Shopping Disappointment

[Father Bill]

I hope you're not right about that Fr Bill.
Management not being allowed to make decisions because their employees won't be able to follow their example?
That is why managers are (or should be) there. They can make the decisions that the employee can't and shouldn't be making.
This seems to me a case of a manager who shouldn't be in the position he's in.

That may indeed be the case, but in many thrift shop situations, the rules are extremely rigid only because they're designed not only as a source for the public but more and also, to teach and give succour to handicapped staff who may have little or no vocational or cognitive skill. Some of those are individuals who simply cannot handle variation, even if it is made by their leaders, and it can cause some very real emotional breakdowns for some of them.

We need to remember that some (and admittedly not all) thrift shops have two products: the items on the shelves, and the emotional/ social/ vocational lives of their clients who work and learn there at the same time as we go shopping. It's something with which I had a very close connection for 25+ years, and while I know that often this is not the situation, it sometimes is, and that's why I mention it as one possibility.

Should the manager have another way of dealing with it? Of course... but s/he may not, and while that may not meet our extremely unusual and unique needs, it may on the other hand, meet the extremely and unusual needs of handicapped staff.

Making people happy has many facets - us (the customer with a need for a jacket conversion that nobody there has ever imagined or could understand) and in cases such as I've tried in a few words to describe, the client-staff whose quality of life may be hung on slender threads because of challenges and horrors that we could never imagine, and for whose absence in our lives we should be giving humble thanks.

Things are rarely as simple as they seem!