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Retail anonymity in small places
Nov. 20th, 2003 09:49 amIt’s hard to be anonymous in this city. When an old friend came in for cheese a few months ago, she asked twice to make sure the cheese she was buying wasn’t made with raw milk. "Oh my god, you’re pregnant!" I said.
The look of surprise and fear on her face was priceless. "We haven’t even told my parents yet. You can’t tell anyone!" I didn’t. The cheese confidentiality laws are very strict in this state.
This is such a small city. I mean, I’ve met three out of four of the top vote-getters in the mayoral election and I’m just not that important a person, ya know? But I know that when I shop at Good Vibes or Blowfish it’s likely that someone I know will be processing my order. When I buy CDs or books the person behind the counter might have lived with a friend of mine, shopped at Epicenter or my current workplace, been in a band I saw or did a zine I reviewed. Hell, I might have even gone to school with them. After the day I ran into someone I hadn’t seen since 6th grade on my stoop where he was on break from the fly-by-night car insurance company next door nothing surprises me.
The important thing about all of this is that it changes the anonymous dynamic of consumer capitalism. I touched on the losing battle of retail shame previously but I think it bears further exploration.
God knows I used to judge people for the records they bought when I worked at Epicenter. I tried to keep it to myself, but other volunteers didn’t even bother. This didn’t help our reputation for being a bunch of mean music snobs. I remember before I worked there buying a copy of The Afflicted’s "Good News About Mental Health"* and wondering if it was going get any crap for not being sensitive enough to people with neuroses issues.
Because after all, judgement helps pass the time and that is the primary goal of almost all retail workers. By the time I got home, I wouldn’t even remember most of the things I said about customers back in the days when I really worked retail.** In retrospect, I loved the busy days because not only did the day go faster, but the customers would be more stressed and likely to do something really classic like threatening to get me fired or to sue the store over the fact that they didn’t load their roll of film into the camera the right way.
So I take it as a given that retail workers form snap opinions of me when I interact with them. However, it wasn’t until recently that I became self-conscious about librarians.
At my local branch, I know the two main workers*** who are there on my day off. One of them lived with an old friend of mine in a big lesbo house back in 1989 or so. She lives somewhere on my path to work so even though we’ve never been actual close friends with each other, we’ve kept in touch over the years. For example, she was one of the many people who stopped me on the street to discuss the Israel "boycott" last year. See, small city.
The other I know because he’s a regular shopper and I’m a regular library goer. We began discussing books when I’d run into him at the store because he’s always so busy at the branch that there’s never time. It was then that I realized what a skewed view he had on my reading habits.
I buy a fair amount of books. I love buying books and love spending hours at used bookstores finding books that I can afford to buy. I read a lot, and I’ll certainly buy full-price new books when I feel the need, but volume demands that I look for deals. But I also have a weakness for detective fiction much of which is not only a) crap writing but b) something I would never read more than once. Therefore I never buy detective fiction, I only check it out from the library.
I understand librarians probably hate this dynamic because they’d rather be buying Works of Incredible Importance than the latest Sue Grafton, but they have their needs and I have mine. However, when my librarian acquaintance commented on my reading habits, I realized that he probably doesn’t think I read anything not involving murder, guns or having "Blood" in the title.****
This bothers me because I actually care about librarians as a class and I do kinda want them to like me. We all love books, can’t we just get along? But it’s more than that. I want them to seem me as a kindred soul: a book-lover and a reader, things increasingly rare and special. I started becoming aware of the selection of books I was checking out and self-consciously adding more important works to my stack of check-outs, even if I knew I probably wouldn’t have time to read them.
I know this is all about my issues by the way. You, dear readers, don’t need to point that out
*Still an horribly underrated punk album. It’s got three classic songs: "I was a punk for the FBI", "Summer of Hate" and that "Here come the cops. Here come the cops. This is where the party stops." song which is one of my all-time faves.
**The wonderful thing about working in a large worker-run store is that there’s plenty of other drama to distract me from judging the customers. They have to do something really egregious to make me make sweeping generalizations about them these days.
***Only one of which is an official MLS librarian
****By the way, librarians on my friends list , are you trained in library school about the importance of not showing judgement on the books people check out? Or is it just taken as a given you shouldn’t say, "Geeez, you really read nothing but crap!" when someone is checking out books.
The look of surprise and fear on her face was priceless. "We haven’t even told my parents yet. You can’t tell anyone!" I didn’t. The cheese confidentiality laws are very strict in this state.
This is such a small city. I mean, I’ve met three out of four of the top vote-getters in the mayoral election and I’m just not that important a person, ya know? But I know that when I shop at Good Vibes or Blowfish it’s likely that someone I know will be processing my order. When I buy CDs or books the person behind the counter might have lived with a friend of mine, shopped at Epicenter or my current workplace, been in a band I saw or did a zine I reviewed. Hell, I might have even gone to school with them. After the day I ran into someone I hadn’t seen since 6th grade on my stoop where he was on break from the fly-by-night car insurance company next door nothing surprises me.
The important thing about all of this is that it changes the anonymous dynamic of consumer capitalism. I touched on the losing battle of retail shame previously but I think it bears further exploration.
God knows I used to judge people for the records they bought when I worked at Epicenter. I tried to keep it to myself, but other volunteers didn’t even bother. This didn’t help our reputation for being a bunch of mean music snobs. I remember before I worked there buying a copy of The Afflicted’s "Good News About Mental Health"* and wondering if it was going get any crap for not being sensitive enough to people with neuroses issues.
Because after all, judgement helps pass the time and that is the primary goal of almost all retail workers. By the time I got home, I wouldn’t even remember most of the things I said about customers back in the days when I really worked retail.** In retrospect, I loved the busy days because not only did the day go faster, but the customers would be more stressed and likely to do something really classic like threatening to get me fired or to sue the store over the fact that they didn’t load their roll of film into the camera the right way.
So I take it as a given that retail workers form snap opinions of me when I interact with them. However, it wasn’t until recently that I became self-conscious about librarians.
At my local branch, I know the two main workers*** who are there on my day off. One of them lived with an old friend of mine in a big lesbo house back in 1989 or so. She lives somewhere on my path to work so even though we’ve never been actual close friends with each other, we’ve kept in touch over the years. For example, she was one of the many people who stopped me on the street to discuss the Israel "boycott" last year. See, small city.
The other I know because he’s a regular shopper and I’m a regular library goer. We began discussing books when I’d run into him at the store because he’s always so busy at the branch that there’s never time. It was then that I realized what a skewed view he had on my reading habits.
I buy a fair amount of books. I love buying books and love spending hours at used bookstores finding books that I can afford to buy. I read a lot, and I’ll certainly buy full-price new books when I feel the need, but volume demands that I look for deals. But I also have a weakness for detective fiction much of which is not only a) crap writing but b) something I would never read more than once. Therefore I never buy detective fiction, I only check it out from the library.
I understand librarians probably hate this dynamic because they’d rather be buying Works of Incredible Importance than the latest Sue Grafton, but they have their needs and I have mine. However, when my librarian acquaintance commented on my reading habits, I realized that he probably doesn’t think I read anything not involving murder, guns or having "Blood" in the title.****
This bothers me because I actually care about librarians as a class and I do kinda want them to like me. We all love books, can’t we just get along? But it’s more than that. I want them to seem me as a kindred soul: a book-lover and a reader, things increasingly rare and special. I started becoming aware of the selection of books I was checking out and self-consciously adding more important works to my stack of check-outs, even if I knew I probably wouldn’t have time to read them.
I know this is all about my issues by the way. You, dear readers, don’t need to point that out
*Still an horribly underrated punk album. It’s got three classic songs: "I was a punk for the FBI", "Summer of Hate" and that "Here come the cops. Here come the cops. This is where the party stops." song which is one of my all-time faves.
**The wonderful thing about working in a large worker-run store is that there’s plenty of other drama to distract me from judging the customers. They have to do something really egregious to make me make sweeping generalizations about them these days.
***Only one of which is an official MLS librarian
****By the way, librarians on my friends list , are you trained in library school about the importance of not showing judgement on the books people check out? Or is it just taken as a given you shouldn’t say, "Geeez, you really read nothing but crap!" when someone is checking out books.
