Welcome to corporate hell.

You know what I hate? I hate the way it's now considered normal to be "welcomed" into every store you set foot into. A bored chorus of "Welcome to (insert store name here)" is called out to you before the doors have swished closed behind you. This puts me in the awkward position of having to respond or appear rude by ignoring them. You can tell they hate it, their voices give it away, you must be able to tell I think it's stupid by the way I respond. So why are we doing it? Because some twerp in corporate thinks its a good idea that's why. You can be absolutely sure that whoever it was  never worked on a shop floor for $10 an hour with no benefits.

I've noticed another insidious trait creeping into the shopping experience now, not content with welcoming me into the big box home improvement store I'm now pursued around the isles and continually badgered about my requirements, what do I need?, can I find everything?, is everything ok? how's my day going? Look, I'm a man, if I can't find something I'll stumble around blindly looking for it before giving up and going home, that's the way it is, 200,000 years of evolution has finely tuned me to be completely individual shopper, an autonomous, belligerent, miserable master of my own downfall, and that's the way I like it! Leave me alone.

See all this "Have a nice Day" bullshit, you can stick that as well. Don't tell me how to live my life, a simple please and thank you is perfectly adequate and don't get me started on "awesome"  possibly the most overused adjective in the US. However, I have a weapon against this glib overuse of superlatives though, I take them literally. On been ordered to "Have an awesome day" I offer the retort that it's unlikely, this completely throws them off the page, this isn't in the script, I'm supposed to respond with "you too" or something equally inane. But I didn't start this, I was told to have an awesome day so I think it's now within the bounds of the responsible person to either understand what @#$%ing awesome means, shut up about it or, and this opens a world of possibilities, make it so, because if  I'm buying dog food in a grocery store it's pretty unlikely my day is going to be "awesome"

Rant over.