Johnny Retail, if you donīt like your job than quit. No one is holding a gun to your head and making you work at a bookstore, are they? Anyone, and I mean anyone, can get an entry level job that does not require you to interact with the public. Even high school students can get jobs stocking produce at grocery stores or loading and unloading trucks for UPS. Or how about data entry? And donīt give me any crap about the tight job market and the displaced dot.com work-force, there are still tons of mind-numbingly dull, sit-in-front-of-the-computer-all-day jobs, that require no interaction with anyone, not even co-workers. And if you have a college degree, than there is a whole world of middle management jobs just waiting for you. If you hate your job so much, than quit. But I guessing that you wonīt quit. I am guessing that you, like the majority of intelligent, white, college educated twenty-somethings who reject suburbia and revel in blue-collar chic, get off on being oppressed and crapped on by the middle-class.

Please donīt misunderstand me, I have had my share of women scream at me over the phone; and my share of overly tan, middle age men in gold chains speak only to my breasts, call me missy, snap their fingers at me because I am not moving fast enough and actually throw money at me. Most of these people are just assholes; when they go home at night, after a long day of shopping, they are still assholes. You and I have to deal with them for five minutes one day at work, but someone has these assholes for neighbors, or in-laws, or bosses or their childīs bestfriendīs parents, and that person has to see them all the time. The world is unavoidably full of them. Making assholes work retail for three will not change that fact. The two people who are the rudest to waitresses, the two people who I am most embarrassed to eat out with, and who, when I am out to dinner with, I am the most worried about receiving shit in my food, both worked as waitresses themselves.

Get over yourself. You are in your situation only because you put yourself in it. Either quit your job or stop whining about. It is not just in the context of retail work in which dealing with people sucks, it sucks to deal with people anywhere. Your middle-class hating emulation of hepatitis causing, employees who add shit to food is played out, Tyler Durden; Youīve watched Fight Club one too many times.

I am told that this is basically the gist of The Retail Manifesto, part two: If the Customer is Always Right, You Can Suck My Cock. Unfortunately, I myself, was unable to wade through the vague twisted pimp metaphors and half innuendos. Maybe this is because I too dumb to understand it, maybe it is because it is jumbled and confusing, or maybe it is because in my white-guilt, college educated twenty-something emulation of the lower class, I refuse to read anything longer than 100 words or containing complex sentences.