We had a dad who let his two young children run loose in our comic store. They knocked over a display, which destroyed a glass display case and several high-priced figurines. Our boss ended up suing the dad, and he was ordered to pay over $2,000 in damages.

It was the last day for the parent to pay the damages before he would be in trouble with the courts, and I saw his car drive up to the front of the store. The back was dragging very low, and I watched as he got out, opened the trunk, and struggled to grab two backpacks and bring them inside. He set them by the front counter, and without another word, he went back several times, bringing more and more of these backpacks in.

Once he was done, he leaned on the counter with a sweaty, red face.

Dad: “Receipt.”

Me: “For?”

Dad: “The damages. There’s your money.”

Grinning like an idiot, he opened one of the bags onto the floor. It was full to the brim of nothing but change — quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies.

Me: “You… just dragged in thousands of dollars in change?”

Dad: “It’s legal tender. You have to take it. Get me my receipt now, little girl.”

Me: “Okay. But I am not taking it like that. You need to bring it to the back counter. Then, I need to confirm that it is all there.”

Dad: “But—”

Me: “But nothing. I am going to count it. Every. Single. Cent. And then, because there is so much there, I am going to count it back to you. Then, you are going to roll it up into coin stacks so I can take it to the bank. Then and only then will I give you the receipt.”

The dad looked over my shoulder, then down at the bags, and then at his watch.

Dad: “But that will take hours!”

Me: “Yes. Yes, it will. So I’d get moving. Or… you could take this all back to wherever you got it from and come back with cash. I get paid to count it either way.”

The dad sighed and began hefting the bags back to his car. He came back three hours later with the cash.

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I work at a comic book shop. A customer comes up with a few green army men we sell for $1. The movie “Toy Story” has recently come out and is proving very popular.

Customer: “How do I get them to move like in the movie?”

After a few seconds of looking at her, I just respond: 

Me: “…with your imagination?”

I was working at a comics and gaming store, and a guy came in looking for a board game recommendation. I showed him a few games, and he chose one. I started to check him out.

Customer: “I’m going to play this game with my friend while we do LSD. Want to join us?”

Oh, yeah, I can think of nothing I would rather do than psychedelics with random men. I’m not sure how he thought he and his friends would play a board game while on LSD in the first place.

I ran a comic and card store in the 1990s. One fine afternoon, I was doing some organizing and straightening up, and I saw an SUV pulling up in front of my store. The mother driving proceeded to drop off her two kids and drive off.

“Not a big deal,” I thought. “She must be going to park and will be right in.” Well, I was wrong.

After a few minutes, I asked the older kid where their mother was.

Older Kid: “She went shopping.”

My store was in a strip mall and a supermarket was on the other side of the mall.

After thirty minutes, I started to get a little annoyed as I had to go to the post office and I couldn’t toss these two out; they were six and seven years old.

After an hour, I had to go to the bathroom, and I couldn’t leave them alone on the floor as they might damage something. At least they were well-behaved, but I couldn’t risk it.

After ninety minutes, I got mad. I looked in the parking lot for the SUV but couldn’t see it from my door. Of course, the parent didn’t even give her kids a couple of quarters to play a video game.

After two hours, she pulled up and honked, and the kids went running with me right behind.

Me: “That will be $20.”

Mother: *Sneering* “For what?!”

Me: “Babysitting — $10 an hour for two hours. I’m giving you a discount because the kids were so well-behaved.”

Mother: *Snorting* “This is a store for kids.”

Me: “Yes, a store. You didn’t even give your kids a quarter to play a video game. I had things I had to do and couldn’t get them done because I couldn’t leave with them here.”

Mother: “There’s nothing here I want them to buy! We won’t be coming back.”

Me: “That wouldn’t bother me in the slightest, since you don’t respect my business enough to not just leave your kids here.”

Their father did bring them in a few times after that. The shame was that the kids did like me, as I treated them with respect and didn’t just throw them out.

Their mother did tell people how rude I was, but these people knew that I could be sarcastic but never rude. She was known to be a pain in the a**.

You may wonder why I didn’t call the police, but this was the nineties, and that wasn’t really done at the time. Parents did leave their kids places sometimes. The other reason is that I didn’t get along with the city particularly well for various reasons.

Years ago, a friend of mine, Bob, owned a comic store. (He passed away in 2014, and I lost one of the greatest friends I have ever known and my favourite-ever comic store.)

Like many comic store owners, Bob sold premium comics — older issues with a VERY high value. Bob rated the comics himself and, unlike a lot of services, was absolutely honest and fair in his ratings from Good to Near Mint and, if anything, he underrated what should have been a higher rating. This meant you could get a real collector’s item for cheaper.

 Truth be told, Bob preferred to sell to real collectors, not speculators. A friend of ours got major discounts on his back issue purchases because Bob knew they were for him.

[Customer], however, would buy books from him, get them “officially” rated and sealed in plastic (a small, hard plastic box), and put them on eBay. With the world’s largest garage sale, he made a profit. 

One book was an early “The Amazing Spider-Man” (issue number somewhere in the thirties) and it was valued, in its condition, at around $3,600 to $4,000. As I said, Bob often underpriced things, erring on the side of the customer. Bob put it out for $3,300.

[Customer] came in, bought a whole bunch of stuff, and asked Bob how low would he was willing to go on the “Spider-Man”. Considering the overall sale, he dropped the price to $3,100.

[Customer] left and life moved on.

Cut to a couple of months later. [Customer] was back, trying to talk down a couple of wall books. (The highest-value comics were on pegs on the wall, to show off stock.) He was complaining about the last deal. He had sold the comic for $3,800; this was lower than he had expected. So, to sum up, Bob gave him a discount, and [Customer] made a profit on that. H***, if [Customer] had paid the original price, he still would’ve made a profit.

But it was not enough. [Customer] felt that Bob should offer him a discount on some wall books, on the order of 50%, so he could make the money he should’ve — on books with values in the $2,000-to-$3,000 range.

He seemed upset that Bob did not agree. Bob gave him a more than fair deal. And, even if he had lost money on his speculation, that was Bob’s business, literally.

Bob: “No.”

Customer: “Do you know how much money I spend in this—”

Bob: “I’ll save you even more. I am not selling these books to you, even at full price.”