A LYS Rant

Yesterday I volunteered to go with a coworker to the only local yarn store in the small town in which we work.  We made our way over on our lunch break, and found that the store owner wasn’t there.  Instead, it was another lady (who, for some reason, looked very familiar to me) taking care of the store while the owner was away.  When we entered the store, her and two of her friends were sitting down knitting.  She got up and asked us if she could help us with anything.  ”No thanks”, we said.  We told her we had come in to get one skein of a particular yarn that my coworker had run out of, so we knew exactly what to look for.  She went on her way, and we went on our way to find the yarn.  After grabbing the skein, we went over to check out the sale bin.  The moment we went over to it, the lady came back and stood about a meter away from us.  And stared.  She stared at us!  Without saying anything.  It was the most irritating thing! Because…

1. I don’t feel like I can comfortably shop having someone hover over me.  If you do this, I won’t buy anything.  And I didn’t.
2. It’s insulting.  Do you think I’m going to steal something?! Because that’s the vibe I get when you watch me like a hawk.
3. If I needed help with something, I don’t think I’d have trouble finding you.  The store is literally one small room.  I could speak at a conversational volume level, and you would hear me.

Maybe she thought we were just a couple of amature kids coming to see what this store was all about? After a little while, I tried to hint that this wasn’t the case.  ”Oh look! Noro!!” I said, picking up a skein from the sale bin (because any respectable  knitter would know what Noro is, right?).   At this point she tried to convince me to buy a different yarn, comparable to Noro.  I put down the Noro sock yarn  ($20 – that’s not even a sale price, is it?) to go check out the other one.  To give her hope, that I might actually buy something (mean?). We wandered around a bit more, and the entire time she kept saying to us, “Are you sure I can’t tempt you with anything else?”.  She said those exact words at least 3 or 4 more times before we decided we needed to bolt.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a friendly and helpful LYS staff, but don’t crowd me and beg me to buy your yarn, because I won’t.

Wow, first knit blog post in over a half a year.  You’d think it’d be a nicer one.  Sorry!