Customer
disservice

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Shopping has gotten so complicated! Going to Costco is like visiting a Communist country: you have to show your papers upon entry, at the cash and again at the final passport check. That’s where they check your bill to ensure you haven’t stolen something in the empty corridor between the cash and the exit. So I’ve granted myself permanent diplomatic immunity. Jaws drop at my temerity as I hurriedly push my cart past the line-up, making like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. The helpless bill checker always calls “Monsieur, monsieur!” as I roll by. This doesn’t slow me. They either watch me march away or hurriedly dash to me with an immediate, apologetic and cursory check of my goods, in deference to my self-conferred diplomatic status.

A few days ago Canadian Tire made my heart flutter with a display of cheap cans of paint badly mixed, strangely discoloured Au Coton Mauve and Mile-End Cockroach Brown. I returned to buy some and, yes, they still had the paint and, yes, they still wanted to sell it. But they’d decided to return it to the back room for a couple of weeks. Possibly just to inconvenience me. So I shared my disapproving thoughts with the manager and later tearfully rifled through my sock drawer hoping to find enough unspent Canadian Tire money to buy the whole mall.

I long imagined the grating alarm that greets customers at Radio Shack was set off by face recognition technology that detects and discourages cheapskates known to ask endless questions without ever buying anything. But the earsplitting WEEEE-WAAAA! door sensor goes off for everybody and not just my type. The alarm kept me out of Radio Shack for ages until I noticed this week that it had been removed from my local branch, which left me strangely nostalgic for it.

The Home Depot in St-Henri has provided my major shopping disappointment of 2002 because I fantasized it would be a 24-hour nuts’n’bolts paradise. One fine day, which I would have preferred to spend drinking champagne with dark-skinned beauties on top of the Hotel de la Montagne, I was instead sent by my wife to buy a can of PVC glue. When I asked the clerk where among the store’s treasures the glue might be kept, he stared at the floor and mumbled a belligerent reply in French that made me feel that I was asking Raymond Villeneuve to sing “God Save the Queen.” I also tried to buy an air conditioner there during the recent killer heat wave, but the manager explained to me that it wasn’t convenient for them to be selling air conditioners at this time, which also impressed me to no end.

I never go to the Body Shop because I can’t handle feeling ethically inferior to shop clerks. Somebody recently gave me a Body Shop shower gel called Activist. It’s convenient. Now I can talk to hippie chicks and say, “No, I’m not politically inclined… but I wash with Activist body gel.”

Another awesome customer experience happens regularly at Super C, where the specials are kept off the meat racks until a crowd gathers. When the cart finally rolls out, customers are overcome by a frenzied meat lust and descend on the specials like wolves on a bunny.

I haven’t bought a CD in years for fear of suffering the ridicule of $8-an-hour über-hipsters working the cash, secretly snickering at my taste in music. Meanwhile, you wondered why your photo development store staff is extra friendly to you? It’s because they made a copy of that naughty photo you once had them develop. They pull it out for laughs every time you leave.

People rave about Wal-Mart but I can’t go. I have hard-to-control aggressive impulses towards store greeters. Plus the aisles are so narrow and crowded that I once ran over a tiny kid with my cart while racing to the $2.49 hand towels. I feel dreadful just thinking about it. :