I checked Google and saw that AJ Newsagents was open until 9 pm. At 8:30, I left my flat.
It was raining lightly. Not the nicest weather to be out in, but I wanted to get this errand taken care of.
As I approached the shop, I could see the shutter rattling downwards over the blue storefront. I ran the last ten metres, then quickly reached down and rapped my knuckles on what was still exposed of the door. (About eighteen inches at this point, but the shutter kept rolling noisily downward until it hit the ground.)
I checked my phone -- it was 8:38 pm. I could bang on the shutter and be an asshole, but (a) it wasn’t an emergency and (b) I’m not an asshole. It’s a small business and maybe they don’t keep their Google hours updated.
I returned home full-handed (which is like empty-handed when your intended errand is to drop off a parcel), which meant another six blocks of walking through the rain.
The next day, I made another trip to AJ Newsagents for a second attempt at the same task. Once again, it was raining. But at least it was daylight this time.
After the fellow behind the counter scanned my item, I asked, “What time do you close on weeknights?”
He asked me to repeat myself three times. I know for a fact I enunciate clearly, and I even changed the wording once or twice in case it was the phrasing that was difficult to understand – I tried “How late is this store open” and something else. Maybe it was my mixing up the wording that kept throwing him off, but I had a feeling the hearing problem might have been partially due to the headphones he wore in both ears.
Finally, he got it. “Nine,” he answered. Pause. “Eight to nine.”
“Oh, you close between 8 and 9?” If closing time was somewhere within a particular range, depending on how busy the shop was each night, I could understand that. There are bars that observe such practices, and when I used to work as a barista, there were some nights we closed a little early or continued serving a little late. If there are no customers for long spans of time, it would be stupid for a business to continue to pay employee wages and electricity for zero income.
But – “No,” said the man. “We are open from 8 in the morning until 9 at night.”
“Well,” I reported, “Last night I was here at 8:40 and the shutter was down.” I have worked in customer service for 17 years, am gentle by nature, and will never throw a fit, so this is the most argumentative I get.
The man scoffed audibly. “Psh. 8:40, 9:00, same thing.” His tone was irritated and self-righteous. What a fool I was, huh?
Now I was angry, because that is fucking bullshit. If the store’s hours had been different than the online listing, and Google was simply wrong, I would not have minded. If the bloke had told me that sometimes they chose to close early when it was slow, I would have been only slightly irked but not held anything against them.
But for this guy to ridicule me for expecting them to be open at twenty to nine, and say that 8:40 was “the same thing” as 9:00? I had even been giving him the benefit of the doubt. It had been 8:38 when the shutter rolled down that night.
But I only bristled silently, turned, and left. As I stepped out through the doorway, I thought I heard the schmuck mutter under his breath, “8:40.”
I fumed internally as I walked back up Whitecross Street, Old Street, St Luke’s Close, Mitchell Street, and Bartholomew Square. It was still raining. I counted in my head – two trips there and back meant that I had walked twelve blocks in the cold and wet to complete one simple errand, in addition to being subject to derision.
