There
must be a retail work experience so horrifying that there's nothing funny about it. If so, editor Jeff
Martin must have decided to excise it from The
Customer Is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles,
a collection of essays exploring the lighter side of that
soul-sucking retail
job that serves
as a gateway to higher
pursuits.
At
less than 200 pages, Customer is sadly slight, but it encompasses a vast array of workplace woes. Some zero in on first jobs, like Jane Borden's stint at a cutesy children's clothing store in "The Popsicle Shop," or Richard Cox's much-desired scramble for commissions in an
electronics department in "We Weren't Really Rock Stars." And
no two annoying customers are alike:
Some may just be introducing a little
disorder into the situation,
as in "Not Included With
Display," in which Michael Beaumier comes to identify with
the cleanliness
and order of his department so
much that he chases
customers away from his tidy displays.
For James Wagner, a customer with an
impossible project is the bane of his existence at a home-improvement store. As in any retail
environment, some days are marked by the absence of action: In "I Scream," the repetition of
Colson Whitehead's scoop-shop
job is the way to madness
(and the swearing off of all desserts), while Kevin Smokler's "Another Day At The
Video Store," which channels Clerks, is bookended by phone calls to his manager
in which nothing is discussed.
Customer's best
stories supersede its jokey title and become true slices of
life: "Tulip Thief," Gary
Mex Glazner's account
of catching a shoplifter in the act, begins with the
bracing line, "I worked as a florist for eighteen years, but
always wanted to
do something more masculine, so I became a poet." Like Glazner's contribution, Timothy
Bracy's "Klaus" offers
just a glimpse into
a particular
place, in this case a coffeeshop
suffused in †particularly Flaubertian horror. While it's constructed
with a creepy
specificity, "Klaus" invokes
the slow-building horror
common to several contributions as Bracy realizes his wits have become so dulled to the changes around him, he might have continued to accept his
shrinking paycheck for years. The Customer Is Always Wrong could be polished off on one of Wade Rouse's extra-long lunch
breaks, but it never trivializes the
value of suffering a little for a paycheck.