The Customer Is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles

From mom-and-pop general stores to big-box, strip-mall chains, it is impossible to consider the American experience without thinking about the buying-and-selling retail culture: the sales and the stockrooms, the shift managers, and the clock punchers. The Customer Is Always Wrong is a tragicomic and all-too revealing collection of essays by writers who have done their time behind the counter and lived to tell their tales. Jim DeRogatis, author of Let It Blurt, for example, describes hanging out with Al himself at Al Rocky's Music Store, while Colson Whitehead explains how three summers at a Long Island ice cream store gave him a lifelong aversion to all things dessert-like. This book not only shines a light on the absurdities of retail culture but finds the delight in it as well.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Soft Skull
Published: 09/01/2008
ISBN: 9781933368900
Pages: 184
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 7.48h x 6.36w x 0.54d

Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 07/07/2008 pg. 52