DW's Blog

Aisle Seven

by DW Green — October 8, 2026

“You know more than your customer does. That is the whole problem.”

A woman is standing in the middle of your store holding a recipe card. She stops a clerk and asks where the capers are.

“Aisle seven,” he says. “End cap by the olives.”

He is not being unhelpful. He is being precise. He could find those capers in the dark. The trouble is that she cannot see an aisle number from where she is standing, she does not know we call that thing an

end cap, and she is not sure what an olive has to do with it. He answered her question perfectly and she is still lost, and she will wander two more minutes and leave without the capers and possibly without the rest of the recipe.

He knows the store. That is exactly why he could not help her.

· · ·

A friend did me a kindness last week. I had written a piece for this blog, and he wrote back to tell me he got lost in it. He kept reading, and then he told me why, which is harder and rarer than agreeing.

One sentence in his note has been following me around ever since. He said that when he reads his

writer friends, he often ends up telling them the same thing: you know so much more than the reader does.

He was right, and it stung the way true things do. I had dropped names into that essay — a neighbor from my childhood block, a doorbell, a line about warm water — that carry a load of meaning for me

because I have written about them before. To him they were suitcases nobody opened. He was standing in aisle seven looking for capers.

· · ·

Here is the strange part, and it is the reason this happens to all of us for our entire working lives.

You cannot see what is missing from somebody else’s head, because in your head it is present. There is no gap for you to notice. The clerk cannot experience not knowing where the olives are. The pharmacist cannot hear how the instructions sound to a frightened person. The man who wrote the sign cannot

read it as somebody who does not already know the answer.

Knowledge does not feel like knowledge from the inside. It feels like the way things obviously are. And you cannot subtract it once you have it — nobody gets to walk into their own store for the first time

twice.

· · ·

Every store has an attic like this, and everyone who works there has stopped seeing it.

We tell people something is “in the back” when they do not know there is a back. We put up a sign that makes complete sense to the person who wrote it. We use an item number with a vendor, a nickname for a display, an acronym in a meeting, a phrase in an employee handbook that the writer understood and the new hire does not. We say “we are out of that” and consider the question answered, when the actual question was what am I going to feed my family tonight.

None of that is laziness. It is the opposite. It is expertise, doing damage on the way out the door.

· · ·

Two tests, and they are cheap.

The first is the new hire. Not the one who has been there six months — the one on day three, who still

has to think about where the restrooms are. Ask her which words she did not understand this week. She knows. She has just been too polite to say so, and in another month she will not be able to see them

either. That window closes fast, and most of us never use it.

The second is the twelve-year-old. Say it the way you would say it to a smart twelve-year-old who is not stupid and simply was not there. That is not talking down. A twelve-year-old will follow anything,

provided you carry it in through the front door rather than assuming she came in through the loading dock.

· · ·

And then the fix, which is smaller than you would think. Almost every one of these is solved by one clause.

Not “aisle seven, end cap by the olives.” Try: “Capers are with the olives — that is the aisle with the pasta, on the far end. Here, walk with me.”

The walk is the whole thing. It costs forty seconds and it is the difference between a woman who found the capers and a woman who decided that store is confusing. The clerk did not need more knowledge. He needed one sentence of translation and a pair of feet.

For a sign: one extra word. For a handbook: one example. For a piece of writing: one clause introducing the person whose name you just dropped, so the reader is not standing in the aisle wondering who Mrs. Ferdale was.

· · ·

There is a longer version of the same walk.

When I was a young clerk we would sometimes run out of an item that was in that week’s ad. A few

times, when there was time, I got in my car, drove to another store, bought the item, came back, and sold it to the woman who had asked for it at our advertised price. On a couple of those trips the other store was a competitor.

Nobody told me to do that. There was no policy covering it and I do not remember mentioning it to

anybody afterward. It just seemed like the right thing to do. The ad is a promise, and that ad may well have been the reason she walked in the door in the first place.

On paper the trip is a loss. My gas, my hour, full retail paid to somebody else, sold at our price. It is also the cheapest advertising that store ever bought.

· · ·

My father was a grocer for most of his life. He did not lecture me about any of this, and I do not

remember him giving me advice about customers at all. I learned it by watching him and listening to him, which is a slow method and the only one that ever stuck.

What I remember is that he walked people to things.

I have been writing essays for two years now, and it took a friend’s honest note to show me that I have been standing at the front of my own store calling out aisle numbers. The knowledge was never the