Crazy Paper Lady

Every Sunday at the bookstore the newspapers drop off their special Sunday papers... lots of them. Because people like the Sunday edition, right?

We open at 9:00. It's 9:15, and a lady comes in and brings to my register an ARMLOAD of papers and a few books. I figure she's buying them for someone... maybe the people at her church, maybe folks at the retirement home.

Whatever; that's her business. I check her out, she leaves.

Ten minutes later, she's back. She complains that the other store where she gets her papers isn't open yet, and she doesn't have enough time, so she has to buy ALL THE REST of our papers! The lady CLEANS US OUT OF NEWSPAPERS and we've only been open half an hour!

I'm going to be telling people that I'm sorry, but we're sold out, for the rest of the day!

Still, I don't ask why she needs all those papers. I try not to get involved with customer purchases, for reasons that will be explained in future posts.

Even so, she volunteers the information that... wait for it...

She is buying all these newspapers for her 13 dogs to pee on!



Whatever, a sale is a sale. It just seems a little ridiculous. I mean, buying paper towels would have been a lot cheaper than buying all those newspapers. But apparently she had been doing this for a long time, because she even discriminated against different types of papers. For example, she refused to buy the Investor's Business Daily, because the ink, when wet (eww), got on her floors too easily.



To top it all off, she was my opening sale and handed me a hundred-dollar bill! I had to give her mostly fives, and this is a problem because if the store runs out of small change and bills on a Sunday, we can't run to the bank to switch out our higher bills for lower ones and quarters or whatever!

But I did it for her anyway because she was nice. Basically, if you are a nice person you can walk all over me. =)

It's true. This one time this lady was acting really weird about her magazines (She was getting married though; they were all bridal magazines, so maybe its excusably), and had me holding huge stacks of them for her and paging managers and doing all sorts of crazy stuff, but I let her get away with it because she was so sweet... even if a little bit egotistical.