When nursery, doesn’t mean nursery

Spend anytime in retail and you’ll find that intelligent people still ask incredibly stupid questions.

The list of questions I have tried to answer would go on for pages, but today I’ll just share the latest.

I had a guy ask me, in the lumber department, surrounded by 2 X4’s and roofing tar, if we sold canned dog food.

In retail, you are defined as much by what you don’t sell as what you do. You can’t call yourself a home improvement warehouse if you sell milk, eggs and cookies. We may be forced to try it if the economy doesn’t turn around, but for now, we are still making it selling “stick and bricks”.

The best question in recent times, however, came from a woman who wanted to know if we sold Pampers, as in disposable baby diapers. When informed that we didn’t, she appeared perplexed. She simply assumed that since the sign our front indicated that we had a nursery attached to our home improvement warehouse, then of course we sold diapers.

Go figure!

The Semi-Annual Employee Clearance Event

Every retailer is in a seasonal business. Sales go up and down in a predictable pattern depending on the time of year. When sales increase, retailers add employees and when sales start to decline, business 101 dictates firing employees to reduce payroll expenses.

It doesn’t matter that sales will pick up in a few months, retailers can’t handle even a couple slow months of lowered profitability. The irony is that when sales rebound from their seasonal lows, these same retailers will be hiring like mad.

So right now we are in the first of our two “Semi-Annual Employee Clearance Events”.

During this event, retailers play what I like to call Payroll Poker. In this game, retailers try to reduce the number of employees in the store while betting that customers won’t notice. If played correctly, the shoppers will continue to shop, and buy, even though there is a significant decline in the service provided by the retailer. If the retailer can keep the game going long enough, then the reduction in service will not drive down sales, while the lower labor costs improve profitability.

The thing is, customers are not stupid. They notice immediately when labor costs are lowered in the store. When shoppers can’t find what they want, or if they can’t get their questions answered regarding what they plan to buy because employees are non-existent …then they don’t buy. They simply leave and many vow never to return. Payroll Poker is a game that is won by the retailer only in its own corporate mind.

As service levels drop, due to insufficient staffing, the resulting decline in sales is chalked up by corporate know it alls as a symptom of the seasonality of the business.

Right now, due to our Semi Annual Employee Clearance Event, I have been covering three separate departments by myself. In good times, my single department is staffed by at least two and in most cases three employees.

I have personally seen between $300 and $500 in sales walk out the door in an hour because I couldn’t get to the customers to help them, or if I could get to them, then I didn’t have the knowledge necessary to answer their questions. So rather than ante up in the game of Payroll Poker, the customers simply folded and walked out.

On several occasions I have been faced with customers actually crying because they can’t find what they are looking for or anyone to help them. These poor individuals feel as though we are taking an active part in making them feel less than human. And perhaps we are, but it’s not personal, it’s only business.

Crying is an extreme example; most customers just seem to wander the cavernous store in a daze, hoping that someone will point them in the direction of the replacement furnace filters.

Nowhere in the corporate accounting system is there a ledger entry which records the dollar amount lost in these cases. There is no Excel spreadsheet column marked “sales lost due to pissed off customers”. There is also nowhere to track the amount of dollars lost because overworked and exasperated employees have simply stopped talking to customers that they can’t help.

In my experience, there is little in the world of retail that is more energy sapping than being forced to face exasperated customers. No employee wants to deal with a customer who has been wandering the store for the good part of an hour while trying to find what they want to buy or someone to help them. As an added benefit to the shopper, when they finally find me, I am not able to help them in the least because they are asking questions that I have no hope of answering.

In such cases it is not unusual for a customer to take out his or her frustrations on the only symbol of corporate malfeasance they can find; namely me. I have been cussed out, threatened and made to hear over and over again a litany of complaints about how our lack of concern for the customer is, in various cases;

Rude, bad business, inconsiderate, despicable, unacceptable, Frickin’ ridiculous, stupid, Frickin’ stupid, mean, nasty and downright inhospitable.

So as a defense mechanism, most employees simply stop trying to help customers in this situation. As labor cost decline, the number of angry customers that no one wants to help increases. We go from being a DIY retailer to a GIY retailer. From “Do It Yourself” to “Get IT Yourself”.

Service levels drop, employee enthusiasm declines and sales go into the tank.

The feeling among customers and employees during this game of “Payroll Poker” is amazingly similar. Neither the shoppers, nor the people paid to help them, actually want to be in the store.

The kick in the pants in this whole game is that eventually the Corporate Brain Trust decides that the level of non-service is unacceptable and they order the stores to add more staffing. This leads to a rush in hiring and the inevitable extra costs incurred to screen, hire and train all those new employees.

So soon the Employee Clearance Event will be replaced with the Hiring Anyone with a Pulse Celebration. Then the store will be crawling with clueless newbie’s who have no trouble telling customers that they have no idea where the furnace filters are. But hey, that’s retail!

How a day in the electrical department sharpened my use of deflection as a sales tool and almost saved the planet.

Today I was asked to fill in for a vacationing associate in the electrical department. The very though of it had me intimidated.

In plumbing, I don’t fret too much anymore about giving customers bad advice or about letting them go off with the fixes they insist on, even though I know that they absolutely won’t work. After all, we’re dealing with water and I figure that the worst that can happen is that people or property might get a little damp. Even with gas fixtures, the chances of things getting out of hand are relatively slim.

There was that one time, however, when I was sure that the barely English speaking guy was going to hook up the fryer in a Chinese restaurant with some highly flammable thin plastic tubing. I remember watching the news that night to see if there was a horrible explosion and fire at the Great Wall Dim Sum Palace. But with electricity, you’re into a whole new stratum of destructiveness. Combine the lethal nature of voltage and watts with my appalling lack of knowledge and you’re looking straight down the barrel of some big time trouble.

Me and electricity don’t mix. One of my first home improvement projects was a botched attempt to re-wire a ceiling fan. I could have sworn I turned off the breaker, but when my screwdriver crossed the circuitry, I awoke flat on my back, at the bottom of a four foot ladder, looking straight up at big, black scorch marks on the ceiling, while coming to in a fog of ozone. Before I could even check to see if my spinal cord had been severed, my mind screamed; “Shit! My wife’s gonna kill me when she sees that burn mark on the ceiling!”

Whenever I am asked an electrical question, I remember the line uttered by Michael Keaton in the movie classic “Mr. Mom”. For those of you younger than 30, or those of you that don’t remember the 80’s, in the movie Keaton plays a laid off auto executive who is forced to stay at home with the kids while his wife, played by Teri Garr, goes off to earn the daily bread. With his ego in tatters, Keaton’s character begins taking on home improvement projects in a botched attempt to reclaim his manhood. In a display of misplaced testosterone, he comes barreling through a hole in a wall with a chainsaw growling in his hands. When asked what his up to he utters, “oh, just adding on a room or two.” When asked by another male character if he’s going to wire the room with 220, and Keaton answers; “220, 221, whatever it takes.” I’m sure his next line would have been “shit, my wife’s gonna kill me”, but his was a movie, not real life.

Management at my store is famous for telling associates to that they need to step outside of their comfort zone (usually followed by the retort “What the hell did you do that for!!!?”), so I begrudgingly took on the assignment in the valley of death, commonly known as aisles 1 through 6 in electrical.

Fortunately, my first hundred or so customers where even more clueless about how electricity works than a young Ben Franklin. I easily cruised through my first four hours by using a trick I have turned into an art form over my long retail career. I simply avoided answering questions by employing deflection.

To unarm a customer with difficult questions, you simply start asking them different questions that they can’t possibly answer. It’s a type of verbal judo where you use the customer’s inquiry against them, until they just give up trying to buy anything and go home to gather more information.

I had one customer who asked early in my shift for an outside light bulb that came with those tiny little bases known as candelabra. He complained that the bulbs he had been using burnt out in less than a month. He wanted to know if we had any special candelabra bulbs that could be used outside. This was a question I was unable to answer.

To deflect, I asked him if the problem might be caused by a damaged weatherproof seal in the fixture. I asked if he knew of any damage to the weatherproof covering. He said he didn’t know, but that he would go home and check it out.

See, problem solved.

I have no idea if there is such a thing as an outdoor candelabra bulb, and I couldn’t find any on the shelf, so I simply deflected the question with another question. He later returned to the store and bought an entirely new light fixture which we both assumed would have the weatherproof seal in tact. The store saw a $4.99 light bulb sale increase to a $69.00 fixture sale and the customer thinks I know what I’m talking about.

Everybody wins.

Another customer asked me to help him find “Can Lights”. I don’t know a can light from a barrel light so I simply walked him around the department until he pointed out the can lights to me. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my store carries about 50 ,000 different configurations of what, to the untrained eye, looks like a simple hole in the ceiling with a light bulb screwed into it.

Can lights (as I found out by quickly and secretly scanning a shelf full of stuff I didn’t even know existed) come in a bewildering number of sizes, each with an equally overwhelming number of ways that they can be secured to the area above your head. They come in 4, 5, and 6 inch diameters with all sorts of wires sticking out of them and different heavy metal brackets to hold them up. Each has a specific function and is designed for a specific type of instillation environment. This was my salvation.

I am completely ignorant about which type goes where, but the customer doesn’t know that. He then asks; “which can light do I need?” I don’t know the answer to that question, but do I reveal my ignorance? Not on your life! I simply deflect. “What size of light were you thinking about using?” I say while pointing out the 4, 5 and 6 inch choices. “I don’t know”, he replies.

I then go in for the kill. “Well, how big is the room and what types of activities are you planning for it? The size of the can light depends on the square footage your trying to light and the height of the ceiling.”

My bet is that the customer has no clue as to the square footage and even if he does have some idea about the room’s basic dimensions, he certainly can’t calculate the cube footage, which is why I threw in the factoid about the ceiling height. ”I better go home and measure”, he says dejectedly. HI-YA!! verbal karate chop to the solar plexus.

I spend the rest of the day putting returned items back onto the shelf. I am struck by the shear number of items that come back to the electrical department. I was sure that plumbing saw the most returned items as customers find out that there is a big difference between ¾ and ½ inch pipe and spouses weren’t happy with the $45 plastic kitchen faucet that the husband bought (“What’s wrong with it? All the damn thing has to do is turn the water off, why do you need to spend $435?”). Electrical gives plumbing a real run for the money. I put back ceiling fans, switches, breakers, and a whole host of things that I could not identify.

The most returned item by far, however was light bulbs. People simply have no idea what size or type of bulb they need. They think they know, then they come in the front door and see the enormous array of bulbs we have in the store. The light bulb section consumes an area half the size of the department. It is eight feet high, runs for 55 feet in length and contains at least 35,000 separate items. Not multiple packs of items mind you but 30,000 different devices to give off light. When seen from space, I’m sure the light bulb aisle in my store is hard to discern from the great wall of China.

They keep the light bulbs near the front of the store, not to make it easier for the customers to find, but to improve the reception on their cell phones as they desperately call home to find out exactly what type of bulb they need. The shear size of the section, combined with the overwhelming number of ways you can make a wrong decision, drives many customers to madness. Most don’t even try to navigate this part of the store with out guidance, and today that meant walking through the shadows of doom that are light bulbs with me.

All the information most customers need to make the right choices are directly in front of them, or more accurately, right there in their own two hands. While some customers will venture into our “Light Bulb Jungle” unarmed and to their peril, most will bring in an example of what they need in the form of a recently burned out bulb.

All I have to do, as the helpful associate, is to take the bulb from their hands and begin reading the boxes on the shelf. I look for anything that bears a resemblance to the bulb I’m carrying and see if the numbers and descriptions on the box match what’s printed somewhere on the bulb. That gets me 95% home. Then it’s up to the customer do decide if they want soft white light, natural light, spot light, 30 par light, 20 par light, grow light, fish-tank light, incandescent light, florescent light, halogen light, cool white light or one of those yellow lights that don’t attract bugs. See, that isn’t so hard, is it?

While in light bulbs, I get to pontificate on one of my favorite topics, the idiocy of using the new compact florescent lights to help save the environment.

The theory goes that compact florescent lights, commonly referred to as CFL’s, help the environment by reducing energy usage. CFL’s are much more efficient than regular incandescent lights because they put out more light while using only a third of the electricity. You save both money and the planet by lowering your electric bill and the saved electricity leads to lower carbon emissions. I have no problem with that because as near as I can tell, the facts on energy savings, when comparing CFL’s to their incandescent counterparts, seem indisputable. Where the argument runs off the rails is in the whole “Good for the Environment” logic.

I’m a big believer that our use of fossil fuels like petroleum and coal are doing some strange things to the environment. I sitting here in Charleston South Carolina and it’s snowing, something it hasn’t done since 1895. So don’t tell me that driving SUV’s to the corner store and Hummer’s to the kids’ school is not putting the whole planet into some kind of climate catastrophe. But you have to look at things in a greater context. I can’t imagine that using more energy efficient light bulbs is going to make up for my neighbors truck that gets 1.7 mile to the gallon. I have to believe that we need to do more than convert to CFL’s if we’re going to stop global Armageddon.

To further vent my spleen, CFL’s have a big draw back as far as environmental friendliness is concerned…you can’t throw them away!

Check out the package for any CFL, you’ll see that you have to take them to an authorized disposal site. That’s not a characteristic generally attributed to a product that’s supposed to be a pal to the environment. CFL’s contain trace amounts of mercury, one of the most highly toxic substances on the planet. Mercury, once released into the ground or water, never goes away, and it causes sever brain damage to small children. Now the Mercury in one bulb is not going to turn your kid into a vegetable, but once 20 or so Billion of them get into land fills, I think we’re going to have a hard time feeling good about our selves when a future generations ask us what the hell we were thinking.

To expand on the Green-washing, CFL’s work because they are filled with a gas that glows when an electrical current passes through it. Those gases are known carcinogens, something you definitely don’t think of as earth friendly. Packaging also carries warnings that if a CFL breaks, you are not supposed to clean it up right away. You are supposed to leave the room after opening all the windows to change out the now toxic air. Once the room is ventilated, you are supposed to clean up what’s left of your green lighting and take the broken pieces to a hazardous waste disposal area. Green my ass!!

People are flocking into my store to buy these things and they are confused about them. CFL’s have only been widely available as a replacement for incandescents for about five years. Since many of the customers that come into my store are still vigorously debating the virtues of VHS vs. Betamax, it will be quite some time before they are aware of the choices they have in home lighting options. So when faced with a decision they are totally ill equipped to make, people will ask the man in the nametag for his opinion.

They are surprised when I tell them that I don’t really like CFL’s. They look at me with shocked disbelief and ask me why. It‘s then I tell them that I don’t usually like to buy disposable products that I can’t throw away.

They look at me, then they look at the pretty pictures of a pristine forest shown on the package for a CFL and they are even more confused. “But I thought CFL’s were good for the environment?” They ask. “They are”, I tell them, “just so long as you don’t ever plan to throw them away.” Then I show them the statement on the package and they have a tough time processing how a purchase that is supposed to save the planet can be so damaging to it that you can’t throw them away without irreversibly poisoning your drinking water.

I’d like to say that I was able to use my time in the electrical department to champion the cause of saving the planet, but unfortunately, most of the customers who asked my advice disregarded it and bought the CFL’s anyway. In a typical fashion, the associate is seen as the expert on whatever the customer wants to buy until he tells them the truth. They aren’t about to let some guy with a name tag ruin the sense of self satisfaction they were planning on having by purchasing a light bulb that’s good for the planet. Even if it ultimately leads to making the place we call home just a little bit more toxic for future generations

I’m only an expert on what I sell if I agree with a customer who has already told me that they don’t know what they are talking about. Go figure. Most customers would rather live in their ignorance and take the energy saving, planet saving until you don’t need it any more product that contributes to brain damage in children, and carry it home to their 3,500 square foot Mc Mansion in their 2.3 mile per gallon Escalade; warm in the fact that their purchase almost saved the planet… and that guy in electrical was a putz.

The shocking truth about "standard" replacement parts

I’m about to let you in on a little known fact about home improvement by peeling back a little of the veneer of ignorance that shrouds the majority of Do It Yourself projects. If you find what I’m about to tell you to be too great a challenge to your current belief system, I’m sorry, but it is better that you hear it from me than from some strange contractor out in the street.

There is no such animal as a standard or universal replacement part.

No matter what you have been lead to believe, no matter what you may read on the package, nothing fits in every situation, every time. Now I realize that I may just have put both your belief system and my own personal safety in jeopardy, but it’s a risk I feel I have to take.

I can no longer stand idly by while millions of self-described handy men and women march through home improvement warehouses, small hardware stores and huge lumber yards basing their misplaced sense of self confidence on the fact that since the packaging, the website or the guy in the vest told you that all you need is a “standard” replacement part: then they should have no problem making the repairs themselves.

I’m sure that right now, goons hired by the companies that make trillions of dollars selling “universal” replacement this or that’s are conspiring to make sure I accidentally fall over a cliff or meet an untimely death due to a short circuited pallet jack in the store, but the truth must come out.

Nothing in home improvement is ever universal or standard. Granted, there are parts that will work most of the time, or usually, or even in 80% of cases, but nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing will work all of the time. If truth were a part of advertising, then all of the packaging that uses the terms “standard” or “universal” would substitute truthful terms like “probably” or “usually”, but words like that don’t sell.

This concept of “Standard” is so ingrained in the imagination of so many of my customers that I can’t convince them otherwise. I had one gentleman come into the store with what appeared to be his wife and his mother. It was a Sunday and I assumed that the family was just making their way home from church. The wife asked me if we had replacement toilet tanks. This is a common allusion. Even though every single toilet tank you have ever seen standing proudly above it’s bowl looks exactly like every other tank, there are subtle difference in the ways they are manufactured that assures that only specific tanks will work on specific bowls. It makes no sense unless you are in the business of selling toilets.

If a toilet didn’t break, then no one would ever buy another one. So the manufactures assure themselves a regular, tidy profit by making each tank and bowl distinct enough to require that you buy the complete package if you break any of the parts.

This line of thinking is not unique to toilet manufactures, but is a key component of product development in the entire home building industry. Nothing can ever be easily fixed. Universal replacement parts are the holy grail of the industry. Everybody is looking for them, but nobody can ever find them and somehow the legend of their existence will not die.

The perfect design, from a manufacturer’s point of view, will insure that the cost of manufacturer specific replacement parts exactly equals 300% of the cost of simply replacing the whole thing. By making their products minutely unique, they protect themselves from having future business siphoned away by those goon hiring unscrupulous vendors who peddle untruthfully marked “Universal” replacement parts.

But back to the gentlemen with his wife and mother. I explained, as clearly and as simply as I could, that there was no such thing as a universal replacement tank. I offered to order the exact tank they needed as a replacement part if they could give me some information on the model of toilet they had. The gentleman then told me, in an exasperated tone, that all he needed was a “standard” toilet tank. “Ahh…” I thought, “If only that were somehow possible”

I again re-iterated the fact that there are no “standard” tanks and that I doubted very much that anything I sold would work on his toilet which he informed me was; “only about 6 years old”. Six years might as well be a lifetime given the rapidity with which manufacturers abandoned design, and I knew he was in for a frustrating Sunday afternoon.

When the truth of my revelation failed to mesh with his delusion, he turned in a huff and told his wife and mother that; ”He doesn’t know what the f*** he’s talking about!” I ignored his profanity, relishing the situation that I knew would arise in the next two hours.

Like clockwork, the profane gentleman wandered back into my department before the end of my shift asking me to help him find a replacement toilet. I immediately sold him the most overpriced, worst performing toilet that we had in the store. He never acknowledged that I did know what the f*** I was talking about, but that’s ok. At retail, we’ll take your money over an apology any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.

Why do people shop with dogs?

When did it become acceptable to bring your dogs in to a retail store? Lately, what once seemed to be an occasional event, a couple of people a week shopping with their dogs, has turned into a torrent of canine shopping companions. It seems that more customers than ever feel no hesitation at all about marching into my store with their dog in tow.

When I first noticed people bringing in their dogs, I though it might be to prevent them from being trapped in a hot car while they shopped. I should have asked myself why the dogs were in the car in the first place. I just assumed that there was a good reason and figured; “Ok, its 103 degrees outside and it’s unsafe to leave a pet in a car for more than three minutes in weather like that”. That was rationale number one.

Rationale number two was that I thought it was because the pets were elderly or unwell. The first pets I noticed in the store seemed to be smaller breeds that their owners pushed around in carts. The dogs all seemed really old, or very sick, or really old AND very sick. I postulated that the owners were nervous about leaving a sick pet alone too long at home. I assumed that the owners would never forgive themselves if dear old Loveee was sent off to Valhalla by the animal version of the Grim Reaper. If the icy hand of death were to reach out for little Loveee (No “Y”, just three “e”’s… an actual name of a frequent canine guest in our store), and no one was there to ease her through the transition to the creature equivalent of an afterlife, the owners would be guilt ridden beyond a capacity they could endure. I don’t completely understand their distress. I would imagine that doggie heaven is a place where you can sniff butts all day long and then roll around in other dog’s poo without ever having to have a bath. .

But then I noted that the dogs went from being small, sick and in carts to being huge, healthy and on leashes. When a customer was dragged around the store by two Alaskan Huskies on leashes like they were competing in the initial stages of the Iditarod, that’s when I ran out of rationales for why the pets needed to be there.

I mean what possible reason could you have for dragging your dog into a store? Pets can’t shop, and even if they could…I don’t think they’d want to.

Shopping is a purely human activity and no matter how intelligent they are, dogs are still animals. Given the chance, dogs will hunt for food, look for a mate and check out places to pee. Other than that, they would pretty just be sleeping. None of the things an animal does naturally is available to them a store.

I had a dog all the while I was growing up. My pet would never get in the car, let alone allow itself to be walked aimlessly around a 150 thousand square foot enclosed structure with nowhere to relieve himself. Good old Charlie would have bitten my leg off just to get out of the place within the first 5 minute of walking into a store.

Even now I live with two dogs, they aren’t mine but belong to my mother in law. They are the most attention starved sentient beings I have ever come in contact with. They need to be the center of everyone’s interest at all times. They are like perpetual two year olds. They are very well cared for and are never left alone for more than a few hours. When left alone, however, even if for only 15 minutes, they maul you at the door like starving prisoners from some rat infested POW camp. And they lack for nothing. Their every whim is attended to by at least one of the 5 people living in the house who are usually there, in some number, 24 hour a day. But still they demand attention.

I think I know why they are so needy. I think it may be because they are actually dogs and not just little people.

Animals have very limited needs. They don’t need to watch football, go to the movies, play video games or download music like my children do. That’s because they are not children, no matter how unconditionally they love. Animals are programmed by a sense of survival that demands that those limited needs are met, without regard to the social setting within which they find them themselves. That’s because they are not people. They drink from the toilet and they go to the bathroom on the ground. They eat until it’s gone and they roll in whatever stinks the most. They do this because that’s what animals do.

They may act like people a great deal of the time. But in the end, they are animals and are not inclined, regardless of how much we want them to be, to spend time in the modern retail store, which is still pretty much designed only for humans.

I’m not the only one who is not totally comfortable with dogs in the retail environment. Not all customers are dog lovers. A customer who frequents the store with her Doberman (whose name I know is Dallas, although I don’t recall the owner’s name) recently spent no less that 35 minutes or so in the plumbing department. She went from aisle to aisle checking out everything from kitchen sinks to shower heads. The entire time she was there, I saw customers dart in and out of the aisle she occupied with her 150 lb charge.

Dallas the Doberman’s ancestors were originally bred as guard dogs due to their ability to withstand attacks from humans.

No mention on Wikipedia on a human’s ability to withstand an attack from a Doberman. This explains why people were fearfully avoiding buying anything from me while a huge dog stood in my toilet aisle

I need to be frank on this point. Pets have no place in a retail store. They can’t buy anything and there is nothing in a store that should be of any interest to a dog.

People bring in their dogs just because they can. They seem to think that animals should have the same rights to shop as people. But animals, no matter how close they may be to your or how much like “people” they act, shouldn’t go shopping because they can’t spend money. At the end of the day, that’s what a store’s is, a place you go to spend money. Buying is a purely human activity. No matter how much you love your pet and believe they are the perfect companion, they literally have no business being in a store.

If you don’t feel the same way as I do, that’s okay. I’ll give you a call the next time there is dog crap to clean up off the floor and then I’ll let you tell me it is no big deal.

For a second, lets think about the dog? They have no interest in the store, in fact I’ll wager that most of them want to get out of their faster than the average three year old. Hell, dogs can’t even entertain themselves by sitting on the lawn tractors.

In many ways it’s actually cruel to bring a dog to a store. We have birds, and squirrels and even a cat that live in the store. The wildlife in our store are thriving in a climate controlled Eden. Aisle 23 is filled with bird seed and deer corn and the fountains on aisle 32 make a perfect watering hole. The squirrels nest overt the cabinets on aisle 37 and the birds have found a home directly over the customer service desk. I think the birds are attracted to the sounds the counting machine makes when it tallies the receipts at the end of the day. Most of the squatting fauna in my store are third generation and I doubt that any could actually survive in the “outside” world.

So the dogs that come into the store find a harshly lit, noisy place with hard floors, strange unnatural smells and wildlife that they can’t chase scurrying about. It must be torture for a dog to have to sit quietly in a cart or to strain unnoticed on a leash while their owners peruse items that, for an animal, have no earthly value.

So let’s make a promise to each other. No matter how much Fido begs to go to my store, you won’t bring them in and I won’t sit behind you at the movies with my colic-ally six month old.