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Post by Mostly Harmless (flufflepuff) on Oct 22, 2016 21:06:47 GMT -5
It's a common saying in the workplace: the customer is always right--but oftentimes, we find that they're not. Or they end up doing something that makes your heart go warm and fuzzy and restores your faith in humanity.
Or they just say/do something absolutely insane or hilarious.
Feel free to discuss the craziness, but of course, keep it civil. c:
Like today: I work in a cookie shop, and customers always seem to feel bad when they pay in change, always apologizing for it and whatnot. But honestly, since we run out of change pretty quickly on busy days, I want to say "no it's okay actually you're my savior I can keep ringing people up without fear of giving them all nickels back!"
They are precious. < 3
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Post by Breakingchains on Oct 24, 2016 9:18:32 GMT -5
I got some unusual people when I was working at the fish counter. First off, the seafood department was combined with the meat department, so I got a lot of their questions and traffic. So while I was working there, the whole "pink slime" debacle broke in 2012 (tl;dr: a beef additive which looks squicky and caused a dubious food safety panic in the US). Overnight, there were so many terrified little old ladies. People thought it was going to kill them. Whatever the case, our store brand did not and had never contained "pink slime". We were very clear about this when asked . But you had a few of the really paranoid people who would ask you point-blank and then not believe you. One woman went to the shelves, picked out a roast that was way more expensive than just buying the same quantity of ground beef, and demanded that we roll out the grinder and grind it in her presence, so she could be positive that us meat-contaminating gremlins were not standing in the back of the grocery store, gleefully taking her honest purchase and cutting it with scary, scary pink slime. The grinder, BTW, had like a two-foot cord. It wasn't meant to be moved around while plugged in. Someone had to find an extension cord so we could roll the whole giant stainless steel monster out onto the sales floor to stand there and grind a roast and prove to this lady that we weren't trying to poison her. I was awed. And hey, there's another food safety story: I had this one customer come in who was clearly from a particular place across the globe (I recognized the language, and he had an interpreter with him). That alone was a little unusual, since I live right in the middle of Backwards, Redneckia. He wanted to purchase some fish, but he wanted to inspect each piece thoroughly. So I had to get it out of the case, show him both sides up close, and then let him smell it. Smell it as in, run his nose along the entire length of both sides from a distance of roughly a centimeter. This step took a solid 45 seconds. He happily bought the fish after getting, uh, personal with it, but it struck me at the time as really odd. It wasn't until later that I finally remembered: his apparent nation of origin has notoriously bad food safety issues. To him, it was likely just what you do when you buy fish. So yeah. He was being smart, she was just scared out of her mind by the news. Actually, I think working around meat and fish is part of what made me so twitchy about pseudoscience and safety panics and "toxins". You work around sensitive food items and you start to realize that people are scared of what they eat, and fearmongering types can make a lot of money taking advantage of that. Pink-slime-lady's anxiety probably was not doing so good even before the news media decided to scare the heck out of her for months. =/
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Post by Celestial on Oct 24, 2016 15:45:09 GMT -5
Having worked with the general public in two volunteer jobs for about a year now, I feel like I have acquired a nice chunk of customer stories. First, the good. I mentioned in Mini-Gloats how a gentleman told me I (a foreigner) am an asset to the country and it is good to have me in Scotland but I will repost a link to the story right here. Then there were the couple who I spent about half an hour with in the chapel trying to translate the Latin inscriptions on the walls using just our very poor knowledge of Latin and Wikitionary. That was a fun time. Both of these stories are from last month only as well, and I have been there since March. I know I have had more nice moments but I cannot recall. I think most of them are visitors complimenting me on being really enthusiastic and knowledgeable or being really, really interested in the palace and its history. Generally, since I work in a heritage place, the customers we get are really nice and polite, since the sorts of people who are jerks don't usually visit 16th century palaces. At the bookshop, meanwhile, the best customers for me are the kids who buy good books with their own pocket money. There is just something heartwarming about a kid picking up a Horrible Histories book or a Harry Potter book or what have you, coming up to me all sweet and respectful and paying for it. I just feel like they're going to grow up to be good people. ^^ Now the, uh, less than pleasant people... I did mention at the palace that I don't get a lot of awful customers? There was one exception that sticks out very clearly in my mind. I call him "murderer guy". I was working in the library/office where we have a lot of pictures of the ancestors of the current family who own the place. One man comes in, with his wife IIRC, and joins my tour group as I am talking about the family and the photographs. He interrupts me to tell me that "the man in the photographs looks like Lord Lucan, the murderer." That catches me off-guard and I have to ask him to repeat himself because I thought I misheard. Once he explains to me who this man he is referring to is, I politely explain to him that no, sir, this cannot be him, this is the current keeper's grandfather who died in the First World War in 1915, before his murderer was even born. That does not calm his guy down. He goes around every photograph and picture (and we have a lot) interrupting me with "Hey, you can get a lot of money if you know where this guy is. 8D". I get sick of him and cut my tour off, just waiting for the guy to leave because if he keeps interrupting me and not listening to me, I am not wasting my time. But the best part? When I get home, I google the man he talked about. This is Lord Lucan. This is Lord Ninian, the man in the photographs and the grandfather of the current owner of the palace. They look nothing alike! So I am left wondering at the gall of this guy to come into somebody's house and interrupt the guide to ramble on about crazy conspiracy theories. The bookshop customers have been less crazy but they make up for it with numerousness. Just this week we had a guy who insist we wrap his book for him (we are a charity, secondhand bookshop. We do not do this) because he was giving it as a present for someone. In the end, the only way we could placate him is find an old, free map that the town information office gives away and wrap it in that. I got an insanely rude man who was a jerk to me because he did not feel I gave him adequate information where to find a certain section just because I pointed him to the shelf. I do that to all customers because, as a second-hand charity bookshop, our organisation is terrible and mostly pot luck so I point people to the shelf and hope for the best. To quote him "You must be a volunteer here and a student but next time, don't just point" before he walked out. The other customer in the shop just...stared before agreeing that he was very rude to me. (Joke is on him, I am a graduate). Finally we had a woman come in and ask us if we have books but...some author I cannot remember, all I know is that she writes some sappy literature. Not quite romance but the sort of true-to-life stories that deal with relationship drama, marriage, etc. Now, me and a male coworker of mine at at the till and we start asking her what genre this writer does. The woman drops several gems on us: "Oh, I don't really like her but I read her because she is popular", and, referring to me, "I thought you would have heard about her because you're a woman." Which just...after she left, me and my coworker burst out laughing.
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Post by Ian Wolf-Park on Oct 24, 2016 16:30:22 GMT -5
I mentioned this before in Mini Rants, but here goes.
I currently work at a chain grocery store. We usually close up shop @ 9 pm EST. On one evening, just as we were about to close up, in comes a customer and goes on a shopping spree. Normally, at that point, there's one person (that time, the poor sap was me) working the customer service desk/express line and the front end manager. Roughly $300 worth of groceries was bought by this customer, although one bag of groceries was left behind, probably because the customer was in a rush. Keep in mind that the customer service desk does not have a conveyor belt, unlike the other cash registers, so you can probably see where this is going. Ladies and gentlemen, procrastination at its finest. Fortunately, at that time, I lived in an apartment building that's literally next door, but I shudder to think had it happened at my current location.
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Post by Thorn on Oct 26, 2016 4:54:02 GMT -5
I mean one time a customer bought me a chocolate bar. Just somebody random, nobody I knew. I don't think I've seen them again since. But at the end of the transaction they gave me a chocolate bar they'd bought from us, which was just incredibly sweet and made my day! <3
Not quite as cool as the above stories, I know, but I still wanted to share. xD
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Post by Reiqua on Oct 26, 2016 5:40:18 GMT -5
This is Lord Lucan. This is Lord Ninian, the man in the photographs and the grandfather of the current owner of the palace. They look nothing alike! Oh, umm... they both have a mustache? (Nice stories, btw - that job sounds like great fun!)
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Post by Mostly Harmless (flufflepuff) on Nov 4, 2016 11:50:00 GMT -5
When customers are super cute (excited kids, the elderly, maybe the occasional light haired guy) or super sweet and make the encounter delightful, I often give them the bigger cookie of the variety they want.
If you're rude you're getting the M&M cookie you asked for, but you're getting the one with the small crack in it or the one the fly just walked on.
...I only feel a LITTLE guilty for this. XD
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Post by Celestial on Nov 5, 2016 19:55:00 GMT -5
At the bookshop today, I was categorising books and came across one I used in my piracy and privateering course back in my third year of university. Immediately, without thinking, I went "Oh yeah, I remember you. 8D" without realising there was a customer in front of me. I quickly packpedalled and told him I was not talking to him but the book because I used at university.
It actually ended up going well. Turns out the guy had a massive interest in the subject and we ended up chatting about it. Guy told me a story about a policewoman friend of his who was tracing her ancestry and discovered half of her family were pirates raiding the west coast of Scotland. He ended up buying the book right out of my hands, even though it was not technically priced because the manager was away and did not have the chance to price the new books that had come in so I guesstimated the price.
So yes, my gaffe turned into a good thing. \o/
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Post by Ian Wolf-Park on Nov 6, 2016 22:32:40 GMT -5
I had three customers that held up the line for various reasons. Fortunately, the other customers and myself were patient. I'll detail them below.
1. The first was a couple that bought just over $500 worth of groceries, thus ending up with 2 carts. Yeah, they went on a shopping spree.
2. The second was an old lady with problems in her hands (possibly arthritis) and was unusually slow. The credit card machine kept on timing out because of that, forcing me to restart again.
3. The third was the worst one. Roughly $200 worth of groceries, but wanted a lot of grocery bags, including for some of the larger items like paper towels and toilet paper. Thanks to the request, this one also required 2 carts, but also a carry-out. Not helping matters on both ends was that some of the items, mainly dry good items, but there were cans of soup, in the clear plastic bags, thus obscuring the barcode. Oh, and the canned soup that I mentioned? There were 4 of them in one bag *cue invisible headdesk*. While not as bad as having all items in clear plastic bags (this one I mentioned previously in Mini Rants), it still was bad. At the end of it all, my manager asked me if I had fun with that customer. Obviously, I didn't, but I definitely appreciate the friendly jab.
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Post by Mostly Harmless (flufflepuff) on Nov 28, 2016 14:38:37 GMT -5
Um, lady, our pecan cookies do indeed have pecans in them. There is a sign on the front of the cookies.
And lady's friend, our chewy pecan cookies don't have caramel in them, as much as they share the same coloration. There are literally pecan pieces all over them as well as the SIGN THAT SAYS CHEWY PECAN SUPREME.
I swear, you customers are precious.
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Post by Shinko on Dec 1, 2016 8:02:44 GMT -5
8,D Ah that awkward moment when a customer cheerily tells you about how they were just talking to your manager, were informed something was against company policy by said manager, and the customer brags that they retorted (to the manager who has a very thick Arabic accent) "It wasn't against immigration policy to give you your work visa, was it?"
I think what blew me away the most was has he laughed after he said it, like he took it for granted I'd share the joke with him. |D You sadly see racism a lot living in the southern US, buuut generally people aren't so blatant about. I don't usually like my manager (who does, haha) but I felt pretty bad for him.
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Post by Ian Wolf-Park on Dec 5, 2016 10:10:02 GMT -5
Customers can certainly be forgetful at times. While it's common for a customer to leave one or two items behind after leaving the grocery store for various reasons, it's not often one leaves a bag behind. What makes this worse is that it was a bag full of perishables like eggs.
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Post by Shinko on Dec 8, 2016 8:49:34 GMT -5
So this guy walks up to me in the electronics department, and asks, "Do you guys carry the 4 terabyte Xbox 360, the Mario kart Wii U bundle, and the Wii U Mario maker?" "Yes, we have all of those. Would you like me to get them out for you?" "Yes please; I'll take all of them you have." "...Beg pardon?" "All the pieces of each of those systems you have. I'll take them." " " Bear in mind the Xbox he wanted was $99, and the two Wii U systems were both $299. And he legitimately bought us out of all three of those systems. Cashier who rung him told me he ended up spending over $3000. But when she asked what they were for he didn't answer. Just. What is your story, strange console enthusiast? I would love to know.
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Post by Mostly Harmless (flufflepuff) on Dec 17, 2016 10:56:26 GMT -5
So I clock in and this guy wants half a dozen cookies and he doesn't tell me immediately so I have his cookies in three small bags.
I ask, "Would you like me to consolidate these into a larger bag?"
"Huh?"
I ask again and get a similar response.
Losing my patience I ask "Do you want this in one bag?!"
After he says yes and goes away my boss says "I don't think he knew what consolidate meant."
That day was off to a great start right XD
More happened on that day but that's a story for another time.
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Post by Ian Wolf-Park on Dec 17, 2016 18:06:47 GMT -5
Tales of 'horror' from my seasonal retail job:
1. There's the concept of dine and dash, which is frowned upon. Then there's the cousin to it, the shop and dash. I had two customers do that to me, leaving me behind the change I was supposed to give to them before they dashed off (so technically, it wasn't shoplifting, which is also frowned upon). Yes, I'm aware that it's the holiday shopping rush, but you still have to have patience, especially with the long line ups.
2. We have several baskets that are used for returns. More than one customer have wandered in the cash area and attempted to take the baskets out, but my fellow coworkers and I have politely (and loudly, given the time of year) reminded them that the baskets were out front. A few of my coworkers have wondered how in the world do the customers not notice the location of the baskets as it is in a restricted area.
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