The Customer Is Always Wrong

A young woman’s art career begins to lift off as those around her succumb to addiction and alcoholism

The Customer is Always Wrong is the continuing saga of a young naïve artist working in a restaurant of drunks, junkies, thieves, and creeps. Oakland in the late seventies is a scuzzy, low-rent warzone and Mimi Pond folds the tales of the sleaze-ball characters that surround her into her workaday waitressing life. Outrageous and loving tributes and takedowns of her co-workers and satellites of the Imperial Cafe create a snapshot of a time in Mimi’s life where she encounters who she is, and who she is not.

Told in the same brash yet earnest style as her previous memoir Over Easy, Pond’s storytelling gifts have never been stronger than in this epic, comedic novel. She drops readers right back at the Imperial with its great coffee and depraved cast, where things only get worse for the addicts and alcoholics surrounding her while her career as a cartoonist starts to take off.