[Image Description: Background is several triangles in a circle like a pie alternating from true red, scarlet and black. A robin is sitting on his perch looking to the right.
Top Text: “(Perfectly able) Customers who seem incapable of shopping”
Bottom Text: “without you looking for everything for them.”]
Long story time (sorry I’m still a little angry about this), but before I start let me say this:
I have no problem if a customer is in need of extra assistance due to any sort of issue they have, like if it’s hard to bend over, or their eyesight isn’t the greatest, whatever. That is not a problem to me at all, we all need extra help some times and that’s what we Robins are there for. What I DO have an issue with is when someone treats you like you’re their personal shopper when they are PERFECTLY CAPABLE of finding items themselves; they just want someone to boss around and do their shopping for them.
Yesterday, at the department store I work at, I had this …gentleman…who wanted help finding jeans that he could use a coupon on. Well we’re having this big sale so all of our affordable (read: not $90) jeans were on this special sale which is excluded from the coupon. BUT the jeans are literally $20, so not expensive AT ALL. So I explained all this to this gentleman, telling him about the special sale and the price of the jeans, yada yada. Then I take him over to some of the jeans, because even though he knew exactly where they were (another associate had just told him and he had even gone to look) he wanted me to lead him there. Fine, whatever.
Then he tells me what size he is looking for. So I start looking. And then I realize this guy is just standing there, watching me look for jeans for him. Well, ok. So I find him the size he *thinks* he is and he goes off to the fitting room. Meanwhile, I go to work on something down the aisle, and I just have a feeling I’m going to be this guy’s personal Robin during his time in our store. Lo and behold, he comes out of the fitting room, goes to the jean section, and, when I’m not there, instead of actually looking for jeans himself HE WALKS AROUND THE WHOLE DEPARTMENT LOOKING FOR ME SO I COULD LOOK FOR HIM.
I spent 20 minutes alone on this guy. Luckily the store was not busy but I do NOT work on commission, and the whole time he was telling me how “tricky” I was because of the way the coupon works and then asking me questions that could easily be answered if he just actually looked (such as, “how many pairs of socks are in this package?”…it says 6 pairs right on the front…). Just for the record, he did not have eyesight issues. In smaller letters on the front, the socks read “athletic” and he had no problem reading that.
Like, come on. If you really need the help, fine. But you are a grown man, I don’t understand why you need hand holding. You’ve been doing your own clothes shopping for at least 40 years now just fine.
Plus, when he was finally ready to go, he stood at a different register than I was at and “YOU HOOOO!!“‘d me and waved me over to him. I was so tempted to sarcastically ask him where my tip was for basically doing his shopping for him at the end of it all.
Tl;dr, Robins are people too, don’t treat us like your personal servants.