<p>My parents own a pretty well-known pharmacy and I cashier there during the summers.
So this one lady comes in to buy soap and she complains for a whole 2O FRICKIN’ MINUTES about the price of the soap and she couldn’t figure out why the price went up (ever heard of inflation lady).
So she’s running on and on about how the owner of the shop is a thief and the only way she was able to afford buying the new building is because she steals from her customers. And then she insists that we tell her how much we get paid.
Well when she finally winded down I said with the biggest smile on my face "Thank you for shopping at [my name] Plaza, I’m [my name] and I’ll be sure to pass along your grievances to my mother.
She looked like she had been hit over the head with a club and she couldn’t get out of the store fast enough lol.</p>
<p>I work at a popular children’s toy store chain (due to a strange, overbearing blogging policy, I cannot say which one, but the mascot happens to be a giraffe) and it is truly sad to admit that the kids aren’t the worst customers we get. Some parents are just annoying!</p>
<p>We have this regular who is very concerned about coupons. Once, she saw that we had a “buy 1 get 1” deal going, and then she found a free coupon for the same item online, and thought she could get both of them for free.</p>
<p>Also, I’d like to know what made my place of work such a popular place for the most immature teenagers to hang around in. What 15 year old honestly has their mother drive them to a toy store?</p>
<p>Hahaha, so many customers deserve to be set aflame. I get a lot of good customers where I work, but the bad ones stick out like a sore thumb.</p>
<p>I’ve worked at Claire’s for almost 2 years and a ton of these hit home for me haha but here’s my list:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>The earrings are buy two get one free. No, that does not include necklaces, hair accessories, or rings. Earrings.</p></li>
<li><p>If you ar under 18, you need a parent with you to get your ears pierced, not your older sister, best friend, etc.</p></li>
<li><p>No, we do not pierce bellybuttons</p></li>
<li><p>I once had a lady rudely say “well none of the people who work here could be a doctor anyway”. I’m pre-med.</p></li>
<li><p>I also have had girls bring up a pack of 9 earring sets and ask how much it would cost to get just one pair from the pack. It’s in a pack for a reason.</p></li>
<li><p>“How much is this?” <em>flipping it over and reading the price tag</em> “$X.XX”</p></li>
<li><p>No we cannot pierce your ears with your own earrings. That would hurt.</p></li>
<li><p>No, your daughter cannot wear a pair of platform sandals around for a day through the mud, break the strap, and then have you return them.</p></li>
<li><p>The door is locked because we’re closed. Really.</p></li>
<li><p>When people walk in right when we’re closing, I tell them that we’re closed, and they say “oh it’s okay, I just want to look around, not buy anything.” Gee, that’s really persuasive</p></li>
<li><p>I am not your babysitter, I have a store to run. Please do not drop off your 10 year olds for 2 hours.</p></li>
<li><p>No, my name is not Claire.</p></li>
<li><p>I hate when somebody comes in for a piercing and asks if I’ve done this before or if I’m trained. No, they just handed me a piercing gun and said have at it, so which part of the earring goes where?</p></li>
<li><p>When I have to wait for a sobbing girl to calm down enough to get her ears pierced while meanwhile I have 10 people in line, but the mom is insisting that she’s going to calm down any second now.</p></li>
<li><p>When I see you dropping the merchandise on the floor, kicking it does not make it invisible, just broken.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I have tons more but this is already a novel haha</p>
<p>This thread makes me glad that I’m a manager and not a regular employee :D</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, you may as well just say Toys 'R Us at this point. It’s not like you really left much to the imagination.</p>
<p>Hey, well I didn’t say it. (:</p>
<p>But you wanted to. Yea, that’s right. I know you did.</p>
<p>You wouldn’t have been able to sleep until someone properly deduced where you’re employed at.</p>
<p>We also get this lady who we have deemed “the diaper lady” because she fills a cart full of diapers and puts it by the door so that she can sneak out with them without paying (she’ll buy something else, something small like candy). Problem is, she’s a dumb repeat offender.</p>
<p>Teenagers are immature…no one should be allowed to shout such vulgar obscenities in a toy store. Let alone, what is there for you to do in a toy store? We have walkie talkies, we just let everyone know you’re in there and tell all the employees to watch you. You’ll get annoyed eventually and leave, that’s the point.</p>
<p>Parents who let their kids run their grabby little hands down every aisle. It’s annoying because we’re the ones who have to make the whole store look nice at night. And, I’m six feet tall…I don’t enjoy straightening the bottom shelf.</p>
<p>We also have an awful return policy. I know that. (90 days, WITH A RECEIPT.) You must have your receipt. We do not return, exchange or even care to take back anything that has been with you longer than 90 days, doesn’t come back with a receipt, or something that your child has used. No. I don’t want a floatie that has already been blown up and punctured.</p>
<p>Best story I’ve got is when a kid tried to return a lemonade that had expired. I wasn’t on register when he bought it, but he and his sister (they were about 8 or 9) came in BY THEMSELVES to exchange it. Problem is, receipt was with lazyass mom. I honestly am not allowed to do anything, ANYTHING, unless there is a receipt, which sounds awful, I know, because of the expired lemonade.
Eventually their mom came in and yelled at me (and I quote) “MAYBE YOU SHOULD POP A FEW OUT YOURSELF BEFORE YOU MAKE A CHILD DRINK EXPIRED LEMONADE!”</p>
<p>I’m eighteen. Should I really be having kids? I didn’t think so. Not to mention that the lemonade expired like 3 days prior. It would have been fine…but mom’s these days are so uptight.</p>
<p>Excuse me if I’m from the ancient era of THE 1990’s when we didn’t NEED to sanitize our shopping cart beforehand.</p>
<p>This isn’t retail, but it’s related. I work as a lifeguard. I get the greatest (worst?) people coming up to me at the pool to say and do some truly stupid things.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>“If I pretend to drown, will you give me mouth to mouth?” At which point I tell them that CPR involves usually applying enough pressure to fracture their ribs. Sometimes the people asking this are really skeezy old men who do the eyebrow wiggle while they ask. And they’re not joking.</p></li>
<li><p>“My kid can’t swim. Just watch her, I’m going off to have a drink in the park.” I am a trained professional, not a babysitting service. Watching little Timmy or Cheryl for you while you go do whatever is technically against pool rules. Parents are supposed to supervise. All the near-drowning incidents I’ve had were because of this.</p></li>
<li><p>PDA. Seriously. If you’re going to go to the pool to make out and dry (wet?) hump with your boyfriend or girlfriend, please don’t. The worst case of this was this week when it was just one couple groping each other at one end of the pool, and me sitting in my lifeguard chair at the other. There was no one else. I had to stare at them the whole time. Awkward.</p></li>
<li><p>“There’s too much chlorine in the pool. Fix it.” I am not Fabio the pool boy. I do not control the pool Ph range.</p></li>
<li><p>“Yo lifeguard, want a beer?” I’m nineteen and I’m in the business of saving your children’s lives. Do not offer me alcohol on the job.</p></li>
<li><p>“Will you rub lotion on my back?” NO, FOREIGN OLD MAN, I WILL NOT.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>PlattsburghLoser</p>
<p>I used to work at Disney World too!!!</p>
<p>These are not necessarily stupid questions, but ones I was asked every day.</p>
<p>Or rather, every 15 minutes!</p>
<p>1.) Where is Space Mountain?</p>
<p>2.) How do you get on that thing up there? (*points to astro orbiter that is so mysteriously hanging up in the sky!)</p>
<p>3.) Wow, you have to work this late at night? How do you feel about that?
(guests seem to forget that if the park stays open until 3 am people still have to be there to work the park!)</p>
<p>And I had the most adorable questions from little kids!</p>
<p>Honestly I didn’t get that many stupid questions, and it was kind of understandable anyway because a lot of people have never been to the park before. Or it was people who were just kind of forced to go on this family vacation and didn’t know the first thing about Disney World.</p>
<p>Oh, and I was always surprised by the number of people who asked me if Tomorrowland was Fantasyland. But I guess they just don’t really know a lot about the park…</p>
<p>And another I just remembered! The one thing that did get on my nerves is you would not believe the amount of people (like almost every single person) who would ask me what the individual price of a million different items were. Or even just one. The problem? The price is right there on the back of the item! It’s clearly written. It’s not written in some secret invisible ink only I can see. This just got a little annoying when I had a hundred people asking me this everyday, and especially on super busy days with a ton of people around. </p>
<p>As for my non-Disney retail experiences? I can write a book. Let’s just say that retail pretty much ruined Christmas for me. Maybe I’ll post about it later, but it just brings up too many bad memories! Is there a therapist on stand-by for this thread??</p>
<p>Okay, so the garage for my supermarket has an entrance to my supermarket. This entrance is clearly delineated as the entrance, and it has sliding doors. When you approach these doors, they slide open and there’s a BIG sign right in front of you with an arrow pointing left saying something like “Store this way, carts & baskets available upstairs.”</p>
<p>I have lost count of how many people turn right, grab a cart, realize the moving walkway next to them is going down, and then walk in the direction they came only to realize you can’t take the god damn cart up the escalator. Usually they take the cart back to the holding area but occasionally they just leave it there, blocking foot traffic. Idiots.</p>
<p>Hahahah I love how my thread from last summer has resurfaced :D</p>
<p>These stories are so funny. I’m working as a lifeguard this summer, CompletelyKate, and it’s a good job so I don’t have much to complain about but a lot of the stuff you said is true - I despise the moms who leave their 3 year old who can’t swim alone at the pool, then go sip margaritas at the cafe for an hour and a half.</p>
<p>Okay, so for the first year of my college experience I worked in a department store. Some memorable experiences:</p>
<ul>
<li>there was this lady who was in our store a good few hours before closing. She ended up staying an hour after closing. Five minutes? No big deal. Fifteen minutes? A little annoying, but I’m not going to hold a grudge over it (usually). Thirty minutes? Yeah, that’s not cool. An hour? That’s just strange and wrong. Even more wrong was how she treated us. Now note that we’re not going to tell her she has to get out and we’re not going to tell her to her face how annoying she’s been these past few hours. </li>
</ul>
<p>It wasn’t just as simple as her staying an hour after closing. No. From what I remember, about 30 minutes or so after closing she finally comes up to the register with 3 different baskets full of clothes. The catch? She hadn’t actually decided which ones she wanted to buy yet! So I had to sort these clothes into different piles and hold each one up to ask if it was one she wanted to keep. </p>
<p>Finally I start ringing up her purchase. Keep in mind we still haven’t been rude to her. In fact, we’ve been perfectly nice and accepting of her still being in the store! If it wasn’t for how she acted, she would have simply been that weird little lady who stayed in the store for an extra hour. </p>
<p>But no, she herself started being rude. She started cussing out our manager and yelling at him. She even demanded to have our corporate phone number. After all we had done to help her and after we were actually really nice to her considering she was staying an hour after closing! We never did anything that would deserve that kind of treatment!</p>
<ul>
<li><p>there were a good number of customers who tried to take advantage of me because I was just a lonely little sales associate who had no real power in the world. Like these two women who came up to me with a shirt and demanded that the price was $7. I had been ringing up these shirts all day, so of course I know that’s not true. But they insisted that the price scanner told them it was $7 dollars, and they demanded to speak to the manager and blah blah blah. I don’t remember what ended up happening, but I know that afterward I went back to the price scanner in question, scanned that same shirt and sure enough, it rang up the price I told them it was!</p></li>
<li><p>people don’t read coupons. Our coupons sucked, but they did clearly state that they didn’t work on clearance. Plus who was going to give you 50% off of clearance prices that were already under $10 anyway?!</p></li>
<li><p>in another store I worked at, a lady once spent three hours trying on clothes. And that was just after I got there- apparently she had already been in there a long time before! She was trying on so many clothes that we couldn’t keep up with putting them back. It was the night of a HUGE sale, and the only people closing were me, another person, and a manager. Let’s just say it was hell to put everything back, and we ended up getting in trouble for the store not being in perfect shape. Not cool lady, not cool!</p></li>
<li><p>once this woman insisted on coming into our store right at closing. She had a return. No big deal, right? It turns out this return was from something she bought a year ago. There were no tags and no receipt. She ended up throwing a fit, and I don’t know if she ever got her way. But 15 minutes after closing I see her walk back up to the door, which of course had been closed and secured so no other crazy people can come in. She just stops and stares at it, and has this most hilarious expression on her face! It was priceless. </p></li>
<li><p>we had a regular that would go around to every department and buy a new set of items. Not weird at all. But then she would go to the next department and return everything she just bought! And she always paid in cash. If she didn’t have enough cash, she would return something else. Sometimes she would have to go return something at another store so she would have enough money. Note that she did this every single week!</p></li>
<li><p>there was one woman who got upset because she said a certain shirt she bought her son last year was not the same price this year. She said that it looked just like that shirt, but it turns out it was from a completely different brand! One we had never sold be she insisted we did. I’m not even sure if she was wanting to buy the shirt, I think she was just trying to prove her own stupid point. She continued to go to each and every department to try to get them to change the price (the actual price was considerably different than what she said it supposedly was last year). Of course no one would do it, and she kept insisting on calling the manager. The hilarious thing was that there was only one manager working that night so it was always the same one who was called! The look on the lady’s face was hilarious when she’d realize it was the same manager walking up each time!</p></li>
<li><p>when I worked at the mall I got so sick of men complaining that we didn’t have any nice, comfortable, big couches for them to sit on! We were a tiny mall store, there was hardly room to stick in extra folding chairs! The funny thing was that there were multiple couches and chairs right outside our store inside the mall!</p></li>
<li><p>the look on people’s faces when they demanded and insisted that coupons or signs said one thing, and then I would point out word-from-word what they said and it “turns out” that I’m right was priceless!</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Well, these are really funny and also sad. I worked retail (meat counter of the A & P) and waitressed when in college. Nothing seems to have changed.</p>
<p>I hope your experiences will help you to be the “nice ones” when you are going to restaurants, fast food joints, amusement parks, etc etc. for the rets of your lives! And the big tippers (I tip waitresses 20% minimum unless they really were awful).</p>
<p>^ definitely! I always give good tips because I know how much that can mean (unless they were just absolutely terrible, which has only happened once). I also try to be as understanding as possible about any issues that might come up, or long lines, etc.</p>
<p>People are just plain stupid. However, they do not realize this and thats the problem. </p>
<p>My parents have a bakery and I cashier there during holidays and vacations. Its always funny when people say “Well I know the owner…” or “I’ll talk to your manager…” One, you obviously don’t know the owner, and even if you did he would think you’re an idiot. Two, go ahead and talk to the manager, pretty sure hes not going to fire his daughter who has worked their for five years and maintains a very pleasant attitude when talking to bafoons.</p>
<p>Also, many customers are quite immature. On Christmas Eve its jam packed, so we have two lines and are constantly making bread which goes very quickly. I’ve had people threaten me because my customer was getting the last loaf. People cut lines and almost brawl with each other. I’m like dude… its a friggen’ loaf of bread. Of course there are the nice ones, who even tip though it seems that they probably don’t have much money.</p>
<p>lol, I think everyone ought to at least work one summer in retail. Just to see the utter stupidity the human race is capable of.</p>
<p>ITA. People are <em>idiots</em> sometimes and I feel like you can’t truly get a grasp of that until you have worked in retail. I work in a pet store and we get some true morons…just the other day, a woman walked in with a live goldfish in a bag that she had bought the other day. She said that she had bought a goldfish two weeks ago, and then forgot to acclimate it to the water, and it died. We kindly replaced the goldfish, she forgot to acclimate it (again), and it died. She then bought a third one, had it for three days, and decided she didn’t want it…ugh.</p>
<p>Also, there was this one guy who thought it was a good idea for his kid to sit in the guinea pig cage. No, I am not kidding you. We have an openfaced glass enclosure about 4’x4’x4’ and some guy thought it would be a good idea to put his CHILD in there. Despite the 500000 signs saying that you can’t touch an aniumal without an employee. <em>facepalm</em></p>
<p>Perfect example today:
girl: these sunglasses have like SPF to protect your eyes
me: you mean uv protection
girl: ya, suv protection
I almost died laughing</p>