Customer Service Thread

Customers expecting me to "fit them in" in front of people who paid a week ago because their orders "take less work". It's still first come first serve by date, we don't prioritize by how difficult something is, and NO WE CANT GET SOMETHING DONE IN A WEEK RIGHT BEFORE THANKSGIVING.

Also corporate handed down a decree that we have to have a whiteboard in the shop that lists every employee's personal sales goal for every day of the week. Each day we're supposed to write our actual sales number, in red if it doesn't meet the goal and in green if it surpasses it.

We don't even work on commission.

My manager thinks it's absolute bullshit and told us so but she has to make us do it anyway. All I could say was "what an excellent way to decrease morale and breed resentment among coworkers!"

 

My one retail job does that with credit card sign ups. And tracks our sales despite not doing commission and hounds us on it. Even people working at the register are expected to get at least one person to add something to their purchase per hour. =.=

My favorite form of encouragement they do is 'dont forget if we exceed our sales expectation monthly you all get a bonus! except you, seasonal workers. you get nothing. but work harder anyways.'

 

We're entering prime bullshit territory, good luck everybody!

 

Our photo lab is already in full holiday mode and I’m back in the pharmacy. I feel bad for them, but then again, I get thanksgiving off...

 

I confirmed the days I could take off on Thanksgiving week twice verbally with managers and twice through the scheduling system and my job still tried to schedule me for two of the days I got off.
Like. Uh. No.

 

Can you call in?

 

Oh I already told them I'm not going to be at those shifts; Ive had my plane tickets to go literally across the country to see my family for thanksgiving for two months. It's just annoying how obviously they don't respect my time at all.

 

I had a moment like that. Cleared a vacation I had been planning for months and already sunk about $100 into on the scheduling website, got scheduled anyway. talked to my boss about it and he said it was fine if i went. got a call one morning midway through the vacation.
them: where are you?
me: ...illinois (i live in tennessee)
them: well are you coming in to work today?
me: considering i'm eight hours away by car, no.
them: how about tomorrow?
me: also no.
them: you can't just skip shifts like this
me: talk to the manager. he said he would deal with it.

 

I definitely won't be surprised if/when they call me on Tuesday asking why I'm not into work yet.

 

Oh and the manager I talked to definitely didn't remember that we agreed I'm only working Sundays from now on, I'm scheduled 3 days again week after thanksgiving. I'll make sure to tell someone I'm not showing up to those shifts either, wheeeeee.

 

had a conversation with a customer today that lasted 16.2 years

• he kept calling me "sister"
• he asked me "whats a sweet girl like you doing in a place like this" (note: i work at a reputable-ass liquor store)
• he asked me if i had a husband and children
• he told me that the best part about getting old was being ready for death so you can really enjoy life. quote: "im ready for death. im prepared for it."
• he asked me "whats your story, how did you get here"
• he told me that he would spend his birthday drinking alone

god also like
this shit was kinda next level but shit like this happens to me every other fucking day at this place, people tell me way too fucking much weird shit about their lives and their (bad) relationship with alcohol or aging and im dying squirtle is a really appropriate meme because they say it with a laugh or a smile

 

customer service rant

Spoiler

i want to get a ton of piercings and i want to stop smiling because i think people are getting the wrong fucking idea about me and i hate hearing all this intensely intimate, distressing shit from strangers in a situation i cant fucking leave and aghggh

like is this normal? is this a normal level of emotional shit to have to hear? multiple customers today joked to me that they wanted to die and it was only unusual because it happened twice in one day, and people tell me that they have drinking problems and shit like that a lot

 

@seed it is....really not normal, or ok, though I have noticed that there are certain types of people who have figured out that retail employees have to be nice to them so they use them as emotional dumping grounds, which is shitty. And I can see how that occurrence might rise at a liquor store but it doesn't make it at all appropriate for anyone to drop things like that on strangers. :(

 

So i work at Lowe's, and it was kinda late (like 8:30 or 9:00), and a customer left me in the middle of a sale because he paid for $30 of his $40 purchase with a gift card, THEN decided that he wanted to take the 2 packs of jerky he bought off his transaction. Which i explained to him that we couldn't do, because you can't change the contents of a transaction after you've already fucking paid for part of it, but that if he FINISHED THE PURCHASE and took his receipt to customer service, they would refund him the price of the jerky.

"Just take the jerky off." He said, after i explained all that.

"I'm sorry, since the transaction has already started processing, it has to be completed, I can't change it."

"I just want to take the jerky off!"

"I know, but unfortunately the computer system is set up in such a way that it's impossible to change a sale once a payment has been made. If you go to customer service with your reciept, they'll get it all sorted out for you." I explained. Again.

"I just want you to take the jerky off my purchase," he said, angrily, because apparently he had the listening skills of a fucking loaf of bread.

"I'm sorry, but I can't do that."

"Yes, you can!"

So i REPEATED, AGAIN, why i couldnt, and rather than finish his purchase, he just. Grabbed his fucking stuff and walked over to the customer service desk and demanded that they fix it, leaving me with a half-complete sale that i couldn't do anything with. And Customer Serivce couldn't do anything, because he never finished paying, so he technically hadn't bought anything to return. And he was over there for a solid 20 minutes trying to get them to "fix it", and you bet your ass i stood there at the end of my aisle and stared at him the whole fucking time and grinned.

At one point, one of the customer service guys literally came over to my register and said "this guy is about to give me a fucking aneurysm, i need to calm down." And hung out with me for a few minutes. By the end of it, we had 4 supervisors over there trying to explain to this shit idiot that he had to PAY FOR HIS SHIT before he could get a refund, and he threatened to fight one of the managers (who is like 6'2" and fairly intimidating, which was hilarious because the dude was like 5'4")

And he still had to finish paying for his shit. A manager had to get the $10 and put it in the register because i was busy (at a different, non-locked register) with a customer, but god i wish i could have been the one to take that $10 and go "have a great evening."

 

Apparently it's "fucking bullshit" that we close early on Wednesday and are closed Thursday. Fuck you very much buddy.

 

Callout post for the head doc at the clinic who just made it so that i had to manually do a blood cell count on a COMPLETELY normal (as in, every single parameter was within norm range) BCC because the patient has the sort of insurance where you can grab extra money for that.
Despite the fact that the people who actually do the BCC see fucking zilch of that money.
Communism, WHEN?

 

i feel like this is the place to put that on saturday at my petco, a customer accidentally called fucking 911
goddamnit

 

... HOW

 

so, she had borrowed a store phone, and to dial out on the store phones you have to start with 9
you can see where this was going
i was the one who had to talk to the police, because there were ONLY THREE OF US WORKING

 

I am so sorry. You're a saint for dealing with that.