Part Two: "Title dictates behaviour"
Vagary
For me, one of the best scenes in Clerks was the depiction of the strange behaviour that many customers exhibit when looking around a shop. Until I saw the film, I was under the impression that these antics were exclusive to Redlands News. It was some help (not much, but some) to see that other shop staff have had to put up with these annoying habits. It didn't stop the customers grating on my nerves, but it did help to stop the belief that these people had been sent from Hell to make my life a misery.
In Clerks, we are shown a man who is looking for the perfect pack of eggs. He opens each pack, shakes and examines each egg and smashes any that he does not approve of. Thankfully, Redlands News did not sell eggs so I was spared this sort of behaviour. If we had sold eggs, you can bet that not only would I have been in charge of dealing with the customer, but also with cleaning up the mess afterwards. So I can at least be thankful for that.
One type of customer that I did have to deal with (and also appeared in Clerks) was the Milk Maid. These are the people who are on a constant quest to find the perfect pint of milk. The milk bottles at the front of the fridge are immediately shunned by the customer as they are considered to be too old. The milk on the second row is examined but ultimately refused too. No, these people are not happy until they have taken every single bottle of milk out of the fridge until they are faced with that one magic example of super-dated milk.
Except they're not. That milk will have been delivered on exactly the same day as all the other bottles. If they're lucky, the bottle that the customer finally decides to buy may be, say, ten minutes fresher than the others. But ultimately, there is no difference. And if that wasn't bad enough, they wouldn't even put all the other bottles back, leaving me to do it. And guess what? Half an hour later somebody else would come in and repeat the process all over again.
To make matters worse, my boss had to be awkward. Instead of just using the sell-by date on the milk as a judge of freshness, he used a letter system too. Each day, a sticker with a letter from A to G representing each day of the week was placed on the lid of each milk bottle. At first this system was just for the benefit of staff, but customers sooned realised what the letters meant. This led to conversations such as:
Customer: What day is it?
Me: Saturday.
Customer: No. What DAY is it?
Me: Sat-ur-day.
Customer: No. What LETTER DAY is it?
Half the time I knew what they meant and just did it on purpose to antagonise them. This would leave them standing in the middle of the shop trying to count the letters on their one hand while counting the days on the other. A bit like Joey Tribbiani in that episode of Friends when he invents his method of remembering days ("Monday - One Day, Tuesday - Two Day, Wednesday - Huh, what day? - Thursday - Third Day").
At the end of one particular day, there was only one bottle of milk left. The customer still did the counting and while they were in the process of doing so, another customer came in and bought the milk without a second thought. How I laughed. Why couldn't all customers be that decisive?
The other customer annoyance was the way in which they paid. Some people would come for their cigarettes and pay for them entirely with pennies. Others would come in for a 10p sweet mix and offer a £20 ("I haven't got anything smaller"). However, the most annoying customers were the ones who would simply slam their money down on the counter (even though I would be standing there with my hand out) with not even a "thank you," but would still expect me to put all their goods in a bag for them, give them the change in their hand and still have a jolly smile for them.
So much for treating others as you wish to be treated in return.
Purgation
When faced with people and circumstances such as those described, it is really hard to stay in control. The problem is that customers always think that they're the first to say an (un)funny joke or ask a trivial question. With these people it is best to just give a polite smile or laugh and hope that they go away quickly. It is best not to call them an annoying customer and spit in their face, as Randal does in Clerks, no matter how much your conscience tells you that it is the correct thing to do.
The only time that I did offend a customer was actually quite unintentionally. I was in the stock room getting ready to bring some things through to the shop when I dropped a two litre bottle of apple Tango on my foot. Not only did it hurt, but it also exploded and sprayed me and the stockroom with sticky fizzy pop.
Without thinking, and not actually caring if any customers were in the shop, I let rip with a massive "FUCKING......HELL!" which lasted for about ten seconds and was surely heard on the other side of the Severn Bridge. Once I had calmed down, there was a long silence and I then heard an elderly lady say "I will never come to this shop again. This has highly offended me."
Of course, she was back again the following week when she wanted her new bingo card, but suffice to say I haven't had a drink of apple Tango since.
Speaking of bingo cards, they were often the things that offended customers more than any offensive language or bad attitude. Not just bingo cards either. Free CDs, free scratchcards, Sunday supplements - if they were supposed to get something free and they didn't receive it, that was reason enough for them to never come to the shop again. They wouldn't even ask if we had a replacement (which we usually did). No, they would take their custom elsewhere. One man was so angered because his fishing magazine was missing a free bait box that he actually left town and hasn't been seen since.
It almost makes me feel quite guilty that I took the box home to use as storage for my guitar plectrums. Almost.
Malaise
There is nothing more depressing than working in a shop on a hot Saturday afternoon and seeing all your friends going off to the beach, or the cinema, or anywhere equally exciting. Dante knew this feeling - he was supposed to be playing hockey on the day that his boss roped him in to working. However, he also had a great solution - get all his friends to come to him and play hockey on the roof of the shop.
This was also my solution. Unfortunately, the roof of Redlands News was not flat. This ruled out any kind of sporting activity. Not that any of my friends owned a hockey stick between them. However, it did not stop my film-making friends setting up their equipment on the pavement outside and recording footage of passers-by.
Other friends would come to meet me for school and form a little crowd outside the shop just so they could be amongst the first to read that week's edition of the NME.
During 1997, I was in a band called The Five O'Clock Heroes (not to be confused with the current American band of the same name - we played Beatles, Who, Jam and Small Faces covers. M was our lead singer but couldn't actually sing - so he rapped instead. You are missing out if you haven't heard Yellow Submarine gangsta style).
One day, I was so unhappy because I had to miss a rehearsal that the band came to me and had an impromptu busk outside. That was my signal to hurry up and finish for the day. Our drummer even brought his bongos to give it that real MTV Unplugged feel. It also kept the customers away for a bit which, ultimately, was all that mattered.
Harbinger
"Do you have a toilet in here?" - a question that I always dreaded. My boss had a list of rules pinned to a board that needed to be adhered to even if the world was about to end. These rules were the metaphorical foundations on which Redlands News had been built (the physical foundations were the remains of an old garage).
Most of the rules were tedious things to do with cleaning and shelf stacking. However, the two big ones were:
- Do not let anyone in the side door - not even a delivery - sneak thieves are about!
- Never let anybody use the staff toilet - sneak thieves are about!
I was never entirely sure why he had such paranoia about sneak thieves. In fact, I was never certain of the exact definition of a sneak thief. But then I also never quite understood why he also insisted on spelling Pepsi as "Pepsie," so I let it slide.
It wasn't so much that the rules were a problem, it was more a fact that we were not allowed to tell anybody about them (in true Fight Club / Book Review Club style). His theory was that if you told people they couldn't go out there, they would presume that there was something worth stealing. I'd like to see a sneak thief trying to discreetly get away with a few hundred litres of pop - I had enough trouble with that one bottle.
These rules led to the need for inventing many excuses for why a customer could not use the shop toilet (after all, just saying "no - we do not have a toilet" would not have given them the best impression of the hygiene standards).
Eventually, the preferred excuse was that the shop had plumbing problems. This would be enough to get rid of the customer. I'm not entirely sure what we would have done if that person had come back another day, still in need of relief. I probably would have just passed them a bucket and turned my back - that would be less embarrassing than thinking up another poor excuse.
Maybe our boss had the right idea, though. Dante let a customer use the shop toilet in Clerks and it didn't turn out well at all...
Perspicacity
Perhaps the worst thing about working in a newsagents was the fact that customers seemed to forget that you hadn't actually personally written all the newspapers.
In Clerks, a customer tells Dante and Randal about a newspaper headline which said that the world was going to end. The next day, when the world had not ended, the same newspaper said that Earth had been saved by a "Koala Fish Mutant Bird Thing." As neither of them had read the story, they had no idea what he was talking about.
This happened to me all the time. If a customer didn't understand a word, they would ask me what it meant. If they didn't agree with an editorial opinion, they would verbally attack me. If I hadn't read a tiny one-paragraph story on page forty-two of The Telegraph, they would look at me as if they expected me to go and stand in the corner and wear a Dunce hat.
And that was just the national newspapers. If it was a story in one of the local papers it was even worse. I would be expected not only to know about the story and the person, but also any extra gossip that may have been left out of the article. It was always my dream to be involved in a local scandal - an illicit affair maybe, or LOCAL SHOP ASSISTANT IN SEVEN-IN-A-BED ROMP - but knowing my luck it would have been the one time that they didn't want to talk about the news. Or the Penarth Times wouldn't find it interesting enough.
Typical.
Part Four: "Sorry, we're closed"
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