Customer Service Thread

I NEARLY FORGOT....

so for a time corporate told us to stop making "hey the store is closing in 30/15/5 minutes, please try to wrap it up" announcements because it "rushed the customers" and "made them feel unwelcome"

I suspect the reason we're back to doing them is because someone got locked in after we closed once. (She was ok. I forget exactly what happened but she was only stuck inside for a couple hours. Still unsure how we missed seeing her because we check all the aisles and apparently THE LIGHTS TURNING OFF wasn't a sign to her.)

 

I feel like I'm spamming but goddamn has it been a week


Things customers have done to try to get my attention: (the entire time I've worked retail, not this week only, but STILL)

-coughed loudly when my back was turned hoping I'd notice
-stared at me over the shoulder of the customer I'm currently helping (all the fucking time)
-snapped their fingers
-whistled at me or clicked their tongue (I am not a dog or small animal...)


Things no one seems to be able to do:

-say "excuse me"

 

Oh managers... if I'm supposed to call for assistance when my line gets too long, please consider assigning me to checkouts where the phone actually works. Or maybe, just maybe, get the damn phones fixed.

 

So the other day it was getting to closing time and we made the usual announcements. It was 5 minutes to close, there was a couple just wandering around floral. One of my coworkers was lurking around, asking if they needed help (because she wanted to get them the fuck out so we could close and go home), but they kept ignoring her. She tells me about this at closing time when they're still looking around. They come to my register. Guess what? They're deaf. But they were speaking to each other so my coworker didn't know (she knows some sign language). Oops.

 

Thank fuck I don't work in a place where someone would have the gall to whistle or snap their fingers at me to get my attention, because I would lose my goddamn mind. Or, at the very least, pointedly ignored them until they used their words like adults. (Exceptions for people who are doing it because of trouble with verbal communication, but I'm guessing those people aren't the ones who do it the most...)

An actual story: Lady comes up to the walk up window. Seems the change machine from the car wash next door has eaten her $20 bill. We are not associated with the car wash, the best we can do is tell her there's a number on the back of the machine she can call.

She says, "Well how am I supposed to get my money back??"

...

IDK LADY, BUT YOU'RE NOT GETTING IT FROM ME

Similarly, we are not a fucking bank. I might be able to make change for you, but the change in the drawer is for paying customers, and they ALSO like to pay for $3 purchases with $20 bills. Consider asking an actual bank for lower denominations so we can all avoid this problem.

 

@Shingleback The number of times I've had people asking me to break their $20.

And don't even get me started on the people coming to a coffee shop with a $100 bill and then getting ticked that their change is a mittful of $5 bills.

 

They're, uh, they're aware that a lot of shops won't even take anything bigger than a fifty, right? Because of how risky it is that someone's going to try and pass a fake? (And also because that's a really large bill and breaking it can take up a huge amount of the ready cash in the till. I've had cashiers flat-out say that they're not even allowed to break anything bigger than a twenty.)

 

this is me, forever!!!

"Do you have the receipt?"
*customer, deeply offended i have asked them this* "No. Why would I? Can't I just do a straight across exchange?"
.... like, yes. you can. i still need the receipt to pull up your original transaction, because, this might shock you- i still have to prove you actually bought the original thing you want to return, and i have to put it back in our inventory, and this may also shock you, but the different styles of shirt of have different barcodes!! as far as our system is concerned, they are entirely different items, and no you can't just take whatever you want because oh well they sort of look the same, that's not how this works.

like on what part of the planet can you just come to a store and take a different thing because you've changed your mind??? why do people expect it works this way?????

 

@Enzel you work in an art store? I can't tell but it sounds like it from framing shenanigans, I do too.
I've been at this job for a little less than a week and officially got my first Obnoxious Customer so hey, I'm a real retail employee now :P Basically I had just finished ringing someone up and I saw behind him was this older white lady who looked distinctly PTA-Mom-ish. I assume she has a question (the actual line customers are supposed to wait in to check out is on the other side of the registers from me) so I ask her if I can help her with anything. She informs me she's ready to check out.
Me: "Can you please join the line?"
Her: *looks at people in line* "But I was here before them!" (I have not been looking at her and have no way to confirm this)
Me: "Were you in line?"
At this point I assumed she was going to say yes, and I could ring her up while feeling less like I had enabled someone to cut in line. Instead, she gives me a death glare, drops the $2.50 bottle of glitter glue she'd been planning to buy on the counter, grabs her kid, and storms out while muttering something about customer service. I was just like ...was it something I said?

 

Because some stores have notoriously lax return policies. Like "we don't even care if you actually bought it at our competitor, and it doesn't even need to be something we still carry or plausibly ever carried" levels of lax. "I have heard stories of people bringing back garments they bought in the eighties with visible, enthusiastic wear on them, and getting money back for those items" levels of lax. And because customers will go "well, they'll do it", some managers will bend till their head touches their ankles if a customer wants to return something without a receipt.

 

Customer: If we bring you a picture of a plaque we got somewhere else can you do something close to it?

Me: Sure, you want to just e-mail it or--

Customer: Nah, we'll just bring you in a photo.

Spoiler

Me: *deep inhale* *steeples fingers* my dude,

 

I've occasionally made the "calling the cat sound" when I'm trying to get someone's attention in a store or something.

But because I am not an asshole most of the time, I'm embarrassed about it and apologize.

 

OMG that's amazing!

I'm weirdly lucky in that when people do that sort of absurd bullshit, I don't even realize that their expectations are so irrational. I will sympathize and agree how frustrating it is and it never even occurs to me they expect me to *do something* about it.

Eventually they figure out that they're barking up the wrong tree, but I'm so nice the whole time i don't think they even feel like they could complain. And eventually I might figure out that they had been expecting to get something from me, and I'm bewildered.

 

I'm definitely guilty of "make eye contact over the current customer's shoulder for a second and hover awkwardly until they're done" because I'm still working on letting myself speak up/take up space and automatically give everyone else priority because they're Busy even if they're just chatting with a coworker or moving products forward on the shelf. I'm putting it on my list of Things to Work On though. I can handle giving/taking things from people directly now! I used to be horribly guilty of putting things like money on the counter because accidental physical contact always made me freak out.

 

(This happened a bit ago but I was yelling about retail with someone in meatspace and was reminded of my first Disaster.)

So for whatever reason the touchscreen keypads for entering produce codes and such have a "00" button next to the Enter key. These same numpads are used to enter the number of non-weighed produce items that are being bought. These numpads are also part of the self-scan checkouts.

My second (and last, thankfully) day watching the self-scans, a customer mistypes and charges himself for 500 avocados. Whatever, it happens, but I need a manager override before the computer will let me void out what it thinks is $500 of produce. And this guy hardly speaks English, I know just barely enough Spanish to get across "sorry I don't know Spanish," and none of my Spanish-speaking coworkers are in because Life Is Great, so he's getting more and more angry because I "won't" void out the accidental $500 of avocados. That was a loooong three minutes.

 

@Loq I think you walked into a word problem from a math book.

 

Unintentional physical contact freaks me out too, but apparently less than you because I've found I'd rather accidentally touch/be touched by someone than have them drop their money on the counter. But I'm super careful about how I hand people things to avoid contact.

A couple of weeks ago I was volunteering with two other girls at the dance studio where I take classes. it was my first day. A lady walks in 15 minutes late for her class, tells us she doesn't have any classes left on her 10 class card* and doesn't have enough money to buy another one today, so she will take the class for free and pay for it when she comes back at the end of the week. Except, that isn't allowed. This was explained to her and she insisted that not only had it been done for her before, she'd seen it done for many other people as well, and therefore we had to do it for her. I told her that since it was against the rules it wasn't our call to make, even if someone else had done it before, we couldn't do it without someone who had that authority telling us directly that we could do it. So she proceeded to insult first us personally, then our entire generation, then us personally again, then complained about the fact that she had spent fifteen minutes arguing over it instead of getting her way immediately. But honestly the thing that made me most mad was when she said one day we would look back on this and regret how we'd treated her. Because no. No matter how old I get I'll still remember the hell customer service is, and how I have always done my best to be polite and generous to people who are being (whether intentional or not) rude to me, and I will never regret doing what I knew was right even when self entitled people who've probably never worked customer service a day in their lives insisted I didn't know how to do my job.

Did I mention she also said she didn't have enough to pay for a drop in (single class) even though she opened her wallet and rifled through it right in front of us and there was definitely a lot more than the $16 the class costs in there? Because that happened.

*buying a card for 10 classes gives you a $1 discount per class

 

A fun story to lighten things up: today a kid came in to buy one of our big individual sheets of drawing paper (like 36"x48"). As I was ringing him up I asked if he wanted me to roll the paper up and bag it for him. He says no, it's fine, he's not painting on it or anything, and folds it until it's about standard letter-size. I get curious and ask what he is using it for, then.
Turns out one of his professors has allowed their students to use one sheet of paper as a cheat sheet for a test. I doubt the kid's gonna get away with it but I respect his smartassery anyway :D

 

Me: [Manager], what is our policy on, uh, swords?

Manager: What?

Me: There's a woman sitting out there with, like, a sword on the table in front of her. Just a sword.

Manager, dead serious: Oh, yeah, I saw her. The real problem is that she's trying to reserve two tables.

Me, also dead serious: Oh, yeah, we've been running out of tables all morning. [Coworker] has been asking people to get up but she's reserving her table with, like, a sword.

Manager: Yeah. Don't worry about it, we should have enough tables.

Me: A'ight.

 

What the fuck.