Music

This record store clerk collected some of the dumbest customer questions

by Mark Teo

We understand it better than most: Record stores can be intimidating places, and that’s mostly because of the people who work there. The folks behind the registers, who stock the shelves, and who trawl the aisles often have a reputation for being über snobs, tracing right back to High Fidelity: The conventional wisdom states that if you don’t have the proper taste in Japanese punk, or British indie pop, or underground hip-hop, you’re destined to be judged. Judged as a plebe.

Of course, the myth of the pretentious store clerk is, largely, a myth, and some of the nicest people we’ve met have worked at record stores—heck, many of us have worked at music retailers. And if you have, you come to understand why some clerks are so standoffish: It’s because they get asked stupid questions. Routinely. And after a while, the indignity of working at a record emporium can get to you.

And it certainly got to Christopher Bickel, who, as a record store clerk, had been storing the dumbest things he’d heard in a notebook—and he’d been at it since 2002. In a post he wrote for Dangerous Minds, Bickel shared some of the most horrendous quotes—and yes, we admit it, most of ’em are pretty damn hilarious, too. Read a few of our favourites above, and check out the rest here.