wherein Liz has a confrontation with a customer

Happy Birthday, aichmetes! (And now for something completely different...)

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This happened on Monday, but it took me a couple days to settle it in my mind. So.

There is a man, maybe in his thirties, who comes into the store sometimes. He always wears a baseball cap and carries a shoulder bag. He's thin and his face is narrow -- it reminds me of a rabbit or a ferret. Whenever anyone tries to talk to him for any reason, he apologizes excessively in a passive-aggressive fashion; you can tell he's really thinking that you're a jerk, but he won't stop saying, "Oh, sorry, I'm sorry, very sorry." It's extremely annoying.

He is also black. (This is relevant later on.)

Sometimes he looks at magazines or buys a candy bar, but mostly what he does is take one or two newspapers (often the Sunday edition of Philadelphia Inquirer), carry them around to the other side of the shelving island, and open them to pull out the classified section. Then he stands there and fiddles around for ten or fifteen minutes.

We have signs posted next to the newspaper shelves that say, roughly, "Please do not open and read the newspapers!" because they get smudged and torn and they're a pain in the neck to put back together. We're not draconian about enforcing that rule, but there is a difference between glancing through a paper to make sure it has an article you're interested in reading (acceptable), and copying classified ads into a notebook (not acceptable).

I've gone up to this man before and asked him to please obey the store rules. He usually gets really passive-agressive about his apologies. Sometimes he then buys the paper. More often, he walks out and leaves it all taken apart and spread over the magazine shelves.

So on Monday evening, when I noticed that he'd pulled apart a newspaper, I went over and said, "We ask that you not take apart the papers until you buy them." And yes, I probably called him on it sooner than I would have called other people, but that's because I know he has a history of not buying the newspapers after he messes them up.

This time, instead of apologizing, he got huffy and said, "I'm going to buy it."

"Okay," I said, and went back to the counter where I was doing some paperwork.

A minute later, he stalked past me on his way to the door and muttered, "Racist."

I didn't hear him very clearly, and I was really not expecting him to say anything like that, so I said, "Huh?"

"Don't 'hmmm' me!" he yelled. "You know exactly what I mean!" And he stormed out the door as I tried to explain that I said 'huh' because I hadn't heard him, not because I was accusing him of lying or anything.

I was a little bit off balance the rest of the night. I mean, yes, he's black and I'm white, but that's not a get-out-of-jail-free card for behaving like a complete and utter jerk. And I wasn't even rude! I was just explaining the store rules, which are perfectly reasonable; I would do and have done the same to any customer.

Also, I think he stole the Automobile section, because I checked his paper against the other two copies, and those pages were missing; since they should have been tucked inside the Jobs section, it's unlikely that it was a shortage issue.

...

Anyway, on Tuesday PM (my manager) told me that this man has accused people of racism before, only in the previous incident, he got into a screaming match with PM and a former employee, went outside and banged on the display windows for a while, and then called the store and pretended to be his own lawyer threatening a lawsuit.

So PM says that if he comes back and starts doing anything shady, I am allowed (and possibly even encouraged) to call the police, whereupon he will be banned from the store.

What a mess.