This happened to me a couple of years ago, not long after I'd "stopped being a bookseller," as if that were possible. I was in a bookstore I hadn't visited before, standing near the sports section and looking at golf titles. A guy wearing a New York Giants team jacket tried to shove me aside in his quest for a book about improving his short game.
A veteran book browser, I anticipated the move and braced myself in a subtle, holding-my-ground, way. He bounced off, stumbling just a bit before recovering his balance. Full contact book browsing.
He didn't say, "Excuse me." I wasn't surprised about that. I was, however, stunned when he held up a book and asked, "Is this on sale?"
"I don’t know," I replied, still irritated.
"You should know your stock. Is it or isn't it a sale book?"
"I told you I don't know. I don't work here."
He eyed me suspiciously, then conceded, "Oh.... You look like you do."
Maybe I always will. Ah, well.
Poring over all the post-Black Friday news earlier this week reminded me of that case of mistaken retail identity. At the time, my first reaction had been a certain mischievous pleasure in the realization that I did not have to be polite anymore. After years of biting my tongue in potentially confrontational situations, here was an opportunity to, well, seek revenge.
That I didn't is perhaps testimony to the fact that I'm occasionally able to resist behaving like the 12-year-old boy that always lurks within me during such moments. More likely, however, the reason was that I'll always be a bookseller and spent a long time learning how to turn confrontation into conversation, customer irritations into handselling opportunities.
Now I regret that I didn't try to sell him a book.
There is, however, understandable pleasure in imagining what you would like to say to certain customers on bad bookselling days. 
Here I invoke the ghost of George Orwell, who wrote, "When I worked in a second-hand bookshop--so easily pictured, if you don't work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios--the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one.... Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop."
I'll raise the stakes with one of my recent guilty pleasures--reading the unauthorized Barnes & Noble Bookseller Breakroom blog. A recent thread responded to the prompt, "Dear Barnes & Noble customer..." with such gems as: "If you're in a book store, you should be smart enough to find the bathroom yourself.... It's this way because I work for idiots.... We don't keep moving sections to annoy you, we do it so some corporate people can justify their jobs.... It's not my job to explain the difference between fiction and nonfiction to an adult.... I would have had that book in stock if I only knew you were coming."
And yes, every bookseller faces customers this time of year who say, "Can you recommend a book for my uncle?" You ask logically what kinds of books he likes and inevitably get the reply: "Oh, he doesn't like to read." But you find just the right book for them anyway, and ask if they'd like it gift-wrapped.
It is not easy for a frontline bookseller to resist the Grinch/Scrooge Syndrome, but the best booksellers do so every day. I've seen them in action, and their reward comes when magic happens.
This week Arsen Kashkashian, head book buyer at Boulder Bookstore, shared a Black Friday story that is at once unique and absolutely familiar to gifted handsellers everywhere.
Take a moment to read his post at Kash's Book Corner. I'll wait...
Welcome back.
According to Orwell, "the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them."
He was wrong. A great bookseller doesn't have to tell lies about books. A great bookseller is an interpreter who sometimes lets the books speak for themselves.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)