say when it happened, or where. The purpose of this post is not to embarrass a person for a situation that is probably temporary. It is to remind business owners to prevent shoppers having this kind of experience. The experience is becoming too common these days, and you need to take positive action to prevent it.
Well, for a start, I was feeling peckish and cranky. Grocery store owners need to be aware of this, and of what I can tell them about when to expect it.
It was some time this spring, while the tummybug was circulating in my part of the world. I wasn't sure what was going on. We'd been warned to expect a norovirus--the Norwalk Flu or "24-hour" tummybug. My quirky immune system does not build up resistance to those things. When they are circulating they usually just hit me like a train flying off a track. I spend a few hours just running from bathroom to bed, or maybe lying down on the bathroom floor waiting to recover the strength to get back to bed. But this time my symptoms felt milder, but they lasted much longer. I thought the whole experience might have started with a bacterial infection, since I'd bought Jif peanut butter. The company has really tried to keep Jif peanut butter gluten-, GMO-, and glyphosate-free and, I suspect as a result, has been sabotaged and had to recall batches of food products contaminated with different things. Salmonella normally infects humans or birds, not peanuts, but it's among the things that have turned up in sabotaged peanut butter. My quirky immune system usually deals with salmonella fast, but this time the gas and cramps and greenish froth didn't stop. At least once during the week I was around someone who had norovirus. I'd prepared for this by not eating for enough hours that there was nothing for the virus to purge upward, but I did feel a bit dizzy and sick at times, and the greenish froth continued to gush downward. The blog went off schedule due to time lost just lying back and feeling bad. What was going on? Why was my body not flushing out these tiresome tummybugs and getting back to work?
Finally I felt strong enough to take a walk around the neighborhood. I saw that, although the Professional Bad Neighbor has reportedly spent most of this year at home with "Long COVID," he'd made the effort to spray more poison around a Mountain Spring. The specific target was the Old English boxwood some long-gone neighbor had left behind. In some places this shrub is said to become invasive. Here it took much time and effort for the old lady to get a few shrubs growing, and for all my life they've been something for the rest of us to remember Miss Ethel by. Just because everyone else enjoyed their fragrance the Professional Bad Neighbor set out to kill the boxwood, and he may succeed. The glyphosate would undoubtedly be what aggravated the infection I had.
Anyway a tiresome errand had to be done, putting an end to a prolonged bit of tiresome business I hope, and I trudged into town. I was low on groceries and thought I'd pick up a few little things in town before the next car pool to Kingsport or Norton.
Theoretically the best bargains on groceries in my town are at Food Lion. That's if you don't think about how many cases of salmonella poisoning have been traced to Food Lion. That was the last thing I wanted to deal with. Food Lion was out of the question.
That currently leaves three other, smaller stores. One was off my route by a couple of city blocks; two were right along the way. I stopped at the first one of those two.
Well, it's only a convenience store, not a real, small, independent grocery store like the Broadwater's, the Thriftway, or the Q.S.Q. stores used to be. I miss having a serious independent grocery store. In all three of the convenience stores most of the shelf space is devoted to "junkfood," with whole aisles for just candy bars, just potato chips, just soda pop, and just "energy drinks," and only one aisle for the whole selection of non-refrigerated foods normally eaten by adults. If they wanted to enjoy a small steady income these stores could stock a better selection of glyphosate-free canned vegetables like beans, peas, corn, and tomatoes, Zatarain's and Ben's rice mixes and plain Success Rice, Jif peanut butter, canned fish (but not salmon, which was my favorite fish before it became a horrible science experiment), canned chicken and turkey, cornmeal, basic kitchen supplies, and I could buy most of my groceries in my own town. They don't. They sell junkfood and then the staff go home and judge the adults who go in and buy junkfood, when that's what the stores have. How often I've gone in and looked for a can of beans or a pack of turkey baloney, and never even mind the onion, to go with my Fritos--but all they had in the store was the Fritos. Since Fritos have been 99% glyphosate-free lately and the potato chips have not, many's the time the store had sold out of Fritos and had nothing left but the potato chips, which is a pretty reliable sign that the people who prefer potato chips have tried them and been sick.
I went in to see what the store had. This is normally at least a nice way to rest my mind after doing tiresome errands and watching dangerous traffic. Come in off the street, out of the heat or the cold or the rain, and walk around quietly considering what to buy, and what else would go with it, and whether the price is reasonable or unreasonable or a good enough deal to make me consider buying something I usually don't buy.
This was a good day to have hit this particular convenience store. Spring weather was back, redbuds and ornamental Prunus and beautiful dandelions and forsythia and one early azalea were all in bloom, I was shaking off the infection, it felt good. The store even had baloney. I don't normally consider paying as much for 4 ounces of beef baloney as I normally pay for 16 ounces of chicken baloney, but I did consider that the cats would be eating most or all of the baloney, anyway, since I'd be cooking it with beans and Fritos and the rest of the sack of onions I had at home.
And a horrible noise, like a low-range mosquito whining, rose above the pop music somebody was listening to. Some horrorcow was trying to chatter at me. "Are you finding everything you need?"
For a minute, due no doubt to "spring fever," I actually forgot that this kind of noise never comes out of people one would ever want to speak to for any reason. I actually said, "Yeah," and continued shopping, ignoring tbe yap.
This is a bad strategy. Pleasantly ignoring this kind of aggressive, bullying extrovert never works. One can't just make a polite noise, keep moving, and let them fade away. It would be pleasant if one could, but a word or a look encourages them, and they go into a sort of feeding frenzy, demanding more and more and more attention. Every time the mouth opens, more overt hostility will plop out. They really want to feel that they've set up some sort of battle and "won." They really need to feel that they have been, in an emotional sense, knocked down, trampled, and spread out on the bottom of a birdcage. The only way to keep them from making themselves unpleasant is to train them to expect that IF SOMEONE LOOKS AT THEM, THEY WILL BE PUNISHED.
If a store employee keeps yapping at me long enough that I look at the face, the store owner is going to hear about it. And I want to know that I will never be seeing that face in that store again. Food Lion's spineless manager once promised me that a certain obnoxious employee would not be kept in a position where she has any contact with customers, but the last time I was there I found that person right at the front of the store with her bad attitude sticking out for the whole world to see. If an employee is bad enough that I look at the face, you need to print that face on a letter you send to the police, notifying them that the person is banned from your property.
Well, I didn't buy the baloney. I didn't like the price, and when the price tag on refrigerated foods is exorbitant you never know how long they've been sitting in the store's refrigerator, either. This was not the store where I picked up the allegedly "lunch-ready" turkey that had the big clumps of green mold showing through the back of the package, but that kind of thing can happen in any convenience store. Especially when people reach into the refrigerator, pick something up, and then put it back while moving away from an unpleasant YAP.
"But they're just trying to be friendly." Oh no they're not! Friendly people learn, normally around age two, to wait for someone to hold eye contact before they open their mouths. Up to about age six someone who starts chattering without eye contact being made may be just a spoiled little chatter-monkey, but that gets beaten out of children in schoolyards. When an adult's mouth starts making noises in the absence of eye contact, the person is looking for trouble.
I've heard that whine about "Be friendly--start a conversation to make a sale," too, and seeing how people react to it was a good, firm, unequivocal reality check. How many times I've sat in a market, looked at someone until person stopped looking at merchandise and looked at me, and ruined a potential sale with a "Hey, hi, good to see you" line of...obnoxiousness. That is what it is. I honestly didn't intend to insult or belittle or intimidate anybody, or even push the person to buy more than person wanted to buy, but I was breaking the rule that THE CUSTOMER SPEAKS FIRST IF THE CUSTOMER WANTS TO SPEAK, so my prospective customers were quite right to stop shopping and move away from my booth when I chattered at them. Some store employees who speak before they're spoken to may actually suffer from extroversion. Others have only been told that they'd earn more money if they acted as if they had that condition, and have fully developed brains, but when nice people think they need to act like nasty people, who knows what they're going to do next.
We need a good clear unequivocal rule. All store employees need to be told, when they're hired: "THE CUSTOMER SPEAKS FIRST IF THE CUSTOMER WANTS TO SPEAK." If they have normal healthy brains, all will go well after that. If they yap, after that, they need to become unemployed. They probably have no consciences and will fake disabilities and get on welfare, after which the example of Canada suggests that...hey, listen, maybe you know someone who can persuade them to go to Canada right now?
This is not about any of the multitude of prejudices and preconceptions people have that may cause them to feel that they "like" or "dislike" other people on sight. It's about the fact that responsible adults remind ourselves, should we feel any tendencies to "like" or "dislike" people we don't know well, to avoid letting ourselves act on these emotional prejudices, which obviously have no rational basis and come from our memories of completely different people whom the new acquaintances resemble in some way. When we're mature enough to have grown-up jobs, we do our jobs without taking time to "like" or "dislike" customers. If I'd made the mistake of hiring a cashier who indulged in "feelings" about customers, I'd make person double-check the day's accounts "Just to remind you that your job's to make sure the numbers are correct, NOT to be looking at or thinking about or forming crazy emotional reactions to people!"
"But people are bound to react to the way other people treat them..." Yes, and when cashiers or stockers are allowed to indulge the fantasy that they're the featured attraction people come into a store to see, they're bound to feel disappointed most of the time! Nice people prefer not to receive a lot of attention, so they appreciate the nice, courteous customers who leave them to their work. It's the aggressive ones you need to keep away from the public. If they're married to someone to whom you owe a lot of money, you want to let them come in and clean the building at night, when there's no chance of their annoying people right out of buying merchandise.
Make them count, count, count until those emotional feelings go away. No matter how young they may be, numbers will entrain the left brain and put a damper on the misplaced emotions. Then the employees may be receptive to the truth: A grocery store, a convenience store, even a fabric store, is not a social opportunity for them to pretend they are celebrities that customers come to admire. It's a place where they are part of a mechanism of exchange that allows customers to feel satisfied about paying for merchandise. We like shopping in the real world, we prefer to hand our money to humans rather than unreliable machines, but at that point all social connection stops. Some store employees, not the ones of whom I complain, used to be my little school friends and some are my relatives, but we understand that when they're doing their jobs a raise of an eyebrow is as much as needs to be done to acknowledge the social connection. They are supposed to check the stock in the back, if necessary, and add up the purchases, when indicated, and make deliveries, if that is their job, and thank us for paying, exactly the same way they do people they don't know. No favoritism. No prejudice. Polite impersonal service for all.
After putting back the baloney, I moved to a different section of the store, further from the yap. That worked long enough for me to decide to buy the beans and the chips. Instead of the baloney, I could have bought some matches, the time to buy which is drawing near, or some other little snack, with the three dollars left in my pocket. I moved back toward the front of the store.
Nobody was keeping what the Yap has for a brain occupied with anything other than that primal instinct to pick a fight, so the Yap started yapping again. I ignored the noise and put the beans and the chips on the counter. Noise continued to come out of the Yap but I resolutely watched the monitor, saw the prices add up accurately, pushed some bills through the slot and repacked my groceries.
"Did you find everything you needed?" came out of the Yap. ("Needed," as distinct from "wanted" or "were looking for," is a sneaky verbal attack.) I didn't find everything I wanted. I didn't even buy everything I would otherwise have bought, because the process of choosing between the conveniences of baloney, matches, or another snack was interrupted by the noise. Whichever of those things I buy, and whatever else I buy on the big shopping excursion, I will buy somewhere other than the store with that Yap in it.
Every yapper always needs to be reminded: WHEN YOU'VE NOT BEEN "RECOGNIZED" WITH EYE CONTACT, ANY NOISES COMING OUT OF YOU ARE JUST NOISE. NOBODY IS LISTENING TO YOU. NOBODY LIKES YOU. NOBODY IS "SEEING YOU AS A HUMAN BEING." YOU ARE NOT ACTING LIKE A HUMAN BEING. YOU ARE ACTING LIKE A BADLY TRAINED DOG.
Employers shouldn't have to deal with this kind of issues, but some employees really need to be taught: If you want to be seen as a human being who deserves any kind of respect, begin by respecting yourself enough to recognize what the back of someone's head is telling you. The angle of the back of the head does tell you what is more interesting than you are. Maybe it's the merchandise on the top shelf, the merchandise on the bottom shelf, maybe in a week like that week was it's the bathroom door. Wait your turn for the customer's attention. When people come into a convenience store to spend their pocket change on "convenient" food or kitchen stuff, the nature of the convenience store business is that they're going to be motivated by frugality not to buy much. It's in your interest to shut up and let their interaction with the merchandise motivate them to buy as much as they can possibly justify to themselves.
And purchases are not being made when customers just want to get out of the store and away from your stupid empty head and the obnoxious noises coming out of it.
I'm not the young impulse-spending nest-builder Madison Avenue most wants to win over, but I am old enough, stable enough, set in my ways enough, that any storekeeper who makes a small effort to please me can count on me for a small steady income. All you have to do is stock things I buy, put a reasonable price on them--I'm willing to pay a little more at a convenience store than at Wal-Mart, but not twice as much--and instruct your employees that, unless I speak to them,. ALL they EVER need to say is "Thank you" when they take my money. That's it. That's all. I don't want to hear any gossip. I don't want to pretend your employees are my friends. I actually like stores that hire foreigners who don't try to speak English. All they need to know are the numbers and "Thank you." You can teach them the difference between "Sir" and "Ma'am" if you want to get fancy, but "Thank you" is quite enough--just make sure they don't try adding anything to it but "Sir" or "Ma'am."
And you never want to let them interrupt the pleasant, restful, ruminative shopping mood.
I didn't let myself get angry enough to look at the Yap, although the Yap was really pushing for it. I don't know what the repulsive thing looks like. It sounded female. I'd guess it was White, young enough to be my daughter, and it had probably spent some time on the uglier side of a city in the Upper Midwest, but I really try to ignore these things.
But the next time I want to pick up a few groceries in my own town, I'll be sure not to stop at the store where the shopping experience was ruined by that Yap. If I ever do feel a need to go into that store again, the next time I'll be braced for "battle" too, knowing that at that store I will not be allowed to enjoy spending a few dollars on a few groceries. For about forty years I've gone into that store with a reasonable expectation of enjoying shopping for a small convenient purchase. No more.
Storekeepers need to train all employees: IF THE CUSTOMER WANTS TO CHAT, THE CUSTOMER SPEAKS FIRST. No exceptions. No excuses.
