The Cooked and the Raw

I. La Patisserie Chichi

I went with bink to a new bakery and coffee shop in the Uptown area--close(r) to where I used to live until three months ago. 
The bakery's raspberry danish is Pain Suisse, and their grilled cheese is croque monsieur––without description, because everyone knows, eh? 

The longer I work around poverty, the more I cringe at visible class barriers like that.
Still, I did enjoy how clean the place was... And the nice touches, like a vanilla bean in the simple syrup.

Reading Diary of a Bookseller, I've been thinking about the customers who bother me the most. It's the ones who would drive their Prius cars to this bakery with never a thought that they are among the 1%. (Or maybe 10%?)

II. The Deserving

I had an encounter with such a customer yesterday––a regular who  scours the store for funky vintage stuff (usually seriously under priced, as she knows). I enjoy her, since we share tastes in pop culture. (Oh, yeah, she's the customer I'd mentioned who'd bought the Partridge Family books.)

She came up to me as I was looking through the clothes newly hung on the dollar rack. I told her I'd bought a pair of heavily worn Ann Taylor cords for a dollar a while ago, and then ordered the exact same kind almost-new on Posh Mark for $15.

"My husband's cords always wear out on the thighs," she said. "So I took them to a homeless shelter." 
She paused. 
"Not that the homeless only deserve worn out things! But there was still plenty of wear in them. If they fit me, I'd wear them around the house."

I was stunned, though this attitude is common enough.
To begin with, "the homeless" is a name that labels people experiencing homelessness (= the new phrase to try to get around this label), labels them by their circumstances, and suggests it is a permanent status.

That's not such a big deal. But when you say you think they don't deserve crap, but you GIVE them crap–-stuff you wouldn't be seen wearing in public––that is a big deal.

I say it all the time:
If you've never experienced poverty or paid attention to what that's like, you may not know it, but people in poverty get crap all the time, in every sense, on every level.

If you think they/you/we/I deserve better and you're in a position to do so, give them good stuff:
Go buy a few pairs of NEW pants––you can get them cheap off the sales rack at a discount store––and drop them off, tags still attached, at the homeless shelter.

Or whatever. 
Just don't hand out crap and say you're not. 

My challenge is to practice understanding and compassion toward people like this customer who DO mean well, but haven't been forced nor chosen to be fully aware.

Lucky are they who do not know that a croissant is a crescent roll.

So I did not yell at this woman but simply told her she can donate old clothes to the store with a label "FOR RECYCLING". (We get pennies a pound for old cloth from a fabric recycler.)

And, in fact, after we talked about recycling for a while, this woman ended up saying she would look into ways our store could recycle food, instead of throwing it in the Dumpster with the trash. (The city does not pick up compost from businesses, so we have to set something up---which is low priority and hasn't gotten done.)

III. Parasite

After the bakery, I went to see the film Parasite, knowing about it only that its director, Bong Joon-ho, made the one of the only horror films I've ever enjoyed: The Host (2006--the trailer on youtube).

Parasite is similar to The Host. In both, a plucky family living a hard-knock life gets in trouble, except the monster in Parasite is ... well, you decide. Both movies are weird and dark and funny, and so, so good. 

You could enjoy Parasite on many levels, but without being preachy about it (not like me), it's about people who always get pairs of worn cords.



III. A Clear Sign

I have high hopes for this [below], the latest of several ways I've tried to alert customers not to enter the [unmarked] donation sorting area:
I ordered two sticky-um signs, custom printed on aluminum (for heavy floor traffic), in traffic-stop-sign red & white:                                  EMPLOYEES ONLY

I paid for the signs myself––$40 total––as a Christmas present to the store, . . . and because I think of them as mine! 

Here I am putting one down--you can see remnants of the "DO NOT ENTER" sign bink & I'd painted on the floor last spring in green paint. It wore off quickly.

(The problem being, staff constantly go between the sales floor and the back room, so we can't obstruct the space with a hanging sign or rope or other barrier.)
 The staff's longtime "solution" has been to holler at customers innocently wandering into the back: 
"Excuse me! You can't go back there!" 

Very startling.

All of this to say:
I want to practice finding fun, creative, loving, and smart design solutions to problems I encounter as a member of the human race.

I don't want to be a crabcake about my species, even if we might well be doomed to extinction because we are so short-sighted and self-serving. After all, I am those things too.

The cake eater and the direction hollerer?  
C'est moi!