This article is excerpted from the Rocky Mountain Pagan Journal. Each issue of the Rocky Mountain Pagan Journal is published by High Plains Arts and Sciences; P.O. Box 620604, Littleton Co., 80123, a Colorado NonProfit Corporation, under a Public Domain Copyright, which entitles any person or group of persons to reproduce, in any form whatsoever, any material contained therein without restriction, so long as articles are not condensed or abbreviated in any fashion, and credit is given the original author.! THE WAY IT LOOKS FROM HERE This month, I have a delicate subject to jaw about, and I will try to go about it with my usual abundance of tact and diplomacy, though some accuse me of having neither. Who's minding the store? Travelling about as we do, taking the RMPJ to its various dealer outlets, we cover a lot of territory. We have been in most of the fair (sized) cities and towns on the flat side of the front range several times in the past year. In our travels, we've visited lots of businesses; emporiums of varied and sundry nature, purveyors of marvelous and wonderful apparatus, books, gewgaws and gimcracks. Now I have been employed for the last eighteen plus years in a business where I deal with the public as customers. Eighteen years should give me some idea of how to treat one's customers, ok? The old saw, "The customer is always right", is as big a load of crap as you're likely to come across. We all know that the customer is seldom right, and more often than not, not even correct. What should be said is, "The customer must leave your establishment thinking that he or she won the contest." And, don't fool yourself for an instant, dealing with the public in any fashion, but perhaps more in the "Proprietor vs. Customer Mode", is a contest; a contest of wills, of intelligence, wit, compassion, and common sense. A customer's inner voice is constantly reminding them that you probably don't have what they want, and if by some remote chance you do have exactly what they need, you're going to ask them to pay too much, and besides, they know damn well that if they had the time, they could find the exact same thing somewhere else at a lower price. Now, in my vast (well,..) experience as a proprietor (or at least, the proprietor's representative), I seem to have managed to come out on top in this "contest" many more times than I have lost. Strangely enough, after a few horrible experiences, I've found that the one thing that makes the most difference in the "contest" is the attitude of the person on the employer's side of the counter. You would be surprised how far you can go with a smile on your face, a cheerful attitude (even if you feel like hell, or feel like strangling that particular customer where they stand) and a little compassion for the way the customer may be feeling. This brings me to the crux of what I want to say on this subject. I can't tell you how many times in the past few years we have gone into a shop, bookstore, hardware store, fruit stand, whatever, and been accosted by one of these socalled employees(I'm in charge while the owner is out to lunch, on vacation, or ....?) You can tell the minute you walk into one of these establishments that the owner is absent: the dull, lifeless face of the person purportedly running the place; the total lack of interest in what the customer actually wants or needs ("Gimme yer dough and split" is a good way to describe what usually happens.); the inability to make a decision, lies,or claims of "store policy" which you know damned well ain't true, cause you've been there before, when this cretin wasn't there and the owner was...; and on and on. With a company as large as the one I work for, with 70 stores and fifteen thousand employees, a customer can find someone they like to wait on them, or go to another store if they have to, and find virtually the same merchandise at the other store. A small shop owner is faced with a real problem if he only has two or three employees, and one or two of them act like they just crawled out from under a rock. The customer usually can, and probably will, go somewhere else, even if they know they can't find what they want anywhere else, and never darken the doorway of this particular establishment again. Now, I realize that on some subjects, my typing fingers run away with themselves, and take on a life of their own, in direct contravention of the laws of good taste and judgement. This much will I admit. However, after waiting on customers five days a week, fifty or so weeks a year, for eighteen and a half years, I think that on this particular subject, I am not editorializing with forked lineprinter..... Much as I deplore it as an employee, when I was in management, I occasionally stooped to the old "sneak and peek" method of observing what my employees were doing when the cat was away, so to speak. Sometimes, I would "sneak in" to the store through the back door, or whatever, and as unobtrusively as possible, observe what was going on between the customers and the person I had left in charge. Often, I was gratified and proud; sometimes I was horrified. Somewhere out there on the plains, there must be an employment agency which specializes in sending subhumans out to employers. I hope you don't have any of them on your staff. If you do, I feel sorry for you and your business. How many cus- tomers have you lost that you don't even know about? ....Think about it Well, I'm sure to have stirred some emotions with this column, but what the heck If the editor agrees with everybody, there's no controversy. If there ain't difference of opinion, life sure gets boring. ..........And that's the way it looks from here. May the Gods bless you all and keep you safe. May the green Earth long know the feel of your feet. .......... Gary Dumbauld, editor .......from R.M.P.J. 8/86