HER: Would you like paper or plastic?
ME: Plastic. (Pause). What are all these German flags for? Octoberfest?
HER: Yep.
ME: You know, it’s funny that Germany gets its own month, but nobody else does.
HER: But we all benefit. What with the beer.
ME: And the laderhosen.
Normally I don’t get this far with offbeat conversations with clerks. Usually I just get a blank stare and a nervous giggle, so I appreciated her playing along. I think most clerks either think I’m psychotic, or that I’m very bad at flirting. Bad like Ross flirting with the pizza girl on Friends. In trurth, I just tend to think of odd things and want to discuss them.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I work part time in a beer store (I’m in Ontario) and customers like you make my day! I love playing along!
Far too many clerks keep their head down, grunt the price at you, and move you on your way. That would almost be OK if they weren’t so dang slow about it. I like the ones better that you can banter with. It’s odd; I’m not even a people person. But we might as well have fun with it while we’re stuck with each other, right?
That’s why I like eating at the bar at my favorite restaurant, rather than a table. The bartender will banter. OK, so it’s probably just tipflirting, but still… (I did take one bartender with me as my date to the office holiday party last year. I suppose it’s not all a waste of time. 😉
But it’s not flirting. I’m with you – I’m horrible at it. But what’s so wrong about being friendly or personable these days?!?
-Augie
In my one, brief stint behind a counter as a cashier at A&W, I found the worst thing about it was that most customers looked right through me. It may have been the uniform, I don’t know. After a while, I stopped seeing the customers too, just robots. Hungry, irritable robots. Sometimes someone I knew would place their order, and I wouldn’t recognize them until I handed them their money. I always appreciated the few customers who took a minute to chat (as long as there wasn’t a huge line of angry, hungry robots behind them). I really wasn’t cut out for that job.
I love talking to clerks. They can have some pretty good stories to tell, from what a jackass the previous customer was to a little gossip about the store to inside info on good deals, sometimes at other stores. I once had a Future Shop employee talk me out of buying minidiscs there, telling me I could get them at 90% less by ordering from a website. He wrote the address on a FS card.
oh god yes, i love when customers talk to me. the acknowledgement! I get so many people talking on their cell phones and not even looking at me
from my time in retail I’d feel like a drone except for the odd time people would chat with me a bit like a human being. Usually I do the same but I scare people too…or sometimes I’m a bit introverted and don’t bother with chit-chat. I know people who don’t even like to frequent the same restaurants because they don’t want that idle chit-chat (“just give me my food!”) and I totally don’t get that way of thinking…maybe because I grew up in a community where everyone knew everyone.
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