Cigar N Smoke

Honestly, this deserves closer to a negative two stars, but one’s the lowest I can go here.
The proprieter of this ‘smoke shop’ is possibly the rudest person in the customer service industry I’ve met in years. He asked me what I was looking for, and when I said I was just looking around at the moment he snapped «then go look around outside! You are wasting my time!» This, despite the fact that I was the only one in the store and that he had come in *after* me. I’d been there about 30 seconds. I was wearing a t-​shirt, jeans and sandals, no bag, and I’m pretty clean cut in appearance, so I doubt he thought I was trying to steal anything — from the locked cabinets.
Stranger still, the last (and only other) time I entered that shop, about four months ago the woman and child who were there were very friendly; the little girl made me taste the cookies she just made with her mom, very cute. I’d made a purchase ($ 20 stem) during that visit, and I thought they were as cool as could be, despite their limited selection, the rat-​maze-​like layout of the display cabinets, and the strange odor. Dad (I think that’s who this guy was) wasn’t there during that visit.
Dad (or whoever he was) literally chased me up the aisle as i tried to keep ahead of the wave of venom spewing from this man’s face and at the same time explain that I’m a customer, and that by treating me in this way rather than letting me look at his merchandise he may lose a sale and will certainly lose a customer, and that this is terribly poor customer service. I actually said it almost exactly like that, trying to remain as polite as possible. He replied, and I quote: «Yes, I don’t need you as a customer. I don’t care. Get out. Fuck off, who cares, get out,» trying to physically push me out the door, which he then slammed behind me. I then went down the street and spent $ 100 on something I might well have otherwise bought there.
I don’t know whether he’d been having a particularly bad day (it was only around 2 in the afternoon) or was up to something fishy in his store and didn’t want anyone around, or whether he’s honestly just a very nasty human being. I feel kind of bad, given that the woman and her daughter who helped me the last time were quite nice, but one decent experience does not cancel out one bizarre, insulting and annoying experience. If you value customer service (or selection, or price, or somewhere that doesn’t smell fairly rancid for that matter), I highly recommend that you do NOT go here.

Talk about the occupational hazards of a psychonaut.
A real good friend from the other side of the Cascades came across some DMT recently and offered me a little bit. I had never done it before, so, being the responsible and ethical explorer of inner space that I try to be, I set about to learn what I could about this substance that my friends and Terence McKenna were praising as a powerful hallucinogen with a deeply profound yet short-​lived trip. Among other things I found out that it is typically smoked through what Wikipedia referred to as a «crack pipe.»
What we really needed was not a «crack pipe,» as Wikipedia called it, which is just a glass straw with openings at either end like a traditional straw, but a glass straw with an opening at one end and a bulb at the other. The bulb being used as a chamber in which to place the substance for cooking. The point I’m getting at is, as my roommate remarked laughingly, this was not exactly the kind of product that you could just call around for. While the thought of me on the phone asking various businesses as innocently as I could if they had any crack pipes for sale did make me chuckle, we did have reservations enough about how productive that would turn out to be to not even try.
So we set out New Year’s Eve to find this smoking utensil. The head shop nearest my house was the obvious first choice. It would have been so nice to drop in there and be done with it. But instead the man behind the counter flared his nostrils and proclaimed, «We don’t have anything like that» in a mildly abrupt way. You would have thought I pulled a baggie of rocks out of my shirt pocket and asked, «Ya got anything I can smoke this out of?» We headed Aveward to try a few different places, with me wondering when it was my roommate and friend’s turn to embarrassingly ask for this glass implement. We got the same reaction from a few different stores until we got to Cigar N Smoke.
The gentleman working at Cigar N Smoke was very kind and non-​judgmental. His professional demeanor never faltered as I described the product I was in the market for. He actually seemed interested in having me be a satisfied customer. To my surprise, he had it! For $ 6.50 I was done shopping for crack pipes and could get on with the New Years festivities. After the purchase was complete the man even gave us a stick of incense I had never smelled before and smiled as he wished us well.
I give Cigar N Smoke 3.5 stars for high class customer service when so many ugly assumptions could have so easily been made.