Retail Revenge

By Kathleen Kingsbury

In retail, the customer may be always right. But he is also often rude, arrogant or even a little nuts.

That makes shoppers perhaps the perfect fodder for America's newest form of back talk: blogs. Once limited to the occasional coffee-break rant with their colleagues, salespeople are turning to the Web to vent about and occasionally mock the bizarre customer encounters that make working in retail so, um, interesting. "One day a male client called and asked that I bring over some foot-cream samples," writes Birdie Jaworski, an Avon lady, in her blog, Beauty Dish. "He not only wanted to try them on my feet, but then he wouldn't let go."

Her posts draw more than 1,000 hits a day, Jaworski says, from readers fascinated by the woman who buys antiwrinkle cream for her pet monkey Hubert or by the wife who orders Bust-Sculpt Contouring ointment for her husband, who ingests it as an alternative to Viagra. "Everyone has a whole secret life," Jaworski says. "Maybe it's nice to know you're not the only one."

While Jaworski proudly puts her name on Beauty Dish and takes a tone of amused detachment toward her subjects, most salesclerks who blog stay anonymous--to hold on to their jobs and take full advantage of the chance to rant, without mercy, about shoppers' bad behavior. "Do not wait until one minute before we close to come into my store and expect me to wait patiently while you browse and then don't buy anything," chastises Retail Recorder, a blogger who identifies herself only as a store manager. The cell-phone saleswoman who writes a blog called Can You Hear Me Now? describes why a customer became furious: "Because we wouldn't let him return DSL equipment to our store. Uh, we don't even sell DSL equipment."

At times, these vengeful furies show some remorse. "I know we should not have laughed at the man who, while looking the other way, walked straight into and bounced off of the plate glass window," a blogger who calls himself Disgruntled Bookseller writes. "Replaying the security video in slow motion? Totally gratuitous."

There is, however, a higher purpose to all that digital sarcasm. Most salespeople who broadcast the stories of their rude customers hope to shame others into acting better, says retail veteran Norm Feuti, who spent 15 years working as a manager at a host of stores. Instead of blogging or just complaining, Feuti created a comic strip, Retail, now syndicated in 43 newspapers, depicting the staff at the fictional department store Grumbel's. Feuti is an equal-opportunity scold. His strip features not just the customers chatting on their cell phones in the checkout line but also the clerks who work only for the employee discount and the managers obsessed with the employee dress code. "People aren't even aware of their own behavior," Feuti says. "Maybe they'll finally realize if they see it in print."