Ever notice how it's the little things in life that amuse us so much? More to the point, ever notice how it's the silly little idiocies in life that amuse us more than anything else? Well, this is not as much ''the little blog that could'' as it is ''the blog that enjoys going up the down escalator in your local mall.'' Will it have anything of real importance? No, probably not. But enjoy the ride never the less!

 


You know, sometimes my store’s Head Office frightens me. This doesn’t happen often. Oh sure, they aggravate me a lot, and they infuriate me on an almost weekly basis, but frighten…well, those are special moments that leave me curled up in the corner of my bed wishing that I could instead be worrying about the clown eating me should I fall asleep.

Consider this past Friday: an Email came in from Head Office, asking us to remove this extra tag that could be found dangling off a bunch of cosmetic/train cases. Now these cosmetic cases are scary enough, and like 50% of most our stock left me asking what sort of groovy drugs our Buying Department’s on, because…damn. Generic colours are fine by me, but honestly--zebra print with neon pink or green trim? Or a black background with kissy-lips plastered all over it?

But I digress. So there was an extra tag hanging off these cases, and Head Office kindly requested we remove them. Now up to this point I hadn’t really taken a closer look at any of these tags; as far as I was aware, they just featured the “JGarden” label and a brief but tedious description about the product. Nothing stated there to earn their subsequent removal, in my opinion, but Head Office doesn’t do this sort of thing without a reason.

I checked the offending tag. And I kid you not, here’s what was written on the lower half of it:




First things first, of course: it seems oddly contradictory to say it complies with safety standards but could still warp you and/or your progeny’s genetics, but I guess it’s the same principle for the warnings on cigarette cartons.

And second: what in the fucking nine levels of hell?!

I don’t know about you, but that sort of warning doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in me to sell these things to random customers.

Okay, so now I understand why Head Office wanted us to cut those tags off (and I can only imagine the sort of panicked calls they got from customers who bought these cases when the warnings were still affixed), but it’s not exactly like I can un-see that warning. If someone asks about the quality of one such case, how do I respond? “Oh, there’s nothing wrong with it at all. It’s a perfectly normal cosmetics case and does not potentially give you cancer or scary little mutant babies. Honestly! Would I lie?”

The rationalist in me does try and calm me down by pointing out that warnings like these are pretty much the rigeur du jour in the US. Plus, without any further studies or information to back it up, the warning itself is quite vague and almost caters to fearmongering. And yet…birth defects, people! I know that everything gives you cancer these days, but birth defects aren’t usually something you expect to see on a list of potential, malevolent side-affects.

I’ve got a stack of these in the back, so does this mean I have to worry about shriveling testicles from handling them?


Anyhoo, to help cleanse my little bit of nowhere’s palate (and to help you brainbleach away the mental image of malformed testicles), here’s a little something I picked up off from Comixed, an affiliate website of “I Can Has Cheezburger”:







I laugh because I can absolutely hear Statler & Waldorf performing this bit.

I cry because I know the punchline is also true.

Labels: This tab contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer or birth defects or seeing the dead or spontaneous outbursts of lines from Avenue Q at inappropriate times

posted by Phillip at 7:02 AM

 

This past Friday, our evening staffer put out the recycling bin so the mall maintenance staff could empty it. Sometime between when she left that night, and when I showed up to open the store the next morning, our recycling bin vanished. Now as far as I know, bins like that are not want to pick themselves up and jet off to Vegas for a weekend of binge parties, gambling and trying to get a gig as a corpse on an episode of CSI. This can only mean that someone else walked off with our recycling bin.

I know, I know: I'm thinking it too. What sort of a deranged idiot steals a recycling bin? Well, apparently the answer to that is: someone who's traversed our mall before. Thankfully, when apprised of the situation, the mall admins managed to find us a replacement recycling bin--and put our name on the side of it in big, black permanent marker letters. I'm trusting that the next time we put this one out, it'll still be there waiting at the front doors the next day. If it's not, I'm going to have to sadly admit that KW is so silly that it's under siege from a ring of recycling bin thieves.

In other news, yesterday I saw the following slogan on the slingbag of a university student:


And I'm inclined to agree with it. We should all try to be a little juicy, as Soilent Green is so 1970's.

I've also been entertaining the idea of taking The Lord of the Rings, and switching all the main villains into LOLcats. Imagine if, in Fellowship, down in the mines of Moria Gandolf goes up against the epic, fiery Basement Cat LOLrog. I can just see how that would go:

LOLrog: "CHEEZBURGER!!!"

Gandolf: "You! Shall not! Has!"

I'd also like to point here that I am not responsible for any broken keyboards due to you smacking your head against it after reading that cleverly idiotic little pun. ^-^

Labels: come back recycling bin come back, Happy Juicy Engrish Slogan Funtime, LOLrogs

posted by Phillip at 7:22 AM

 


For the most part, I really don't understand consumers. Oh, I certainly will acknowledge I'm one of them, though generally speaking my tastes and purchase proclivities are rather specific. There's also the fact that I was never big on mall-trawling, and my time in working in a retail mall has only amplified that particular distaste. (These days, I only enjoy checking out different malls simply because they're different; I don't care about the stores, but it's fun to walk in and cheerfully think, "I have no idea where anything is in this place! I love it!" And yet...it's rather sad too.)

What all of that rambling means is, despite being a consumer, I really am utterly boggled about the consumer mindset. Consider yesterday, a Saturday: a day in which the weather alternated between pleasantly cool but cloudy, to flat-out downpour. Now I've been in the retail game long enough to know that during days of periodic showers/storms, the time between such rainfalls is immediately seized by people who want to go out but not get wet. We like storms since they tend to keep people away from the mall, but fear when the rain ends: once that moment hits, we have about 20 minutes to gird our loins before a sudden onslaught of people in the mall.

Yesterday was an altogether maddening anomaly. Sure, between the bits o' rain we had sudden jumps in customer traffic...but why is it that even during the periods of rain we had even more people showing up? It was like half the people were thinking, "Gee, it's raining. Let's go out somewhere instead of relaxing at home! I bet no one's at the mall right now!" And then the other half were thinking, "Hey, the rain's stopped. Let's go to the mall, I bet no one's there right now!"

Idiots.

We were practically wall-to-wall busy, from the start of the day right until the end. (And even then, I still ended up getting out late due to some last-minute customers who were still around even 10 minutes after we'd closed.) The worst part of this is that, despite the crowds, everyone was ridiculously cheerful and friendly. They were pleasant, they were courteous, and worst of all, they made it impossible for me to curse any of them under my breath.

Why? Why won't the customers let me hate them?! This upsets my entire consumer paradigm! Life has lost its purpose and meaning to me!




Le sigh....

In a way, I suppose I should have expected Saturday to be that level of batshit buggy. The ominous portents were all there. I mean, come on: when a choral group just plunks themselves down in the foodcourt, and begins an impromptu acappella performance of Carmina Burana's "O Fortuna," you know the day's going to hell from there.

You may think I'm joking about O Fortuna. Amazingly enought, I'm not. Not only were they belting all the parts out loud enough that I could hear them down the corridor and recognize the song, but they were doing an incredible job without any accompanying music (and having to also outsing the muzak being pumped out by the mall speakers).

Admittedly, a part of me wanted to run up and shout, "Play Freebird!" once they were done.

So, huzzah for unexpected O Fortuna. Boo-urns for the wrath their song descended upon my store. Yes, you read that right: I'm blaming O Fortuna for how busy we were. Let me savour this one moment of pithy selfishness!





Dammit.

Labels: Carmina Burana for the Customers, O Fortuna ruined my store

posted by Phillip at 8:31 AM