On Being in the Service Industry, Surrounded by the Wildly Over-degreed, Pt. 1

For some weeks I've debated whether or not to post the following. In the end I decided it really didn't matter. So here goes.
I work in a bookstore cafe; I am the book buyer. Because the management is a combination of insane, cheap, and totally unconcerned with the state of the bookstore (it makes no money, whereas the cafe makes a bundle), I am not afforded any of the sorts of things buyers are supposed to have. I'm not asking for much here. A room to call an office would be nice. Filing cabinets for catalogues. A phone that's not in the middle of the store. A fucking desk would be good. A chair.
The store has never even given me an email address, which is ridiculous considering how everything not done by phone is done via email.
As it is, I spend my eight to nine hours a day standing at the cash register, ringing up sales for the bookstore and the cafe while trying to read catalogues, place orders, make phone calls to fix when an order comes in wrong somehow... and getting to listen to innumerable conversations held in the cafe.
This joint is in the middle of a college town. The regular customers at the store and cafe are local business people, academics, and students. Lunch rush is, overwhelmingly, students and young professor types. (In the morning we get a bunch of lazy intellectual types, the sort who have a late breakfast and argue with each other about the Op-Ed pages of the Times; later in the morning we get a lot of mommies with strollers and the occasional really ill-behaved child.) Mid to late afternoon, you get faculty meeting with students, faculty meeting with each other, that kind of thing. It's all supposed to be very collegial and friendly. It is actually entirely cutthroat and nasty and unpleasant. I imagine it's that way if you're one of the people at the tables drinking cappuccino and eating scones, but it's even more so from my perspective.
Recently, the editor of our local "alternative" newspaper wrote an article talking about local cafes, and he talked about how the place where I work is sort of uncomfortable, sometimes, because it gets so noisy with all the conversations you have to listen to (besides your own). I snorted when I read his piece, not because he was wrong, but because he had no idea how right he is. So I sent him an email saying, "You think you have it bad when you go there for coffee once or twice a week? Try being us, the staff who has to put up with you arrogant fucks day in and day out."
I don't think I really called him and his cronies arrogant fucks, but lord I wanted to. The funny truth is that I don't actually know who is more arrogant, me or the overly degree'd people drinking those three dollar lattes. We're running neck and neck as far as I can tell.