Thank you

I'd just like to take a minute to thank everyone for the overwhelmingly positive response to my last post. The last two days have seen all kinds of records broken on how many visits this blog has seen, plus the Facebook post that linked to it has been seen by over 20,000 people and has been shared over 200 times. The discourse in the comments has been mostly civil, and most of the people who have not experienced bad service at Jo-Ann's have expressed their contrasting stories calmly and without resorting to all caps. Most.

I was nervous about posting something so serious on my quilting humor blog, but I felt it was important. I do believe it is okay—great, even—for corporations to make money, but I also believe that it's important to understand how that money is made, and for consumers to understand that the workers at the front lines are not always the ones at fault when your shopping experience doesn't go the way you'd like. Sometimes they are, yes, but understanding what they often go through just to make it through a single shift can change your perspective a lot. I've been the person behind the register at a bookstore, the cashier at the drive-thru at McDonald's, the salesgirl on the floor of a chain clothing store, and the well-trained manager of a high-end optical store. It's all hard, hard work, and so often you are treated like dirt by customers simply because you are in a service job. Personally, I think that staying on your feet for 8 hours or more, serving customers who often think that you are beneath them, while trying to keep up with 800 other tasks is pretty freaking superhuman and deserves more than we as a society have decided those jobs are worth. In my idealistic little noggin, I imagine a world where all work is valued, not just the kind of work that requires suits and desks and degrees that are getting harder and harder to pay for.

ANYHOODLE. On Tuesday, as promised, I'm gonna tell you about three places where I love to buy fabric and a little bit about what they are doing to attract and keep business in a changing and competitive market. This is just a short and completely subjective list based upon where I shop and what my experiences with them have been. But, two of the shops have already agreed to offer coupons to my readers! Woo hoo! So, after I tell you about how awesome they are, you can go and find out for yourself - at a discount!

Then we'll get back to our regular fart joke routine. Promise.