gordonzola | Retail anonymity in small places

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Retail anonymity in small places

It’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.

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Oooh, are you a Lawrence Block fan?

BTW, that's how i feel whenever i shop at your store (ie: is anyone watching me buy this vegetarian frozen salsburry steak?)

For your emotional health I will devulge a secret. Many librarians don't read much. I was shocked when I started out working in this field and discovered this fact. Lots of them, like myself, love reading trashy mystery novels. I devour them. Yes I read tons of other shit but I love nothing better then a nice bloody fucking rocking mystery.

I love the burglar series. I find the clean and sober ones a little dull but I think that's the point.

You should think how I feel when i go to the Safeway near my house. I get all my real food at work, but I load up on alchohol, Hostess and other crap when I go there.* I've had more than one motherly cashier give me a slight head shake and a tsk tsk.

*actually, it's very similar to the library in that way.

I've been so pissed off at Blockbuster cutting into my reading time. So very pissed off. I barely have time to watch the movies I can rent for free there. It helps in my looking forward to quitting.

When I go to my favorite local chain music store, I always have a little glimmer of hope that the cashier will think my musical selection is really cool. I am pathetic.

I cannot help but promote half.com's cheap book selection. Or, you know, that person on your friends' list who works for Time Warner publishing and can order you books at 50% off (not including shipping). *koffs*

Hi! I ran across your entry via friendsfriends, and was so amused -- I do this exact thing, except in reverse. Most of my "serious" reading gets checked out of libraries; it's things like _Get Fuzzy_ collections which are going to sit on my nightstand for months that I have to buy. So I'm always worrying what the clerks think of me, esp. because I used to be a bookstore clerk.

Once in my life I impressed the clerk at the specialty viedo rental with my selections -- I was far too thrilled.n

I guess the retail places that I've worked in don't exactly lend themselves to a whole lot of snobbery. I mean, when you work in a strip-mall chain bookstore you're going to see A LOT of people buying mostly pulp fiction. Hell, we'd have people who would come in like it was a library, buying a dozen books at a time only to come in a couple weeks later trying to return them for store credit to buy another dozen. (You people are sick.)

On the off chance that someone actually bought something decent I rarely missed the opportunity to compliment them on their selections, but that didn't happen too often.

As far as shopping at stores like Epicenter, man, if it was anything like shopping at say, Extreme Noise in Minneapolis then christ, I know what you mean. Talk about your complete fucking assholes. They sit there and talk about customers completely within earshot. Very welcoming, very utopian. Record store snobbery is bad enough at the local hipster place, but being judged by my fellow punk rockers is almost torture enough to get me to hunt stuff down on e-bay.

I laughed out loud reading this post.

I had to switch libraries once because I all I checked out was gory crime and cheesy romance novels, and I was too embarrassed to keep going back. I felt like I had to explain that I bought all my real books, but I didn't want to insult the librarians by basically telling them that they spent a lot of time shelving shit because I am thrifty with my bad taste.

But then, I can't stomach buying anything in places I feel like I don't belong (sporting goods stores), places that are cooler than I (indie record stores), or regular stores wherein I have to buy a necessity (I was 19 before I could buy my own tampons without trying to offset them with three dozen unrelated purchases).

And in October, when I was confirming my pregnancy, yes, I bought four different pregnancy tests in four different stores.

oh, that is awesome! it never occurred to me in my life of retail that people may be coming to me to fit specific needs. i always just judge them on what they buy. of course not nearly as much or harshly as record store clerks. in fact, not nearly as much or as harshly as i have in other cities. milwaukee is pretty low-key that way. mostly, in fact, now that i think about it, i judge them more on their obnoxious behavior.

There were many reasons why I left Portland but the moment I remember as the turning point was when I realized that people were gossiping about my grocery buying habits. Not just looking and making note, but exporting the information to the larger world via the internet.

I grew up in a small town, went to college in a small town, and sometimes really crave anonymity.... but this alterna-universe we occupy is actually just as constrained and judgmental as living in a pious and remote village.

I knew all those record store clerks were judging my purchases. Knew it. Gosh, this used to be one of my primal fears -- yeah, I can buy sex toys without blinking an eye, but please don't judge me by my music!

I got over it when I became a reviewer and started *selling* CDs by the dozen. I'm not sure how the selling process helped, but it did. So now I kinda adopt my reviewer pose when I buy stuff. "I am a professional and it is my duty to listen to a wide variety of music, even the crappy kind. If you, retail person, make snap judgements about my taste, they will most likely be wrong because you haven't seen my business card."

(I don't actually have a business card. You know what I mean.)

Oooh, your Safeway confession reminds me of a recent incident

imnotandrei had at Whole Foods. This is reported second-hand.

He was at WF because it was late, they were open, and I needed lamb for a recipe. So he brings up exactly one pound of lamb and nothing else to the checkout.

The guy at the checkout snickers and says, "Hey dude, want any vegetables with that?"

"No," he replied, "I have vegetables at home. I don't need to come here for vegetables. I get them from a farm [Terra Firma Farm, to be exact]. Tell me, do you know where your vegetables come from?

"Um, sure, it's on the label."

"But have you ever been to where they're grown? Because I have."

"No. Um, OK, man."

It was, I'm told, a very satisfying reversal of retail snobbitude.

Because we get all our veggies from the box, we often have really skewed grocery hauls, and we like to speculate about what the clerks think we're planning on doing with, say, a box of saltines, three lemons, and a bottle of olive oil.

The degrees of seperation in SF is about two.

if librarians have skewed views of what you read because they're not aware of the books you purchase elsewhere, does that mean you have a skewed view of what people eat because you're only seeing their cheese purchases, or their co-op purchases (if they are the kind to come to your store for only a few certain things)?

apparently this is where i come out & say that i've read sue grafton's a-p & always look forward to the next letter.

but of course i have to mention that i'm currently reading one hundred years of solitude to prove that i'm not completely vapid.

Librarians in portland are trained not to make comments on the books being checked out. I was told this after I made some self-conscious remarks about my selections during checkout.

Yesterday I was at Pegasus Books in Berkeley, very sick and engaging in retail therapy to lift my spirits. I got hell of judged buying Please Don't Kill the Freshman by Zoe Trope. I couldn't find it anywhere, and when I asked, no one knew what I was talking about, even though it's gotten some critical acclaim lately. Once they looked it up, they looked at me askance and said, "Ohhhh, it's in the young adult section." Felix said later that I should've told them, "Sorry I'm not reading Foucault, you motherfuckers!" I was too sick to put up a fight.

Those people are not nearly as mean as the Modern Times people, though. They're mean. Though one of them once hit on me and Felix. Mean or sexual, that's all you get from retail people in this town!

When I worked retail I was just sort of checked out and depressed. But that was in Ohio.

Carefully craft your purchases (or rentals, check-outs, whatever) towards a certain bizarre bent over the course of months. Conversely, you can just do something nutty in a single trip. For instance, picking up odds and ends from the store (super glue, orange juice, light bulbs, cat litter) and telling the cashier you're making a health shake.

I was buying some CDs the other day, replacing stuff that'd been stolen or lost, mostly. After a bit of browsing, rethinking a few items, putting them back, I ended up buying four Beatles albums and The Beta Band's The Three E.P.'s. Pretty obvious what was going on there, eh? The cashier didn't say a thing.

but I do notice and do judge people on their reading and media habits. So the lady who is checking out the More With Less Cookbook, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and the DVD Lumumba gets props while the dude with all the wrestlemania smackdown tapes and a trashy YA book on Avril Lavigne gets none. No props for the Crazy Hitler Lady either. Lucky for them, though, I don't actually deal with the public unless it can be helped.

Incidently, this is how I first suspected one of the sex offenders. From the time he got his card he ONLY checked out 2 types of materials (and these he checked out frequently): wrestling videos and sex ed books. Put that together. :/

The only people we openly mock, however, are ones who use the free internet access to watch the Paris Hilton sex footage all the while trying to play it off, like "Oh, I was just, um, checking the weather forecast..." Otherwise, policy is that it's not our business. Freedom of inquiry, no cenosrship and all that.

My name is socialretard and I read detective fiction as well. Thanks for helping me find the strength to come out and admit it.

When I have a haul like that (say lightbulbs, toilet paper, a 9v battery, and an avocado), I usually deadpan to the cashier that I'm making a smoothie out of it.

To me this has always been a test in the other direction.... I will buy/check out whatever the hell I want, and if someone is dumb enough to judge me based on that then I probably wouldn't want to be their friend anyway. I mean really, what kind of a lame ass friend would that be? Would I have to be faking things around them all the time?

But in reality I don't even remember ever getting sneered at by a record store or book store clerk or librarian. If it happened I didn't notice.

Once I went into the St. Francis Hotel in SF and asked where the Tonga Room was. That got me a good amount of condescension from the desk guy.

Oh, yeah, I forgot, once I was in Manhattan and walked into a Borders (near 32nd and 2nd?) and asked where the humor section was and they sneered at me, but I think that mostly had to do with my accent.

1. In my orientation, they explained that we must respect confidentiality and whatever we see people checking out or asking about does not leave the library. But I just answer questions and don't work at the circulation desk, so I don't see many interesting things.

2. I feel really self-conscious when librarians make small talk about my embarressing check outs, which are usually Martha Stewart Living magazines. And I hate it when supermarket cashiers start asking me about my purchases in an "ew, that's gross" sort of way.

3. When I wanted to buy CDs of questionable integrity I would make my sister do it for me. She was amused. I almost never buy CDs now, so it doesn't really matter.

4. I have always made judgments on people who read paperback books with bumpy covers. Covers in relief = trash. I don't mean judgments on people who bought them in bookstores or borrowed them from libraries. I mean people who had them in their houses or were reading them. It has always weirded me out when anyone who was my friend read bumpy books. I'm trying to be less judgmental about it (as more and more people come out of the woodwork), but it still freaks me out.

5. Around Halloween time one year, Matt's friend went to the supermarket and bought nothing but apples and razor blades. Ha ha!

What the hell?! Caring about what retail clerks think of you is so '90's.

I don't think I'll ever top the time

anarqueso and I were working at a bakery and our very flamy boss had me go next door and get a can crisco and a jumbo pack of tp.

HAha!

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Retail anonymity in small places

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You can have fun with it

Not an actual, trained librarian

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Or you can mess with their minds!

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