Does anyone else work in customer service/retail?
 

This is my fourth summer as a grocery store cashier. The business is family owned (by AMAZING people!), and my area is a place where half of the residents are broke and the other half wealthy, and the people who vacation here are usually from North Jersey/NYC and not always nice to locals, although it goes both ways.

I am still frequently shocked by the behavior of people.

Yesterday, a man bough cheese that wasn't on sale, and insisted that it was. My boss had to get him the correct cheese. This wouldn't have angered me too much, but then he drove away in a Maserati that probably cost more than my house!

Once, I didn't know the answer to some lady's question, and she proceeded to berate me as a cashier and tell me how bad I am at my job.

There's also the smaller rude things. Talking on your cell phone while checking out, leaving your cart inside when you leave (WHERE ON EARTH IS THAT OKAY?), deciding you don't want your butter and leaving it in the canned vegetable aisle, those things.

I could go on forever about the horrible behavior of some people. Although, sometimes I'm amazed at how nice people are. We've had wallets returned to us with nothing missing, people pick up the tab when the person in front of them was short a dollar or two, and people help strangers carry their groceries to their cars. When I was younger and someone yelled at me over something like ten cents, the man behind her gave her a quarter and told her to stop picking on children, which I found hilarious.

I guess in retail we see the best and the worst? Haha! Although I'm sure some of you have stories that could top mine.

I work in retail, I'm the sales person for a local charity. We're self-funded so we pay all our own overheads. We take in donated furniture and household items, and resell them to the public so that we can almost give furniture away to the needy.

But there's certain people who come into our place, and change the prices on things >_> Even the really small household items. Something that's got a £1 price on it, they will peel a 20p price off something else and try and get it for that instead : / So these people are basically stealing from a charity...some people just have no morals.

But a lot of my customers are lovely, a number of them come back over and over again. Even though a place selling furniture isn't somewhere that you need to visit on a weekly basis; they come in just for a look round to see if we've got anything new that catches their eye. These people have made a point of learning my name (because I always remember theirs) and they'll come over and have a chat and are all super nice people.

Like you say, you see the entire spectrum of human behaviour when you work in retail; some of it makes you want to punch people in the face, but some makes you very happy and can restore your faith in humans. For a little while at least :)

That guy has a Maserati and was complaining about some cheese that wasn't on sale... These people need to get a grip honestly... I don't have a job at the moment but if I do get one in retail ill be sure to post here.

Jellysundae, I can't believe people try to steal from a charity. Stealing from somewhere like Wal-mart is bad enough, but seriously?

Yep, sickening, isn't it. Whenever these guys come in now, we stalk them as they walk around, so they can't pick the price labels off anything [lol]

I work in retail, I can be pretty firm with the customers sometimes but most of the time I don't take things personally.
there was this man who INSISTED that we had this tent re-proofer on sale for £5, and he was certain it was the one we had on the shelf, I didn't think it was but I said I would check on my till.
(which is updated midnight - before the website which is like 3 or 4 am?)

Anyway, I checked it and it was still £7 and i said to him that our till is the one that gives us the correct answera nd he thought i did it wrong -.- it isn't hard to do you press the sales thingy button and scan the item and it gives me the product details wioth exactly how much it costs now and how much it has ever cost over the past year or so and whether theres any promotions on it.

I tried to explain this to the guy who insisted it was five pounds and can't i just sell it to him for a fiver.
which I said I couldn't do, it costs as much as my till says it costs. And £7 is an increadably good price anyway.

He went for the £19 tin of the stuff.

O___O *facepalm*

@ Jelly - My Aunt and cousin do that. It's absolutely disgusting. It's not like prices at the salvation army are expensive, 2$ for a pair of pants, but you want it for 1$? Go fuck yourself, there's people out there way worse off than you, and you want to do something like that?[illgetu]

But yeah... Working in customer service is teh sucks. Some drunken guy came into where I work, put his hand in our tip jar, took our money, then proceeded to tell us he doesn't have enough money to buy a slice of pizza. After he stole our money and used it to pay us, he gets his food while another woman got hers at the same time. What does he do? "Can I have your food?" [gonk] After we made him leave, he came back the NEXT DAY! and tried to steal MORE money from us.

On top of this, people call back CONSTANTLY, demanding that we made their food wrong, it's cold, and that they deserve free food. We tell them all the same thing; You eat it, we wont replace it. You wouldn't believe how many people try to scam free food out of pizza places... Some guy "called back" and said that "some employee" was rude to him, and told him that he couldn't get his order replaced. He order 2 orders of mozzarella sticks, and lived 5 minutes away... How they were cold? They weren't, in fact, he never called back the FIRST TIME. He bullshitted the owner, got me in trouble, and now I refuse to take his order at all.

I think working at McDonalds for nearly three years made me hate customer service type of jobs. When a new person was harassed I had to deal with it because the manager that was there was "too busy" to deal with it. Note I was not a manager or even a crew trainer and still had to put up with horrible customers. The area the store is in is a pretty bad area. We'd get drug addicts and people drunk off their butts in there all the time. We were drive thru only and no inside dining area, thankfully but there was a walk up window where people could order and eat outside if they wanted.

I think the worst person I had to deal with was when someone punched me. I had this happen twice while I was there. The one time, a lady ordered her food through drive thru and then changed it at the window after she didn't have enough money. So I changed it and repeated it back to her and she said it was fine. Then when she got her food she got mad at me because "stuff was missing" when she did not order the food that was missing to begin with. I gave her a receipt of what she was charged for and told her that we are not giving her food that she did not pay for. At this point the guy behind her was starting to get mad and started beeping. Her and her friend then got out of their car and started yelling at the guy behind them. It was 5.30 in the morning so I wasn't really in the mood to put up with people like that and I told her to move or I was going to call the police. She came to the window and punched me so I punched her back more out of reflex and ended up hitting her in the face. The manager that was there quickly shut the window and I walked away from the window for a bit because I was so pissed off.

The other time, a new person was working the walk up window and this lady was screaming at her so I stepped in and told her to calm down, she hit me then hit the side of the window and hurt her hand then tried to blame me. She was high on something and tried to return an empty fry box because the fries "made her son sick" when she didn't even have anyone there with her. I told her there was no refunds if she did not have the product, which is policy. She kept arguing with me over us using "burger grease" to cook the fries in when we use vegetable oil and no meat even goes in those vats. She left after I told her to have a nice day and closed the window. She was one of those cases that just made me shake my head at how ridiculous people are sometimes.

I don't mind retail. Granted I work in a tea store. I sell all sorts of tea, and tea wares. People rarely get mad or anything. and if they get cranky, I make them smell the pretty smelling teas ^.^ everyone wins. They're happy, and I don't get yelled at.

I would love working in a small store away from angry people. I want to eventually open my own store and great customer service is going to be a major point that I'm going to impress upon. There's too many places that you go into and the employees just don't give a darn about customers.

I want to open a flower shop someday so I need to get used to calming people down ^.^

I know exactly what you mean Mystic. I see it even with my co-workers -.-'

A flower shop would be nice! I don't know how anyone can go into a shop like that and be angry with all the plants around.

The worst experience I ever had in retail? Oh man...

I worked a seasonal job at my on campus college bookstore one year. They hired over 100 people for the beginning of the semester rush of textbook sales.

They didn't properly train us on anything...just said "here is a cash register...count your drawer and have at it."

So this one day it's a looong line of college students (probably over 100...I'm serious) waiting to check out. and I get this guy in a black hoodie and sunglasses and a friend who was with him.

I still remember how much exactly his books totalled because this tramautized me so much...$255.55. He gave me the 255 in bills and then goes, "Oh I have the change" and proceeds to spill a bunch of pennies into my hands. I put the pennies down right in front of me and turn back to grab the bills from where he left them and they were gone. I said to him, "Sir, where are the bills?" and he starts going CRAZY.

"YOU FUCKING BITCH! You're accusing me of STEALING! How the FUCK are you in college!? You're SO FUCKING STUPID"

I'm a really sensitive person...that didn't go over well for me and I started crying. My manager came over and goes, "Sir we can straighten this out" and he takes me drawer to the back so we can count it to see if the money was in there. Well, we counted it and sure enough it was 255 dollars short.

The other manager comes back and goes, "I had to let him leave. He was screaming and creating as scene" and the male manager went "are you kidding?! He DID steal the money" and she goes, "Shoot - I should have waited."

So he made off with 255 dollars worth of text books. After calling me all those horrible things. I had to file a police report. I was hysterical - it was the first time something like that had happened to me. Luckily they were really nice. Got me a drink from the starbucks that was in the bookstore while I filed the report. and then told me ,"Hey it's okay. This kind of thing happens ALL the time. Come here" and they brought me to a room with an ENTIRE WALL full of pictures of people who had done just the kind of thing this guy had done. It was a wall of people who weren't allowed back into the bookstore - if we saw them we had to report them.

It was a terrible experience.

Ewww. Customer Service...is my life. Blergh.

I've lost count of how many times people have shocked me, tried to use me, and/or call me names because they didn't get what they want. Luckily, it's all been phone based or internet based so I didn't have to actually look at them. I think this makes them feel less guilty for their behavior. I've had the crazy assed guy who has threatened to come to my office and kick my ass. I've also had my fair share of men trying to flirt on me. It was at its worst when I just came back from England and had an 'accent'. It quickly went away after that.

And to the person who mentioned getting punched at McDonald's - And here I was thinking my husband getting pelted by an angry woman with a shake was unbelievable!

I feel like all of the negative things that have happened to you have definitely happened to me at my job. I work in a small family owned pharmacy, that sells a lot of surgical equipment as well.
Let's see, I once had a customer argue with me over an item that was ten dollars. She DEMANDED that it was overpriced (for no reason at all), and that I only charge her $4. :/
Well, after arguing with me for ten minutes about the price (We're a pharmacy! Not a flee market!), she stormed out of the store and got into a brand new Mercedes. I was so pissed. xD
I once had a customer come in and ask a question about her oxygen tank, which we have never sold or had any dealings with, so obviously I didn't know the answer....she proceeded to stand at the counter and hold me up from helping other customers for ten minutes about how she couldn't believe I worked there and couldn't answer her question. >.<
My supervisor eventually told her to just leave though....

Plus, it really doesn't help that a lot of people (really, you'd be amazed) just don't understand how their insurance company works. I've literally gotten cursed out a number of times because customers think their insurance will cover the most random little things just because they're in a pharmacy, and I'm apparently the devil when I tell them it doesn't work that way.
Or they don't understand that a pharmacist bills your insurance, and THEY give us the copay, so when they think it's too high....oh no. They blame us, say we're the ridiculous ones...ect. I just want to scream at these people to fill somewhere else then. It's going to be the EXACT same price. [gonk]

I definitely have some sweetheart customers, but really my job the bad outweighs the good by a large majority. xD

....Doesn't help my boss is a major dick... [ninja]

I worked as a cashier for nine months, then I switched over to the Pharmacy. I'm still "technically" under the Cashier job code, for the Pharmacy, but I do a lot more than check people out at the register. (Obviously, since the Pharmacy isn't a checkout counter).

It does amaze me the attitude of customers. I think it's gotten worse, and better, in the pharmacy rather than as a cashier. The rude people are ruder (I had someone tell my coworker she deserved to have her head cut off. He tends to swear a lot at us), but the nice people are sweethearts. Since people tend to wait longer at the Pharmacy, it's easier to have conversations, which let us get to know our patients better.

I have had people do the sticker switch. A $100 knife set they tried to pawn off for $1, by switching the stickers on another item. Although, there is a woman who comes through the pharmacy. She'll have her cart of groceries/whatnot, and leave. Without paying. She's done it three times now. Our store policy requires catching them three times before they are forced out of the store forever, so now she's done.


I know the feeling! I've gotten yelled at several times for a high copay. They don't understand there is a deductible you have to meet sometimes, before the insurance company pays for things!

OMG I forgot about the deductibles. [gonk]
That's always the worst in the new year, is most people's deductibles start over and then they go crazy about how last month they didn't pay that much. >.<
I really hate working in a pharmacy sometimes. xD

Hmm - more bad memories:
I've spent the last year working at a KFC/Taco Bell/Pizza Hut Express 3-in-1 while looking for a teaching job. I've worked at a Taco Bell before when I was a freshman in college...I actually enjoyed that! Great coworkers, great customers, I really enjoyed it so I thought to myself, this couldn't be too bad. And boy was I wrong. The place it's located is in a city full of retired old people and rich middle aged people with rich children.

The old people feel entitled to everything and the rich young people treat you like dirt. It's crazy.

One day I was on drive through and this lady came through and ordered some KFC special we had going on and paid with her credit card at the window. Well, what I was taught and what I've always done until then was I give them the copy they have to sign first with a pen...then trade it with their card and their receipt. I never had a problem with that until now.

I give her the copy she has to sign with the pen and ask her to sign it and she goes, "WHERE IS MY CARD!?" and I hold it up in my hand and say, "It's right here ma'am" and she goes "GIVE IT BACK" and I said, "I will when you sign your copy" and she goes, "Well I'm not signing ANYTHING until you give it back! How do I know you aren't going to STEAL IT!?" and I go, "Ma'am, I do this with every customer who comes through here" and she goes, "What's with you attitude problem!?" and I went, "What attitude?!" Until then I had been very nice to her. and she goes, "If you are SO miserable working in fast food MAYBE you should go an actually LOOK for another job" and so I said, "Well I thank you for your opinion" and shut the window in her face. When I had to give her her food I handed it out the window and said, "Here you go! I hope you have a VERY good day!" and flashed a big smile at her. She then proceeded to RIP the bag from my hands as she sped off almost bringing me out the window with her.

And you know what's funny? A few orders later I had some lady come through and I just gave her her copy of the receipt, the one she had to sign, her card, and a pen at the same time and she goes to me, "You know, you shouldn't give me my card back until i sign. I could refuse to sign it" and I went, "Funny story" and I told her about the lady earlier. She tells me, "Don't let old bitches bring you down. You do your job and you do it well!" and I just had to laugh :P

---Another time I was on front counter and this older man comes in....probably in his later 60s. and I ask, "Hi how are you?" like I do for everyone and he immediately puts his hand into a gun shape and holds it right in front of my face and says, "Give me all your money" and I just looked at him and blinked and didn't say anything. So he repeats himself. So I said, "Sir, kindly remove your hand from my face please" and he goes, "What you can't take a joke?" and I say, "Not one like that, no." So he orders like 40 dollars worth of food but when I tell him the total he isn't paying attention. He already has his card out and ready for me to take. So I go to try to take it from his hand and he yanks it back and goes, "What you don't want this?" and he holds it out for me again and I go to take it and he yanks it back again and he goes "Come, try to reach for it" and I say, "Sir please stop." So he grumbles and goes, "What was the total again?" and I repeated it and he starting bitching about how it's too much and wants to change things. So I go to find my manager who can change the order and I tell him, "Can you just finish with this guy? He's pissing me off" and so he goes up there and I just go on KFC to help make the food. And my manager comes back and tells me the ENTIRE time he was up there he was bitching about how the stupid little redhead couldn't take any jokes and how she needs to lighten up because he could have come in with a REAL gun and then it wouldn't have been funny!!! D: I was PISSED>

Don't forget if they have insurance with a donut-hole. xD

@Maria-Minamino-Our machines are old and freeze very often before debits go through, so I keep peoples cards until the machine spits out the receipt. I always keep them in very plain view and such, but I definitely have been freaked out on a few times for "trying to steal their card". Of course, when I give it back and then have to ask for it again because the machine froze, they look at me like I'm stupid.

I'm sorry for those of you working in pharmacies and having to deal with insurance. I've been sick a lot this year, and just as a customer in pharmacies I've seen some pretty atrocious behavior.

It's probably just me that doesn't see the problem with the man complaining about the cheese. If it was on the shelf then it's not his fault. Just because he can afford a nice car doesn't mean that he doesn't need to eat just like everyone else. It's not like he was trying to steal anything.

At least people still pay for the items in your shop. There's a charity shop in my town that goes into funding activities for the towns (like street parties, events, etc.) and any items they don't sell get donated to other charities. Most people in that shop steal the little things. [roll]

I also know someone who stole a charity box for breast cancer care and was proud of the fact that she was £60 richer. >.>

Some people really have no morals.

---

I used to work in a clothes shop. I think I've repressed most of the memories they were that horrific. I can still remember some woman shouting at me because an item that she wanted wasn't in stock. As if it was somehow my fault.

I agree. It's possible he was able to afford the nice car because of his frugality.

I worked at McDonalds for a few.years before I worked in retail, and I agree with the statement that we see the full spectrum of people. Probably because every type of person eats McDonalds at one point, and also every type of person likes things. I hate it when people just leave stuff on the ground or on the wrong shelf, but I also admit that I would get angry when someone would try to put something back, but get it wrong, causing customer confusion later. The only alternative to that though is asking customers to hand it to a "customer specialist" (thats what we call those people who try to sell you things), but that wastes their time (albeit their time isn't that valuable in the first place, but hey).