Where am I?

This blogpost was originally published in German as part of the Retales series on countessleto.wordpress.de. 

"Where am I?"
This seems to be a question that customers just love to ask themselves but only after entering a shop and asking the assistants one or two questions. Or not at all. You usually get whether or not they did based on what they ask you.

During my bookseller apprenticeship, there were two types of people. Type 1 was all the people (and yes, they were quite a lot) entering and saying something like: "Hello, I'd like a book please." Internally, I'd roll my eyes at them and make a huge gesture around the room, as if to say: "IF ONLY WE HAD BOOKS!?" Of course you can't really do that. Instead, I'd ask a simple counter-question: "Would you like to specify that question a bit?" Usually, that'd do the deal.

Not with type 2 though - type 2 enters and asks for everything except for books. Sure, we can help out with some of those things, like calendars, planners, notebooks and so on. But then... all the times people asked me for stamps. Kind of related, sure, but no, you get stamps at the post office just down the road. Usually, they said that's too far away. But people also requested completely unrelated things like CD-players. And the best thing about that is: When you start explaining that you don't have what the customer was asking for - they start discussions. "That's incredibly bad service!" I mean, sure, but that doesn't make the thing appear magically out of thin air. I'll order any available book for you overnight, it would be my pleasure, really, but I can't get my hands on a CD-player just like that. That's not my job either. I'm a bookseller after all.

Now, about a year after I finished my apprenticeship, I work at a crafts shop because the job market for booksellers is shit. Maybe that would be different if people would ask us for books for once instead of CD-players. But oh well... crafts shop it is. Don't you think that kind of conversation was done now, oh no, it just changed.

"Hello, I'd like to present my gift of money in a lovely way, do you happen to have a good idea for that?" (By the way, I love it when the word 'idea', which is the name of the shop as well, gets emphasized like that and then the customer thinks they made the greatest pun ever. Didn't hear that one before. Yes, you came up with that as the first person ever. So funny.) Yes, I have one or two ideas. Look, here, frame with cords, you can hang your money on there and put some stuff around that matches the occasion or the presentees interests. "Oh, that's too elaborate for me, that would require crafting." Thanks to some colleagues I know it's perfectly fine here to answer: "Well, you are in a crafts shop here..." Doesn't help though. Crafting ideas in a crafts shop, who would come up with that crazy kind of ideas? Then the customer lays an eye on the models in the shelf for inspiration and asks if they could buy that one instead. In some cases, they can, for example, the Schultüten (school cones, google it, that's pretty specific for Germany). When you tell them the price though, they usually lose it within seconds. They absolutely love to make a counteroffer that doesn't only disrespect the hours of work one of my colleagues put into it but also is way below the mere cost of the used materials. But buying ready for use packaging for gifts of money somewhere else is bad because you want something individual and not staple goods.

And here, as well, there are customers that go completely wild and yell and curse when you don't have what they are looking for. My favourite so far was an elderly man, I still don't know what he was actually looking for because his explanation was really inadequate before he started yelling at me, cursing on about todays youth and, anyway, no surprise retail is dying when we don't have what he wants. I could only smile about that. Because at some point you learn that those kind of moments are actually reeeeally funny when you yourself actually have nothing to do with them at all.