No, its not for free just because it wasn’t on a rack

No, its not for free just because it rang up wrong

No, its not for free, because you didn’t mention it was on sale until it rung up

[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: “WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOUR STORE?!”

Bottom Text: “SO WILL YOU BE NEEDING ANYTHING ELSE?”]

So at America’s Favorite Store, we’ve been under construction for what seems like an eternity, and we always get costumers asking us when it will be finished and once they get their answer they go on their merry way. Though this day, this old woman was looking for panties, and I asked if she was finding everything okay and she blurt out, “What’s happening to your store?!”So I replied, “Oh, we’re doing contruct-” “I know that! I’m talking about your store, your sales have gone down and your merchandise quality is horrible!” in a passive aggressive tone with a smile, as if she wanted me to find it personally offensive, take responsibility and defend the company to her. I simply said, “So will you be needing anything else?” in my sweetest passive aggressive retail voice, with smile! She said, “No,” with a twinge of irritation. She said she was from Canada, told me America was slow and tried to get the last word in by telling me in passing, “Everyone needs to be so careful with what they say as to not offend people here!”

Sorry lady, not only do I not care about your opinion, the place where I work is not my life’s passion. So I’m not even going to put forth the effort to entertain your negativity but telling you “we really are worth your money PLEASE PLEASE spend your money here!”

[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: “HEY.”

Bottom Text: “CAN I BORROW YOUR FISH KNIFE?.”]

No. You can’t.

To explain: there exists a type of safety knife that looks like a fish, hence it gets called a fish knife (the newest ones in store actually have fins and scales patterned into the plastic now).

Now, I and my fellow robins at work will quite happily lend out pens, pencils, the one pair of scissors we’ve managed to scrounge up, our badges to the warehouse/staff room, even the HHT (RF gun equivalent, I think) that we’re using - we have 3 in the store, that’s it.

But the one thing we will not lend out is out fish knife. Those things are like gold dust. We’re a craft store, we have a delivery everyday and a main delivery once a week. There is no warehouse team, everyone does everything. Therefore, we open a lot of boxes. For a while we only had a couple in store, so we were opening things with our locker keys, pens, scissors we ‘borrowed’ from the tills, because they are the most useful thing ever and they were hogged. I think someone may have taken them home because they disappeared…. 

Then we got a shipment of fish knifes last month and were given one each. They have now been labelled with our names and we do not let them out of our sight, because it won’t come back.

[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: “CUSTOMER LOOKING FOR SPECIFIC BODY PRODUCT.”

Bottom Text: “DOESN’T KNOW WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE, SCENT, OR NAME.”]

I work at a very well known bath and body product store, and people come in all the time looking for a specific product in a specific scent, but they do not remember anything about it.  So we usually end up having to go through a lot of our scents with them, trying to find their mystery scent. 

[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: “INSERT TOP TEXT HERE.”

Bottom Text: “INSERT BOTTOM TEXT HERE.”]

I had a customer do this RIGHT in front of me yesterday.

Let me explain. I like to think that the person who invented hangers was a pretty smart cookie: The have this handy little hook that’s open on one side for easy hanging, that also twists to adjust to the direction in which the garment is facing.

One would think that, seeing as how almost every single human being on the planet is familiar with how these nifty contraptions operate, customers would keep life easy for everyone and use them accordingly.

AND YET.

Every day, whether it be in the sale section or the go-back rack, I see that customers have elected to hook the hanger over the back of the bar instead of twisting the top around and putting it back properly. And of course my thoughts are, :”Really? REALLY? Is your time SO precious that the extra second it would take for you to do this correctly can absolutely NOT be wasted?”

Customers who do this both perplex and infuriate me. Not only does it make grabbing large armfuls of clothing (like for markdowns) difficult, it just doesn’t make any damn sense.

They gave me twenty minutes of till training and they still haven’t showed me how to do everything…rooooar

Hi there, I recently started at a large chain of stores and it’s my first retail job. The first week I started, they mixed up my schedule with the woman who was hired a while before me and they put me on all night shifts closing the pharmacy, which I had no experience or training to do. 

I muddled through it with minimal training and confusion…yay?

So, ugh. I’m in the middle of helping this one really sweet lady who comes in to buy cigarettes quite often, but we’ve run out of her favorite and she’s trying to decide what she wants instead. She moves to another, closed register so she can see the rest of the cigarettes better.

While she is looking, and I have no idea when she will make her selection but she was there first so I wait for her answer, another lady comes up and starts putting her things up on my counter.

I explain to her gently that I am helping someone else at the moment and would she mind if she waited just a second before unloading?

Suddenly, this new lady picks up her things, and just CHUCKS THEM into her basket, full force, and starts yelling that she has never been treated this way at any store ever before, who do we think we are? She is never going to come back here if this is how employees speak to customers.

Trying to placate her, I call over a coworker to ring her up while I am STILL waiting for the cigarette lady to make her selection (WTH LADY JUST PICK SOMETHING IT’S NOT A HOME LOAN)

Then the tantrum lady starts complaining to my coworker about me and how she has never been treated this way in her entire life. My coworker is extremely uncomfortable for the entire transaction and I wanted so badly to apologize or do something but there is nothing that I could have done. It was so… undignified, and extremely uncomfortable for everyone there, except, clearly, the angry woman.

…I just…

Lady. I know for a fact that I spoke to you gently and politely. You could have looked up from your cart for the one second it would have taken you to see that I was helping someone else before you and that is simply was not your turn yet.

To make matters worse, though, we had just gotten the monthly results for our customer reviews and we got the worst numbers we have ever gotten. Having seen these prior to this, I even made a much more concentrated effort to be super polite and nice today (even though I found out afterwards from a coworker that I am not to blame in the slightest for our bad numbers). It just made me feel like shit and made me really question myself even though I know that I am good at my job and that I am a nice person.

I am just truly baffled and saddened by people’s behavior sometimes.

I’m well aware. Customers and bystanders praising robins for good customer service is acceptable here.

~J