OfficeMax is OfficeMin on Customer Service.

This evening I visited a local OfficeMax located in Altamonte Springs, Florida.  While roaming through the store looking for some rubber finger tips for working with paper, I had a customer service person in a hurry to get to the back stock room, pass me by and quickly blurted out to me without stopping, "finding everything all right?".

You could tell he was really wanting to know whether I needed help.  I mean, just mere seconds before, I overheard him talk to another associate and said something about, "going in the back to take a look".  You could tell by the way he slowed down and greeted me that he was really caring.  You could tell that he would drop the world to service me on his way to the stock room to take a look. NOT!  So I responded in a similar haste to his wonderful personal greeting to me of "finding everything all right" with "Yep, and are you finding things OK too?"  Hmm.  No response as I heard the back room door whoosh open and close as he disappeared behind it.

I located my rubber finger tips and another item and proceeded to check out.  The place was so packed with people I was the first one (and only one) in line.  The other lone customer in the place was still roaming the store himself.  The 60 year old man behind the counter was very eager to greet me (uh, yeah ok).  As he slowly put the trash down from the other end of the counter he made his way to the register.  It wasn't slowness because of age, it was slowness of "damn, I don't want to be here, damn, I got a customer".   The gentleman showed that he was by greeting me with "zipcode?"  Wow, what a greeting!  I returned his greeting with a resounding "no thank you".  He rang up my two items.  I swiped my debit card and the machine displayed the amount of the sale and prompted me with the question "Is the amount correct?"  Unfortunately the machine did not display "I think it is but not really too sure" but instead showed YES and NO for answers.  I took a gamble with the 50/50 odds and chose YES.  Apparently it was the right answer.  The man gave me the receipt. I grabbed the bag of stuff. I slowly turned away from him toward the exit.  A second later I found myself saying out loud, "you do the same", to the man behind the counter who had not said anything else to me beyond his initial "zipcode?" greeting.