EVERYONE who has ever worked in retail can tell you that the general public can often be either snotty-nosed, assumptious bastards, or just plain dumber than dumb.
Of course, this is just the minority, but it sure as hell annoys you enough to wreck your day or sometimes even your self-esteem. Either that, or on occasion they'll make you laugh at the stupidity of it all.
So, having worked in retail since 2006, I have a lot of stories to tell...
Customer comes in and asks if we have / where [x product] is. Let's say the envelopes. I tell them they're in the first aisle, and the first things you come to on the right. They proceed to stride purposefully half way down the aisle, THEN start looking, see only notepads/sketchbooks/etc, and go, 'Uhhhhhh... I don't see thummm...'
This is annoying for two reasons. Firstly, I can understand it happening occasionally. I'm pretty bad myself when it comes to spotting things, I have distinct memories of moving into a new maths classroom and I needed a protractor or something, and the teacher told me they were in the corner and it took me about two hours to find them. But this happens ALL THE TIME. In fact, as I write this, about ten minutes ago someone asked me for kitchen foil, I directed him to them, and he got pissed off because all he could see was cling film. Guess what's RIGHT NEXT to the cling film?
The other reason it's annoying is they have specifically ASKED you for "directions" and then completely ignored what you've said. Why bother bloody asking then?
"Would you like a bag?"
*Customer doesn't hear*
..."Sorry, would you like a bag?"
*Customer STILL doesn't hear*
*Customer finally looks up* "Uhh, can I have a BAG? You don't honestly think I'm going to carry all THIS down the road, do you?!"
*Well you're not having one now, you old bag!*
Okay, apart from the rudeness of it all, SO many people carry the reuseable bags now, which is half the reason I always ask as opposed to assuming they do want one.
We sell lighters and roll-up accessories, and ANYONE who works somewhere that sells alcohol / smoking products / etc, will have encountered The Angry Underage Smoker. Luckily, because we're not actually an off-licence, we're generally not the kids' first choice and a lot of them don't even know we do them. However, we still get the obligatory idiots who will get arsey just because we refuse to serve them. Oh sorry, I'll just risk getting fined £2,500 for someone I've never met, shall I? I know, how selfish of me.
Do people
realise that coins ARE legal tender in the UK? The other day, within twenty minutes of the shop opening, we were almost out of £1 coins (we're a fucking "pound shop"!!) and had £170 of £10 and £20 notes in the till. Yesterday, my first sale was a 39p diary paid for with a £20 note. Not. Even. Kidding.
On a similar note, someone bought a 20p drink the other day and handed me their debit card. Uhh, no. We're not Tesco. Considering we would get charged more than that for the transaction...!
Onto a slightly more personal one, we've had a couple of people who have come in and said our card selection is shit. I'm not being funny, but I prefer our cards over a lot of the ones you'll find in WHSmith's or any stationer / card shop. The difference being you'll go in there and spend £2 per card, and here you'll spend 79p max. Unless you want a gorgeous, handmade one for 99p or £1.29. I know, rip off, right? :P I also spend a lot of time making sure I get the best cards for the price we get them at, so it's offensive when someone says my selection is crap!
Luckily for those people, they've never actually said it while I'm around, otherwise I may be in jail right now. :P Oh yeah, the cards are my special section, by the way. :P
People who think they're so much more important than everyone else. An old lady came in one day, and a bunch of kids were at the counter, getting money out to pay for sweets. The old crow barges through because she's OBVIOUSLY the queen of the whole damn world, insists that she'll only take a second, and proceeds to take all of five minutes rummaging through her purse for some money.
Another story along the same vein is probably one of my most memorable, and my old boss and I still laugh about it. A woman enquired about some plastic boxes outside, the boss went out to help her, and when they came back in, I was in the middle of serving someone, which ended up taking a little while. Eventually, the woman comes up to the counter and I charge her for the box, she looks at me in disgust and says, 'you shouldn't have kept me waiting for so long, and besides!! I am NOT paying that much for a box!' She then proceeded to storm outside, THROW the box against the shop window and stride down the road in anger. There was actually a stunned silence in the whole shop for a moment, there was a huge queue and no one was quite sure if they should laugh. :P
People who expect you to be their personal shopper. No offence, but I have more important things to be doing than helping you decide EVERY single product ever. One woman comes in regularly for birthday cards and will expect me to spend all of ten minutes helping her choose one, which is all very well but I can't see the till properly from the card section! She'll then pick up every single card and ask if this would be suitable for a 42-year-old man or a boy turning 5. Honestly, can you not judge for yourself? EVER? And then, when I insist that a teddy bear with a bunch of flowers is great for a 6-year-old girl, she'll ask every customer in the shop what THEY think. Why are you even asking me if you don't trust my opinion?!
*checks a £20 note to make sure it's real*
"Fresh off the printer, made it myself this morning."
HAAAAHAHAHAAHA! Oh, you're hilarious! It was alright the first time, started to get boring the next few times, and now 4,350,459,350 times later, please just stop! It's always men that do it, as well. :P
A young couple came in once and enquired about the plastic boxes, I gave them prices and heard the girl go, 'ugh, they're much cheaper at Trading4U.' I wish I'd been there when they got to the till down there and discovered they're £1 more expensive (especially as they wanted two!).
Thieves. Enough said, really.
What's almost even more annoying is people who open a pack, steal one and leave the rest of the pack! Because OBVIOUSLY £1 is too expensive for three nail clippers.
Oh, and the other famous trick. Taking a price label off something! (Our policy is it's £1 unless marked) The funny thing is, they always, ALWAYS draw attention to it by putting it on the counter and making a point of, "it says it's a pound unless marked so it must be a pound." Yeah, it was marked until you took the label off!
A girl came in one day and swaggered around the shop with her pink trackie bottoms, massive dangling earrings and chewing gum. Then she opened her mouth to prove that yes, she really is that ultimate chav. 'Got any battwayssssss?' 'Sure, what size are you after?' 'Umm... 'ang awwwn...' ...she then took a battery out of her BRA. 'Dis wuuunnn.' Amazing. Just... words fail me.
People who come in and ask if we sell lighters, before looking an inch above my head to see three entire shelves of them. (not annoying, mind, just quite funny!)
People who don't want to spend £1.50 on four padded envelopes, but will happily go to the Post Office, queue up for an hour and spend £1 on one.
Everything we sell outside is stored in one of the aisles at night, and the first thing I do in the morning is put it all outside as it's obviously in the way. Occasionally, the first person to come into the shop is someone who not only wants craft or stationery products, but also wants to deliberate for HALF AN HOUR over what they want. And they'll have a pushchair which takes up half the aisle. Which meeeeans that I can't take anything outside. And then they act pissed off because they can't get the rest of the way down the aisle. AND YOU WONDER WHY.
People who bring lots of things up to the counter, wait for me to ring it all up in the till, and then they suddenly just walk away to browse for another ten minutes. WHY?!
The melodramatics who act like they're going to die if there's one box in an aisle. We had one woman come in once and we'd just had a delivery so there were a few boxes around that we were sorting through. None of them were actually in the way, but this woman comes up to the counter and starts raging about how she just almost broke her leg and might sue us. I'm sorry, but if you managed to trip over THAT, you're obviously a complete retard and shouldn't be allowed out in public. Needless to say, she didn't sue lol.
People who can't control their frigging prams. You should have to pass a driving test for those things! I swear, some of them just deliberately crash into EVERYTHING.
People who buy lots of things and come back later to ask for a receipt. I don't know if any other tills are as sophisticated as that, but ours certainly isn't! So I have to ring everything through again, print the receipt and then refund everything again. Argh! It's forgiveable as I'm just as forgetful, it's just annoying. :P
Someone came in once, I think it was for gaffer tape, which we sell at £3.99. He complained that you can get it for £1 in Croydon. a) Seeing as it's £2 + VAT wholesale price, I doubt it, unless it's a much smaller roll or just crap quality, and b) I'm pretty sure it costs more than £3 to GET to Croydon, but okay.
A woman came in to buy plastic nail brushes and said she much preferred the ones we had in before. So I made the effort to get them back in, she came back in and complained that there were no orange ones like before. She then MADE me phone my supplier in front of her and wanted me to ask them if they could go through every box to have an orange one. I'm not even joking. Who actually cares what colour their nail brush is!!!! Plus, the supplier is hardly going to go through 1000+ boxes just so I can make a 50p sale, you stupid bat!
This one's more just sod's law, but every time, EVERY TIME, I come in quickly on a day off, someone is guaranteed to ask for something that we have in stock but have sold out of on the shelf. This leads to me spending ten minutes turning the stock room upside down looking for it, resulting in ANGRY CLAZZ, all I wanted to do was empty the safe to do the banking or grab some toilet roll quickly, etc! I now refuse to come in on my day off unless it's absolutely necessary.
People who assume all the boxes outside are £1 and then get angry when they're not. Yes, because one measuring 20cm long is going to be the same price as one measuring 75cm long and four times as deep.
'Please' and 'thank you' are always appreciated.
Probably the one incident that has made me the most angry I've EVER been didn't even involve a customer. A middle-aged couple walked past the shop with their dog and stopped outside. I glanced out and actually thought I saw the dog cock its leg on one of the boxes. No, I thought, no one in their right mind would ACTUALLY let their dog do that. Five minutes later, I went outside and one of the boxes was COVERED in piss. This is a true story. Not only that, but it had dripped down into every. single. box. in that pile. It was pretty much the most disgusting thing ever, and I literally stood outside for half an hour shaking with rage, waiting for them to come back so I could punch their fucking lights out. I also reported them to the police for vandalism. I'm actually shaking with anger just writing about it. Fucking pigs, the least they could have done is let us know it had happened and apologise, or even - EVEN - cleaned it up for us. Oh no, too much to ask when the darling dog can do no fucking wrong.
Okay, this brings me on to a whole new rant. Parents whose darling little brats can do no wrong! I can think of two examples straight off. One woman used to go around with her pushchair, conveniently ignoring the fact that darling child was ripping almost everything off the pegs. I actually asked her to pick things up once because there was a pile of about ten things all over the place in a complete mess.
The second one is similar, a grandmother came in with a little girl, who kept picking up toys and begging granny for them. Granny said no to each one, and for the next two hours, I found roughly thirty (no, I'm not exaggerating) toys in the tool section, cleaning section, food section, stationery section... what on earth happened to the idea of putting things back where they came from?!
Actually, I did read a story somewhere, of a little girl grabbing a sweet, being told she can't have it, she goes to put it back, and the chavvy mother actually said, 'No! Just leave it there, it's THEIR job to put it back.' Wow, what a great example you are to your children. I'm starting to see why this world's going to shit.
This reminds me of supermarkets where people pick up frozen meals, put them on a random shelf, and by the time they're found, the food is ruined. What a waste of food and money. In fact, I've read some horror stories to do with supermarkets, it's absolutely ridiculous what some people have done. Luckily, I've never worked in one. :P
And again, on a similar note, I can just about forgive people for picking something up and putting it on a random shelf because they don't want to go around the whole shop looking for where it came from. But it's worse with things that are hanging up, when they put it back on the peg NEXT to where it goes... can you honestly not see it's RIGHT THERE?!?!? And because it's hanging up, it hides everything underneath it, which means we lose sales. So thanks for that.
OH AND! People who decide they don't want an item, walk round to a random aisle JUST to put said item on a shelf... where it doesn't even go! Why didn't you just give it to me to put back?!
Someone once tried to return a plastic box that was completely smashed up, claiming he'd bought it a few weeks ago. For one thing, it's not like it was smashed up when you bought it. And for another thing, we hadn't dealt with that particular supplier for A YEAR AND A HALF. So "a few weeks ago" was pushing it, mate.
People who are on the phone when they bring items up to the till. At least say, 'hang on a minute, I'm just being served in a shop'. But if you just continue to rabbit on, it's rude and it makes me feel awkward about asking politely if you'd like a bag.
People who grab something from the window display, usually knocking the rest of the display over in the process. This bugs the HELL out of me. Not only should it be obvious that if we're promoting it, then it means we sell it somewhere in the shop, but it also takes me a long time to get a display looking right, and especially get everything to balance.
"Can I get discount for bulk?" "Sure, depending on how many you buy, of course." I am not even joking, he went outside, picked up two (two!! As if that's bulk!) boxes and expected a discount!
"Oh, I don't have any money so can I have this box for free?" - someone ACTUALLY said this the other day, apparently.
All of that said, the majority of our customers are brilliant. Honestly.
However, it all comes down to this:
The phrase ‘The Customer is Always Right’ is the single worst philosophy that has ever been adopted by American culture. It gave an entire generation of people the green light to be as impolite, unreasonable, and demanding as their little hearts desired because they were always going to be considered right. It destroyed the entire concept of courtesy and rendered manners obsolete. People began to treat their peers in the service industry like incompetent morons, lacking in feelings or human dignity, who deserved to be browbeaten and abused for no other reason than they had the audacity to run out of a particular brand of coffee. Furthermore, instead of suffering negative repercussions for their appallingly disrespectful behavior, they are awarded with free coupons and plenty of ass kissing. In reality, they should be shunned and humiliated for behaving like such self absorbed little children.
I think this is equally true for British culture.
(quote source: Violent Acres)