Born into Anthroxville’s reviled Miff supermarket mafia clan, the anthropomorphic panther, Mario Miff, suddenly found himself thrust into the sole responsibility of running the show as the Capo dei capi, after his entire family was caught in a mid-air car collision whilst trying to cross the unbridgeable river Ting-Fam. Had they listened to Mario, and simply made peace with the barnacled pirate, Roy Bibbowski (after failing to strong-arm him into renegotiating his excessive cargo shipping fees), then they could have breezily ferried across on his steamboat en route to firebomb a rival retail chain’s headquarters. The show-stopping crash occupied the headlines of Anthroxville news, such as Spencer Godwottery's Well Magazine, and Felix Finicky-Snout’s Sniff Test, for many weeks after, with wild speculation ranging from whether Mario had somehow arranged for the collision to take place, to how the newly installed head honcho would run the despised enterprise upon which so many grudgingly relied.

Counter to the values instilled in him from a young age on the primacy of whacks, wiseguys, and waste management, Mario had always believed in the core business fundamentals of Miff Inconvenience Stores: playing hard to get. This was what had originally differentiated it from its competitors in the combative retail space. However, in recent years, it had seemed to have lost its way. Sure, out of respect for your heritage and traditions, it's important to occasionally bump off an unruly supplier here, to bada bing a distributor there, but underpinning everything was Miff’s abusive relationship with its customers, and this is where Mario feels his family had really dropped the linguine. He had watched on over the years in despair, as they started introducing such measures as express checkouts, price-matching, and discounts. These pitiful tactics turned Miff Inconvenience from a revered retail dominatrix into a desperate floozy, begging for attention. Mario was determined to yank the business back to its glory days of abusive customer relations. Without the chase and the struggle, they were nothing. 

“Make 'em squeam, keep 'em keen,” Mario repeatedly intones each morning, wincing at a nude picture of Agatha Collop whilst flogging himself with a whip. A self-flagellating sado-masochist, Mario is better placed than any to understand the dark desires of his customers. He knows that the emotional and physical torment they endure in pursuit of a simple purchase directly boosts the prices he could wring from them at the checkout, and much like a well-humiliated arm-wrestler, they keep crawling back for more. It is a similar model adopted by other enterprises in Anthroxville, such as Kerubo Soleil's Manifescents Perfumery, Edison Upskirt’s Upskirt Nosher, Bernard Banjax’s Bernard Bankrolls, and, Banjax Bail Bonds, Gregory Fromage's Ours Whole Studio, and Florence de Looselips' Snoop Inn Hotel. However, in this carnival of commerce, none radiate the same potency as Miff Inconvenience under the anthro panther's control, wherein it has once again regained its crown as the necessary evil in Anthroxville. 

Inherently, a philosophy hell-bent on drowning the customer in waves of stupefying inconvenience was bound to stir the tempest within Anthroxville's populace. Shoppers, faced with the abyss of a trip to Miff's, skidded and staggered through what could only be compared to the notorious five stages of grief: denial, anger, anger, more anger, and aneurysm. But like deranged addicts chasing that next high, they kept stumbling back to Miff's doors, hunting for their next fix of absurdity.

Mario, with a relentless twinkle in his eye, continually refines this theatre of the madness, injecting fresh doses of lunacy, ineptitude, and downright falsehood into the customer experience. It's a delicate dance of sadism: to measure just how tautly one can stretch the public's fragile thread of patience before it frays completely. There's a precipice, a point at which the townsfolk might rally behind someone like Cornelius Fudge, the known firebrand, and torch the whole operation to the ground.

Amplifying the public's distress is Miff's paradoxical nature. In Anthroxville, it boasts an unparalleled array of goods, promising everything under the sun at any hour, given its proclaimed 24/7/365 operations. Yet its ever-open doors seem maddeningly elusive, invariably shut at those desperate moments of need. In a quirk of design, the aisles are perpetually awash in ankle-deep water, morphing the store into a disorienting maze aglow with the shimmer of feeble lights. Navigating this dim retail purgatory, the already demoralized customers are serenaded by a singular tune that loops incessantly. It's less a melody and more a relentless auditory assault, gnawing at the fringes of one's sanity with every repetition.

Every item on the shelves bore a label inscribed in an indecipherable script, a language so alien that many suspected it was the anthro panther's own invention. Amidst this linguistic chaos, one beacon of comprehension stood out: stickers proclaiming “buy one get one free.” Yet, even here, a cruel joke awaited: no two items ever truly paired up, a bitter realization for customers often discovered after hours spent in torturous lines.

Much like their unpredictable entrance doors, the store's card readers operate on whimsy, punctuating declined transactions with the robust blare of a foghorn. Amplifying the ordeal, their antiquated ATM produces checks — a payment method, ironically, rejected by Miff's own policy. Those astute enough to carry cash soon discover another catch: an insistence on exact change. Prices, as if to mock, invariably end in .43, .74, or .91. The merchandise too presents its quirks. Foods, bordering on questionable freshness, share shelf space with baffling items: zip-tied zip-ties, cans of Humphrey Skedaddle’s Skedaddle soda missing a sip or two, and bars of Hans Hüftgold's Hüftgold Confections which had...