Lovvers- Popagenda Fail (reprint)

This is a reprint of a regular blog post I did a couple of weeks ago. I had a name-droppingly cool update and since it's about a toy store customer, I figure, fuck it.

I went to see a band tonight, Lovvers, that play great songs and put on a great show. But I will never see them again and will never buy any of their music. Why? You may ask, since those are the very traits that send my heart a-flutter? Because the asshole lead singer violated the Popagenda. I went to Comet Ping Pong to catch them; I did the last time they played, but they went on too late for me to stay too long.

I should have been able to pick them out of a line-up:

Ironic T-shirts: Check

Ironic haircuts: Check

So skinny they run the risk of falling through their ass and hanging themselves (and the girl jeans aren't helping): Check

Ironic glasses that were last seen as "spare glasses" that kids used to dread wearing: Check


They have the markings of the North American Hipster Doofus, but they came from England. They might have tried to grow beards too, but I'd be surprised if they were able to grow pubic hair. The drummer carried a canvas tote bag that said in big letters "Fuck Your Blog".

I heard the lead singer grouse that playing was "Pointless" because only 8 people showed up. Then when they played, he complained that one one was getting right up front. But when he said before one song that he was playing in front of "Nobody", I lost it.
"We are not nobody!" I yelled, motioning to the other seven people, WHO WERE REALLY INTO THEM.
"Well, why are you hiding?" He replied to me.
"Who the fuck is hiding?" Comet is slightly larger than a classroom, there is no place to hide.
So I get the next song dedicated to me, accompanied by an middle finger. Clever boy, aping our obscene gestures along with our easy-to-mock affectations.

I was just going to leave, but I thought, fuck it. I stood in front, not aggressively,just trying to enjoy their music. Then I had to dodge, lest I be impaled by the singer's bony hips being thrown at me. Great, asshole, I do what you say and you start shit with me?

After the last song, people wanted to hear more and the lead douche snidely said,"We learned something from Fugazi about encores," and disappeared backstage.

I had a rant boiling up inside me, but the rantee wasn't available, so I took it out on my poor bartender. "Look you hipster piece of shit, I know it sucks to play in front of 8 people, but don't fucking insult the people that bothered to show up, someday it might be nobody at all! I played for YEARS those kinds of shows and had to work my ass off to get even that kind of crowd, but I played my heart out anyway because it's a lot more fun to do that than piss off people that like you!"

I have a personal manifesto called "The Popagenda" and the second tenet is: honor every audience regardless of their size or interest. They could always be doing something better than watching your lame ass.

One of my most favorite memories playing with my old band the Milk-O-Matics was one show where we didn't think we were playing in front of ANYBODY, but still rocked out to the best of our abilities. After the show we were unloading and a couple of people came out of the club with one of our posters.
We were surprised, I didn't know where they were hiding.
"Thanks for showing up!" I called out to them.
"No, thank you, THANK YOU!" they replied. We may have only seen a hundred faces, but we rocked most of them.

The Ramones changed the world with 8 people in the audience, to name merely one example. Talk about Fugazi: If they were in your position they would have still delivered the goods without moping and insulting the crowd. Then they would have eight people telling their friends for years how amazing Fugazi was in front of eight people. That's the lesson you should have learned.

Signed, a guy that could have been a loyal fan.

P.S. The blog says, "Fuck you, too."

UPDATE:11/5/09 I actually ran into Fugazi Drummer Brendan Canty- he's a customer at the store and one of the nicest people you'll meet- told him this story and asked him about my guess about how his band would have handled that situation. He sheepishly admitted that he's never played that small a show but said if they had they would have most assuredly kicked out the jams (I paraphrase).
"That's what you're there for," he said. Exactly.
"And if those people wanted to hear more, we would have played more. We DID encores."

Encores aren't encores if they are on your setlist, kids.

When to say "No" to a customer

When I worked at The Drafthouse, one of the bartenders told me, "You should never tell a customer 'no'", never mind the fact that he often broke this rule himself, this is just stupid. Sometimes it's in the customer's best interest for me to tell them the word they hate to hear most.

It happens all the time at the toy store in the usual chaos of Saturday afternoon. It becomes necessary to be the short term memory of my customers if they get stuff gift-wrapped. The wrapper will call out when they've wrapped, "Lego!" And I will have to look at the person grabbing it and remember that that was the person that actually bought it.
"No, I'm sorry that's not your gift," I'll say, and hopefully the person waiting for a wrapped Lego will be paying attention, but I wouldn't bet money on it. I've actually had to snatch bags out of people's hands when I ask the customer hovering behind me, "Did you have the art kit?"(for example)
"No," they say and they still grab the bag with the wrapped art kit. Sorry, but *snatch*.
Customers often have often said, jokingly,"You can't expect US to pay attention." It's funny to them for the same reason it was sad to me, it was true.

One lady got pissed at me when I wouldn't let her use our store phone to activate her credit card when it clearly said on it "CALL FROM YOUR HOME PHONE!" This is an example of two of the truest truths I've learned in retail: the lack of attention that people pay will always find ways to surprise me and the truth rarely gets in the way of a good argument.

At the Drafthouse, a scheduling snafu made a showing of Saw V overlap into Beverly Hills Chihuahua. The doorman, God bless 'um, was not that bright and sent a mother and her two children back to the theater before Saw V had ended.

I stopped her at the door, "I'm sorry, Ma'am. You really shouldn't go in there right now."
"But the man up front told me it was OK," she protested.
"The last movie isn't done yet and you don't want your kids to see it."
She tried to walk by me and I had to physically stop her, "You DO NOT want to go in there."
If I had let her 3 and 5 year old go in there, they would have seen a man get crushed to death and the blood rain down on a man in a glass box, a memory that would be decidedly less that misty and water colored, and she was fighting me.

Sometimes I said "no" for selfish reasons. One white trash regular to my old convenience store job came in late one night.
"Let me use your pisser!" she said.
"Sorry, we don't have a public bathroom," which, as far as she was concerned, was true.
"Then give me a napkin so I can go out back!"
"NO!" we said as we involuntarily shivered out the heebiest of jeebies.

Sometimes it was to save lives. One guy at the convenience store COULD NOT understand why I wouldn't let him fill up an empty bleach bottle with gasoline. The fact that it may EXPLODE somehow wasn't good enough.

At my old pawn shop job, I'd have to say,"No" when someone asked if we sold handguns. At least a couple of times the customers replied, "I know a motherfucker that would be dead if you did."

The "Me Era"

The 70s was the “Me Decade”, the 80s was the “You know, THIS is really the Me decade”, by the 90s, “Fuck it, it’s the ‘Me Era’.”

This has really crystallized in the Internet and cellphone age, where we constantly have new ways to express ourselves. The idea behind all these wonderful gadgets is to improve communication, but communication is a two-way street. With e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, texting, not to mention the ubiquitous cellphones able to do all of that, is trying to get in touch with people THAT much easier? You are guaranteed a way to talk, but there is no guarantee anyone is going to listen, or at least listen correctly. That’s because we’re all too busy talking to listen.

You stir into this the circle of selfishness and trickle-down bullshit and you get quite a stew. You have people saying “Why not?” and doing things without actually trying to answer that question. We’re facing the fallout from a lot of this on the back half of this decade, in everything from the economy collapsing to Creed getting back together.

It doesn’t matter who is right anymore, just who’s louder. And if you ask what that has to do with retail, you haven’t been reading this blog.

Trickle-Down Bullshit: Retail sociology part 2

During the days of Reaganomics, the cutting of the highest tax rate percentage was known as "trickle-down economics". The idea was the rich would pass the money they were now not getting taxed down to the lower classes. This did not really happen. Understandably, people wanted to hold on to their money. But the thing that people are more than willing to part with is their bullshit.

This works on two levels. People who feel no power in their lives tend to take power from what they have ANY control over. From this standpoint, the retail worker is the perfect person to trickle your bullshit on, since we often are on the bottom of the courtesy ladder. Make no mistake, we are far from the only ones to regularly receive this wonderful gift; Children, spouses, (non-retail) co-workers, whoever.

For the retail worker, this doesn't always come from customers. Managers and owners are just as likely to trickle down to their underlings.

The second level is a bit more insidious. One of the hallmarks of the past few years are politicians and celebrities getting caught doing something wrong or hypocritical and weaseling away with it with a lame excuse. As I keep saying, if people don't face consequences for their actions, they have no reason to believe they've done anything wrong.

There was a time when I thought that people were too smart to take cues for living from famous people. But over this same time period, the amount of personal responsibility the average person is willing to take has seemed to drop dramatically. The mindset seems to be: they can get away with it, why can't I?

So for the retail soldier, that much more "SPLAT" to deal with. This is why I have two part-time jobs, one where I don't talk to anyone.

Tomorrow: The "Me" Era and why we're all screwed.

The Circle of Selfishness

For the length of this blog, I have tended to post “Those Wacky Customers!” stories, with a little bits of my armchair sociology for seasoning. I have been a little too self-conscious to go too far in that direction, but the positive response to yesterday’s post lessened that a bit.

The end of the book and the show has to deal with some concepts it took me nearly the whole of my retail experience, the reflection of writing my book and reading the writing of Malcolm Gladwell to formulate.

Which brings us to “The Circle of Selfishness”. We are born selfish creatures; we have no reason to believe that everything we see is for the benefit of our singular perspective. Our first lessons are learned this way; the baby thinks that everything in his or her grasp is there to be played with. When this means a knife or other extremely dangerous object, the parent (hopefully) takes it away. The baby cries for it, but eventually they learn better.

Extrapolate that over the course of the child’s life, the child tests the limits of what they can do and the parent enforces those limits (hopefully). I have often said- in fact I kinda said it yesterday- that if we don’t face real consequences for our actions, we have no reason to believe we’ve done anything wrong. This goes for kids and adults alike; very rarely at the toy store is a parent’s threat to not get the child something if they misbehave carried out, and the child knows that, just like the cheating spouse knows the cheated one isn’t going anywhere regardless of how many threats otherwise. Empty threats are called that for a reason.

By the time a person has children, they have taken a job as parent that requires them to be as unselfish as they can be. But parenting is informed by what forms of selfishness the adult still carries; the adults with poor impulse control tend to have children with poor impulse control. The father that doesn’t respect women tends to raise sons that feel the same way. A parent might not want this for their child, but it’s their own genetic reflection; if they say, “Do as I say and not as I do,” they might as well say, “Don’t listen to anything I say.”

At the Sharper Image once, a customer told me, “My mother always told me to NEVER buy the floor model.” By the time we got to this point, it was obvious that her mother never taught her to treat salespeople with the slightest sliver of respect.

And so the circle continues, generation to generation, until it’s learned that this behavior is not acceptable in the world they want to live in and reject their anti-social inheritance once and for all.

Hopefully.

The Toy Store Microcosm

I started writing Surviving Retail in 2000, after quitting my job at The Sharper Image. After my selling CDs, sea shells, irregular clothing, dollar stuff, other people's shit (pawn shop), beer, bongs, and stuff that no one actually needs, I figured I had experienced enough to spin a decent enough tale. But the toy store changed that.

Although most of my other jobs had degrees of this, the toy store was a veritable sociological petri dish, with multiple generations of people to informally study. I was able to see the root of the kind of behavior that makes up most of my stories, the child that gets rewarded for everything becomes the adult that wants to get rewarded for everything. Everything just takes on a more adult context; when told "no" a child will stomp their feet and cry, an adult will use logically faulty arguments like "The customer is always right!" To most of these people, it doesn't matter that what they want you to do will adversely affect other customer's shopping experiences; basically what they're saying is: "I'm always right."

The other impossible-to-ignore truth: kids are the most underestimated group of people and adults the most overestimated.
The story that I like to go with to illustrate this point happened a few years ago. A co-worker was ringing up a lady and the total was higher that she had expected. Something that she thought was a dollar was actually five dollars.
"It was in a bin marked one dollar," she protested.
"Somebody probably put it in there absent-mindedly," he said.
"But it's too high for a kid to reach!"
But nobody said a kid did it. Adults do it all the time, who do you think kids learn it from?

When I tell toy store stories, I have to stress that I'm talking about adults, because people's assumptions skew younger otherwise. When I used to be more of a salesman, I would show people games -usually requiring quickness-that kids loved because they could always beat adults at them.
"Because the adult would let them win," was the what was assumed. Oh no, the kid would smoke the adult like a salmon, fair and square. Kids have so much processing space free and unencumbered by adult concerns.

Adults, for lack of a better way to put it, are screwed up by their intelligence. The smartest and dumbest among us are ignorant about a LOT and the balance isn't as tipped towards the dimmest as much you might think. I don't describe anyone as an intellectual without using air quotes any more, I've met too many of them through retail that can't do something as basic as use a screwdriver. Yes, your insights on Proust are trenchant, but they aren't going to fix your flat tire for you.

A grandmother recently was marveling at the efficiency of our operation and said, "All the children running around must make that extra challenging."
I told her, "It's not the kids that make it challenging."

Yes, Literally.

Every once and a while I like to take advantage of the Monday night half price burger night at the Quarry House in Silver Spring (something I whole heartedly suggest). This past Monday was one of those nights. I had just come in when I saw my fellow theater manager and buddy (in that order) at the late Montgomery Cinema and Drafthouse, Alex.

It was like seeing an old army buddy, someone with a shared trauma. We talked for a while and made plans to do something. After he left, I told Nick, the bartender there, “That guy. He and I have literally been through a lot of shit together.”
“Literally,” he said incredulously, as if I was many trendy misusers of that word.
No, I meant literally. At the same time we had to deal with disgruntled customers, whiny (and occasionally felonious) co-workers and good old-fashioned technical difficulties, Alex and I had to pump literally tons of shit.

We noticed soon after our opening that the automatic sump drain wasn’t working, which meant that we that to flip the drain switch ourselves. We’d try to do it regularly, but sometimes the job would get in the way then we’d hear the alarm: a straight ahead buzz clearly audible in two of our biggest theaters. That would often mean Alex and I would have to drop whatever other crisis we were handling to pump the sump.

At first, we would just hit the manual pump switch and hope for the best, which would be not having a torrent of sewage pop out one of the drains on the opposite side of the draft house, right outside of the keg room. This would cause the less discreet of our personnel- which was almost all of them- to scream in front of a open theater, before we had a chance to bleach it clean, “What smells like shit?!”

We figured out a system, Alex and I would take turns in the pump room or outside the kegs and stay in contact with the other over walkie-talkie. One would flip the pump switch and the other would make sure on the other end that a flood of sewage wasn’t ruining our night. In the pump room we’d pull the sump cover with our shirts over our mouths, to protect ourselves from the unholy stench. The sight was an almost overflowing stew of the most unimaginable nasty broth, with the turds floating like Baby Ruths to always remind you, regardless of what you thought you were going to do with your life, you are currently pumping out other people’s shit. I always made sure before I opened the hatch that my keys and walkie talkie was secure; if they fell in, I sure as shit- no pun intended- wouldn’t go after them.

Thinking about this made me realize that maybe I should write some posts about my time at the cinema and drafthouse. I haven’t because it isn’t exactly retail. It’s something far more terrifying, FOOD SERVICE! And there are stories. Of course!