Your guess is as good as mine.

"What time does it get busy [here]?"

This question, as well as the variations thereof, bids fair to join the "List of Stupid Questions Everyone Asks" a.k.a. "Questions of Doom." It also ranks quite highly as both a provocation for brutal sarcasm and physical violence. I despise that insipid question. So while I sit back, assuming a gentle smile, and reply in an amiable manner, I am already casting their scourged and bloody soul into the molten pitchy depths of Gehenna, basting their broken corpse liberally with quicklime in my mind's eye.

It may seem to an outsider that my level of malevolence is far in excess of what the question actually warranted. Perhaps my tolerance has been scraped ruthlessly to a baleful gleam, tainting my reaction to innocent customers.

The dismal reality is that it's an ugly little question. You might see the inquiry as you would a little girl from the 1920's. However, beneath the spun gold ringlets, dimpled cheeks, and enamel gloss black of tiny patent leather mary-janes, lurks a diseased, soulless monster.

In some cases, it implies that the store is doing sporadic business. In others, they seem to voice the question in the hopes of putting me in my place, as if to make me feel guilty that the volume of custom at that moment failed to meet their personal yardstick of how crowded the building should be. In either case, they are issuing a declaration that the store is deficient to their desires.

Short of herding people into the store at gun-point, there is only so much a given store can do to increase customer flow. Even then, none of the elements directly within a store's power are guaranteed to generate a dramatic improvement and that still leaves a dizzying array of factors that affect customer flow which are outside any store's control. As such, it's an insult.

Supposing that the inquiring party was not speaking from the previous motivation, it's still a bloody aggravating question. Requesting that I or some other clerk should forecast the future activity level of the store is requesting we will gamble with our credibility. As much as it may rankle at times, people are free agents and are not obliged to keep regular hours in a porn store, or vastly more to their point, the video arcade. If we give a day and time, even if carefully couched as the broadest of speculation, and the customer does not encounter the degree of activity they desired, they are going to feel misled. Our credibility takes the blow and possibly, that customer will decide to go someplace else that won't "yank their chain" about things. It doesn't matter if the clerk predicts correctly nine times out of ten, the patron is going to brood on that one failure.

Furthermore, the customer is angling for a sure thing, a guaranteed success. If it was a movie or toy, that's one thing. Setting them up with another person is quite another matter. I am not the keeper of everyone's social calendar. It is excess of my purview to procure playmates for our clientele, let alone legality.

I had one twit of a man even ask me if I had a list of women’s' phone numbers. Yeah, it's called a phone book, but I can't say much for your chances making blind calls. Sweet shivering Shiva on a sybian! What the hell does he think we do here?

But for all of that, it's one of those questions that defies a simple, short answer. Unless you have a specific time to provide, you're stuck with attempting to convey uncertainty. No one has ever been satisfied with the reply that it's impossible to predict, which means I get stuck wasting five to ten minutes explaining why I can't give them a definitive answer, every bloody time someone asks the gods-bedamned question. They probably think I'm being evasive or lazy. If they only knew I was actually stoking my anger.

On further thought, the question is overdue for induction into the "Questions of Doom."