Whole Rudeness

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Met Dan at Whole Foods in Princeton for lunch today, and had two negative encounters in the store within ten minutes.  The first one wasn't even directed at me. Dan ordered a tea from the dreadlocked guy behind the gelato counter and the guy said, "What size?"

Dan said, "Tall."

The guy made a face and said,"Man, just so you know, if you order it that way again, you're going to take a lot of shit from the staff. That's not what we call it here." The dude then turned to this lady who was sampling gelato and said, "I already told you that's coconut. I am not lying to you." 

I thought we had descended into another retail world, like Lowe's where you expect none of the people working there to want to talk to you. I get that it sucks to be in the service industry and this guy is sick of people using Starbucks lingo, and maybe he's studying to get his PhD in linguistics and hates how corporate America has bought the colloquial speak of the masses, but I mean...

The second act of rudeness wasn't from a store employee. I decided to write a complaint about the guy (because my life is so small now), but I didn't want to do it directly, so I was waiting at customer service for the person there to be free, and a lady came up next to me and started to say to the guy, "Excuse me--" and I interrupted her and said, "Wait a second. I was here first."

She said, "Oh, my God, I just wanted to ask a question."

I said, "Me too. I am stranding here waiting to ask a question too." Then of course my question required the guy to run off to find the comment form, and so I stood there next to the lady, staring off into space and hoping she wasn't gathering together her thoughts to say something nasty to me. As soon as I saw that he had the form, I sprinted toward him to get away from her.

I do not like confrontation, but I also do not like this "me first" attitude that I see all the time--mostly on the road when cars will cut you off or pull out in front of you, knowing that it will cause you to have to slam on your brakes. I actually flicked someone off today because he kept driving at exactly my same speed so I couldn't move over into the turn lane. 

Ultimately, though I wrote out the complaint about the rude guy at the gelato counter, I didn't turn it in. I don't know his story or if he had a crappy day or he just learned that his band got dropped from the label or his mom is sick or whatever.  But more than that, I mostly didn't want to be the kind of person who writes out a complaint while buying a $4 smoothie. 

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