Sunday, August 8, 2010

Chicken Run

A follow-up to yesterday's post about the Great Costco Chicken Crisis. A number of folks wrote me to say that the real villains in the piece were the two guys who came in and cleaned Costco out of rotisserie chickens. Well, okay...but the lady who was angry wasn't mad at them...and the two fellows may not have realized how long it would take Costco to replenish the display. Also of course, it's quite possible that Costco could run out of chickens if everyone in the store at the moment had suddenly decided they wanted to take home a hen and had each gone over to buy but one.

Problems do happen. Stores do run out of things. You can't expect a zero defect system in any business...and when things do go wrong, you can't expect employees to do the impossible. I also don't think you should expect them to stand there and be screamed at. The lady's anger was misdirected and way outta scale with the offense. Some people think that if they're wronged, even a little, they're therefore justified in being rude to everyone within sight. I worked (briefly) with a guy like that once. Someone — anyone — would make some tiny mistake and this guy would Hulk-Out, screaming in every direction...and you could tell that the sadistic side of him was delighted that the mistake had been made. It gave him the chance to unleash his inner a-hole.

And the other point was that this woman at Costco was screaming at a poor store employee who couldn't scream back. After he'd done all he could do — politely apologize for not being able to hand her a cooked chicken — she kept yelling at him, calling him names, etc. Some people love abusing service personnel because no matter how nasty you are to them, they have to take it and can't tell you to shut the hell up and get the hell out. You itching to fight with someone? Then fight fair. Fight with someone who can fight back. Once in a while, you see an employee do that and I suspect it doesn't happen enough. If I ran a business that served the public, I think I'd empower my staff to stand up to this kind of thing more than most do. There's too often this sense that every customer is sacred and we don't dare lose a one of them. They're not "always right," you know and that lady the other day made the Costco experience pretty unpleasant for a lot of other shoppers. (So, obviously, did the men who made off with all the chickens but they weren't creating a scene or unleashing their ugly sides in others' faces.)

I've long since written more about this whole incident that it deserves and in truth, it was even funny in a way and some in Costco at that moment may even have enjoyed the floor show. There was another employee handing out free samples of seafood spread on crackers next to it all so the entertainment even came with snacks. Shopping at Costco is always interesting. There seems to be something about the way they sell in bulk that makes some customers respond to everything in excess.

• Posted at 11:36 AM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Michael Hiltzik says that Social Security is in much better shape than its detractors would like to admit.

• Posted at 10:52 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Stephen Colbert's show is really, really good at selling books (so is Jon Stewart's) which explains why some authors go on, knowing they may well be made to look at least semi-foolish. Last week, Dr. Colbert had on Laura Ingraham, who has the best-selling non-fiction book on the New York Times list, The Obama Diaries. The book is a batch of phony diary entires by Barack (and Michelle and Joe Biden and others) that allegedly fell mysteriously into the custody of Ms. Ingraham and if the Times were really a left-wing — or even impartial — newspaper, they'd have it in the fiction category where it rightly belongs.

If the excerpts I've read are typical, it's a pretty tawdry work, catering to every myth that Obama's opponents want to spread about him. It's one of the frustrations of politics that so much of it is how facile someone is at "defining" (i.e., selling a phony portrait of) the opposition. Democrats do it too but Republicans are better at it. They know how to convince a sizeable portion of the U.S. that they shouldn't vote for Michael Dukakis because he likes to let black rapists out of prison, they shouldn't vote for Al Gore because he thinks he invented the Internet and they shouldn't vote for John Kerry because he really didn't earn those medals. It didn't work well enough against Clinton though and it hasn't been fatal (so far) for Obama...but it's still annoying. If those men were hammered for things they actually said or did, it would be a different matter.

And yes, note I said Democrats do it, too. But I don't think the Obama folks lied about McCain nearly as much as McCain lied about Obama. Or at least they didn't do as good a job of it. (Actually, I think McCain self-destructed by hugging Bush, pandering to the Palin crowd and just looking like he couldn't remember what he'd said the day before.)

Anyway, Ingraham's out flogging her book that says that Obama is everything Sean Hannity says he is and enough people want to hear this to make it a best-seller. She apparently thought the Colbert Bump would be so valuable it would be worth the risk of going on his show. She also apparently thought that her old connection to Stephen via Dartmouth would protect her. She leads off with it to try and get on his good side and then later, when he's making her look pretty damn bad, she brings it up again to attempt a change of subject. Here's Stephen Colbert being very funny at the expense of his guest. And probably helping her sell even more books...

• Posted at 12:08 AM · LINK