Shopping is uniquely political in Montreal.Retail assistants and cashiers face a unique struggle to please not only the customer, but also the provincial government, which - since 1980 - has saddled them with the task of keeping Quebec French.
The complex task of both moving goods and serving Quebec government's cultural agenda appears to be more recent than one might imagine.
Throughout the years Montreal newspapers reported on just about every trivial thing that happened in every type of situation but copious searches of old papers reveal zero references to retail-related language hostility.
The most iconic expression of such retail language displeasure referred to "damned fat English ladies at Eaton's," a phrase which promoted an idea that Montreal's longtime largest department store snubbed French clients.
Turns out that nobody ever went on record to complain about those fabled rotund women.
Some might assume that the "damn fat English ladies from Eaton's" was a provocative expression from the 1960s that came out of the radical outrage conveyer belt alongside "speak white!" but the expression was only coined in 1989 as blogger Taylor Noakes explained in an article.
Liberal Cabinet Minister Pierre MacDonald coined the term to describe what some other people might grumble about, while he himself didn't think the description was justified.
Indeed when he died in 2015 some media incorrectly cited MacDonald for thinking that Eaton's sales staff represented a problem, whereas his attitude was quite the opposite.
Quebec politicians conscripted retail into the role of saving the French language after 1980 when Bill 101 forced language restrictions onto commercial signage in Quebec.
The inelegant intrusion of linguistic wokeness into the mission of entrepreneurs fit like a saddle on a cow.
The awkward attempt to offload language survival onto shop owners has led to endless messes, from Allan Singer's signage protests, to Brent Tyler's challenges at the Supreme Court, to the heart-wrenching debates over the apostrophe on stores such as Eaton's and Ogilvy's, Bill 178's order to make English letters half the size of French, to the absurdity of Pastagate and beyond.
In late 2017 Quebec MNAs demonstrated that they still feel entitled to meddle in the life-and-death battle for retail sales by voting unanimously to urge store staff to welcome shoppers with the word "bonjour" rather than "bonjour hi."
The newly-elected CAQ government has recently expressed plans to punish retail language law sins with the same vigor of past years, so expect more of the same.
Some consumers, in turn, have reacted by viewing retail with suspicion and interpreting every insipid friendly sales staff comment as a politically-charged statement.
On a human level the language battle in stores can wear people down and undermine their joy of shopping and enjoying what should be pleasant face-to-face shopping encounters.
An article by the excellent Michael Farber in the Montreal Gazette of April 1989 brings the unnecessary tension to a human scale.
In it, a man reveals how a retail language encounter with an impolite staffer South Shore Steinberg's grocery store in around 1976 changed his destiny.
The time it happened, my father had gone to the market for a big order, $300 worth of groceries. And the check-out girl wouldn't speak English to him. That day he came home and said it was just too much. So we left two or three weeks after. Got in the car and we were gone. My mother was bilingual but my father didn't speak French. He had been laid off by Northern Electric and he worked the pipelines. He would be away for months at a time. It wasn't a hate thing. He never hated the French. My father saw it coming and one day he just went over the top. I didn't understand it at the time. I remember store owners changing their signs and people moving to Ontario but that's all. It was hard leaving here but it saved my game. I got to Ottawa and was playing 100 games a year and I was a much better player because of it.That player went on to star in the NHL where he played 1149 games before retiring at the age of 38.