The Customer is Always Wrong in RetailMichael Beaumier once took a job in the home section of a department store, selling "melon-ball fork sharpeners," eight-piece copper-pot collections and other kitchenware. He soon discovered, though, that he wasn't so much selling the goods as playing handmaiden to the way they were arranged and lighted. "These things practically sell themselves," he was told by Adam, the store's wizard of product presentation. Mr. Beaumier marveled that Adam "could set up a display of toothpicks and used Kleenex in the morning, and we'd have been sold out by midafternoon." No other part of the store -- not luggage, not clothing -- offered goods that could be made to seem quite so voluptuous by the application of his talents, Adam said, although "shoes comes closest."
Now, it might have been interesting to find out more about the retailing alchemy that turns humble cooking tools into irresistible treasures for the home, but Mr. Beaumier is recounting his experience in "The Customer Is Always Wrong," a collection of essays by writers who have toiled in the store aisles and behind the cash registers of the service economy and generally considered the work an ordeal. And so Mr. Beaumier, a frequent contributor to National Public Radio's "This American Life" and the author of a book about working at an alternative weekly newspaper, must turn the spotlight on himself, particularly on his feelings. How did he feel? Diminished by the knowledge that when a knife collection is arranged just so, his efforts as a salesman are superfluous. Diminished by a lecture from Adam that "it's not about you. It's about the merchandise."
Oh, but it was about him. Mr. Beaumier became "progressively more depressed after that. A man is supposed to have value and substance, isn't he? A man is not supposed to compare himself to a bunch of steamers and Crock-Pots and waffle irons and come up short, or be invisible compared to sterling silver corkscrews." He began to "act out," he says, and launched a guerrilla campaign, pointing lights away from displays, unscrewing bulbs, smudging glasses and dishes, driving a customer off by warning that an espresso maker was dangerous. "I loved it," Mr. Beaumier says. "They fired me."
His departure is hardly the only non-résumé-building job departure recounted in "The Customer Is Always Wrong," which, as the title suggests, shows up for work with a chip on its shoulder. Editor Jeff Martin sets the tone in the introduction. Life in the retail business, he says, means dealing with annoying people at every level, from customers to bosses. But he doesn't explain why they're annoying; he just refers to them with a crude and all too common term that vaguely rhymes with gasohol. Throughout the book, obscenities substitute for wit -- some of the obscenities larger than others, as when Mr. Martin trots out that old reliable thigh-slapper, the Holocaust joke: The book's essayists are "retail survivors," he says, and "the Employee Identification Number tattooed on their forearms is a painful reminder of the past and a source of motivation for the future."
Still, despite the overall tone of mirthless sneering in "The Customer Is Always Wrong," the book does offer a few engaging pieces. One is Gary Mex Glazner's "Tulip Thief." It is ostensibly about the time he chased down and tackled a fleeing shoplifter, but its real subject is Mr. Glazner's longing, after 18 years in the flower business, to find a more masculine line of work. In "The Popsicle Shop," Jane Borden effectively evokes the suffocating atmosphere of a children's clothing store in the wealthy North Carolina neighborhood of her youth. Kids were rarely seen in this "fantasyland" for mothers, Ms. Borden reports. She goes to work there as a teenager and soon realizes that, under the honeyed tutelage of the Popsicle Shop's owner, she is being "groomed" to become one of those mothers. She eventually escapes to college and then to New York City but is wise enough to note that "a miniature pillow with eyelet-trim" from the Popsicle Shop that she still keeps on her bed is just one reminder that she has not entirely left behind her pampered Southern past.
That sort of close observation and introspection is rare in the "The Customer Is Always Wrong." More common among the 21 contributors -- whose number includes two comedians, a musician and a poet -- is a thoroughgoing sense of resentment at having had to lower themselves to take a day job.
"I had a master's degree and clips at national magazines and newspapers and my manager still thought I was an idiot," writes Kevin Smokler in "Another Day at the Video Store." In "The Final Facial," Stewart Lewis wants us to know that, even though he was working at a day spa in New York for a mere $12 an hour, he was "a masters-degreed graduate from a top writing school." Becky Poole takes a job at a wine shop, she says, because "I was sick of what I had known as the only way to make money for a B.F.A. drama graduate student in N.Y.C.: working freelance for Viacom."
It turns out that Ms. Poole is the only one of the essayists who actually enjoyed her stint in retail. Then again, the wine shop was in the hipster-magnet Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, and the store wasn't so much a commercial enterprise as "a social club for wayward youths . . . a place for the interesting or eccentric, the harmless ne'er-do-wells and riffraff, to swap naughty stories, share thoughts, poems and songs." Presumably the shop's doors were not darkened by any of the suburbanite, overweight, well-to-do or elderly customers who come in for scorn elsewhere in the book.
Retailers might take one look at "The Customer Is Always Wrong" and vow never again to hire anyone with an artistic bent, but that would be a shame. No doubt plenty of writers and performers who aren't yet successful enough to be recruited for publishing projects like Mr. Martin's are glad to find a job, welcome the chance to learn a few workplace skills, take an interest in the array of people they deal with every day and figure that, as so often happens in life, occasional irritations come with the territory.
