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Chewbaccus... re: the first name thing... when I was in high school in the Great Depression of the early 80s, my mom supplemented her massive schoolteacher salary by working part time in the women's dept. at Sears in the local mall. All the women who worked there, including her, had tags with Miss or Mrs. and their last name. At the time I thought it was cool, because I've never thought it was polite to walk up to somebody you've never met & say, "Hi, Sally, can you show me where the size 8 shoes are?" If they were doing it now I'd probably suggest that they all use fake names to avoid weirdos trying to track them down. Call me unpleasant and impolite, but I've always managed to avoid using a clerk's name. "Excuse me, can you point me to the gigabit ethernet switches" has always worked quite well without the need to pretend that the salesdroid and I are old school chums.
I've never worked retail... thank god.. tho I have my own horror stories from work in dealing with "customers" (i.e. students and employees). My favorite is still the woman who called up to complain that we did not provide laser printers in the dorms. She actually said, "I can't believe I'm paying all this tuition money for little Susie to go to college and you people can't put some laser printers in the dorms!" I had to restrain myself from telling her that if laser printing was the only thing about the experience of going to our college that Susie found important, then she needed to transfer. (For the record, we did have laser printers, but they were in labs where somebody could keep an eye on them.)
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