Two Rants, Shortish
Rant the First: Why do potters insist on making mugs at least one of the following: (a) too small, (b) ugly colors, and (c) concave instead of convex so they would actually fit your hands as you grasp the cup? If I could afford the classes and studio time, I’d learn to make my own, but there’s no way that’ll be happening for a while.
Rant the Second: I will admit to being a temperamental customer, wanting neither in-your-face interruptions every thirty seconds nor to be completely ignored when I’m standing there trying to make eye contact so I can get a question answered. However, an extremely good way to piss me off thoroughly and make me swear, using colorful and inventive phrases, never to darken your door again is, if I should happen to be shopping with companions, for every single salesperson to select the same member of the shopping/browsing party to talk to, completely blowing off everyone else. It doesn’t make much difference whether I’m the blow-off-ee or the store’s golden child, actually, because the principle just annoys me: there are stores I still refuse to patronize because, while I was on shopping expeditions with my mom years ago, the staff would focus on me and pretend that my mother was invisible. Perhaps it has something to do with what a store’s target demographic is, or something, but it’s damned maddening and has resulted in a lot of lost sales over the years. (Cutting off my own nose? Perhaps, but it’s rarely a store that carries something unique and totally irreplaceable.)
All that is a slightly long way of saying that the customer service at the yarn store a block down from my flat rather sucks. Particularly for a small business — I’d expect that sort of crap from a mega-chain store, but not from a local independent. I’ve been in there twice now, and been somewhat annoyed each time, but being blown off repeatedly and ignored when I tried to make eye contact with staff to ask where they’ve moved the freakin’ hemp yarn or vegan recycled sari yarn was it: I’m fed to the teeth. I’ll order it off the Internet instead. :-P
