ana , i agree about it not going away .

however , i think the main problem is the volume - i don't think i'd mind half as much if i didn't feel it was being shoved down my throat. after all ,that's not the reason i'm there .

and when a store or restaurant loses sales because of something they could fix with no effort , i think that's poor management.

would be nice if some of them listened once in a while to what customers wanted , but like you said i don't see it happening any time soon.

Ah, Gimli, I think you misunderstood what I said. I don't care for music when I shop, am in a restaurant, or any other business. I'm not there to listen to their choice of music, some which causes my teeth to grate.

You mentioned at a restaurant. In my experience, restaurants are so noisy that it's often hard to hear if music is playing. Often but not always. I've been into some where you had to shout to the server in order to be heard.

Contrary to what may be a popular belief, music doesn't cause me to linger and shop. It has the opposite effect. I shop faster in order to get out of that store.

As I said above, I can sometimes tolerate what I don't like because I won't be there long. But I can also shop elsewhere as well.

I don't mind music when I shop and once in a great while find myself humming along. It's the darn commercials that I can't stand and, of course, they're always a few decibles louder than the muzzak.

What irritates me so much more is hearing Christmas muzzak beginning right after Halloween until after New Year's Day. I live in a suburb northwest of Chicago and we have a radio station that plays Christmas music during July.

Sorry I've gone off the path of the original question but the Christmas season makes the muzzak situation even worse.

I hate it. One time I was in a grocery store and the power went out except for a few fluorescent lights on the ceiling. This was back when they had cash registers that could be run without electricity, so everyone just kept shopping. I was amazed at how relaxing it was to do the grocery shopping without all that racket over the loudspeakers.