A lovenote to consumers:

Dear Mindless Hoards of Shoppers,

As our relationship grows over the next few months, I'd like for you to more fully realize your place in my life and become aware of my feelings as a human being. Depsite the fact that many of you seem to think otherwise, yes, I am a human being. Androids are not yet taking over the world.

You need to get a few things straight if we're going to be committed to one another.

#1 I am not your doormat. I am not your dog. Nor am I your slave, your footstool, your personal shopper, your maid, your mom, or even all that fond of you. I am a person who is in the business of "Customer Assistance" Those are big words, I know. Let me help you understand the esoteric meanings behind this title. "Customer" means you - the one who buys things from the store I work at. "Assistance" means that should you have any reasonable questions, concerns and or problems, that those of us who are clocked in will ASSIST you in your endeavor. This could be, making the right decision, getting your order rung up, returning an item you don't need, etc.

The word ASSIST implies that we will obviously be doing some work, but not working FOR you. We work for a company who gives us a $8/per hour paycheck and half hour lunch breaks. We DO NOT WORK FOR YOU. We do not have time to linger on lengthy phone calls, or lead you around the store for hours trying to find items that you could easily use your mental faculties to locate (assuming you have them). We will gladly assist you if you put forth a cheerful, friendly or at the very least NEUTRAL demeanor. Being sassy, snippy, impatient and mean does not make us want to help petty assholes like you. It makes us complain to our coworkers as soon as you are out of earshot and laugh (or go home and blog about how much we hate people.)

Why are we assisting you, you may ask? Because you don't know our store or its contents, and you probably have no idea how it is run. Many of you have no idea where anything is, and it is our job to act as a compass. If we were to let you actually ring things up, many of you would never actually leave any money, while others would summon up demons from hell by punching the incorrect register keys. We also know how to properly read and understand our store signage, so we can explain to you what SALE THIS WEEKEND ONLY translates to you in stupid americanese.
We know that math probably isn't your strong suit (and well, neither is ours), so that's why we ask you bring all your items up to the register so we can total them up for you, using those little stripey SKU barcodes.

We appreciate that you can seem to read the price stickers on items that don't have SKUs and are willing to so kindly tell us when we are looking through our SKU book to find those unlabeled items, but you must understand that simply punching in the price is NOT and option and you must WAIT AND BE PATIENT as we are looking items up.
You do not know more than we do about our inventory. Trust me.

Just because we sold something once doesn't mean it's always going to be there.