The Customer Is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles edited and compiled by Jeff Martin (Soft Skull Press, $12.95 trade paperback, 9781933368900/193336890X, October 2008)

Here 21 contributors draw highly distinctive beads on their experiences working in retail establishments that range from one-person operations all the way to big-box stores, from an upscale children's clothing boutique to a Swedish pancake emporium. The focus can be on the customers, co-workers, supervisors, management, employees-discount and the (usually pathetic) paycheck, but the results are uniformly sardonic, touching, hilarious, uplifting and bizarre; in short: terrific!

Though there are many tales of suffering the tedium and humiliation of standing behind a counter, which demands that you be nice to even the most loathsome individuals, the essays teem with lessons learned about growing up and distinguishing all the types of people who walk the Earth (and lurch through your door). What we as readers learn from the behind-the-scenes 411: size labels are sometimes ripped out of clothes so that a size 20 happily purchases what she insists is a size 12; some clerks at Sears suffer intense bouts of mall-envy of all the cool kids who work at Benetton; salespeople working on commission have a tendency to direct you to an item that will benefit them, not you; never buy a service contract.

In addition to offering valuable tips on shopping for home supplies, James Wagner also pulls the curtain back to confide, "Abuse by customers and desired violence toward them by colleagues often go hand in hand, and one of the principal activities of my colleagues at the hardware store is to think of ways of killing customers." The macabre uses to which an inventory of elaborate and sharp devices can be put are, to say the least, highly imaginative.

Surprises abound throughout the collection. The tantalizing first line, "There were a million reasons to take the job at Sexworld," begins Clay Allen's piece, but where he takes us is so idiosyncratic and unexpected that I finished the tale with my jaw dropped open.

As I read one really original take on retailing after another, I feared that the next one had to be flat. Then I turned the page to C.A. Conrad's "Deviant You, Deviant Me," three delirious pages of attitude, hilarity and righteous anger. Consider all my fears banished, although I had no idea what could come next. I began Gary Mex Glazner's "Tulip Thief." "I worked as a florist for eighteen years, but always wanted to do something more masculine, so I became a poet," he writes as his funny and sweet story takes off into the stratosphere. Kudos to Jeff Martin for compiling essays that so consistently fly readers to the moon.--John McFarland

Shelf Talker: The Customer Is Always Wrong parades such wit, variety and sassy personality that you'll want to host a reading in your home in order to meet the authors and maybe flirt with them.