What Goes Around Comes Around
“Five minutes before closing, a woman comes in and is sooo angry that we don’t have any decaf. She demands to speak to the manager. I tell her that’s me because I’m the only one here, and the coffee pots are cleaned for the night because it’s five minutes to close. No, I’m sorry, I can’t make another pot just for her. There’s another place around the corner.
She screams at me, tells me she’s going to ‘find a real manager and get me fired,’ throws half a cup of cappuccino machine sludge at me, and starts to look like she’s gonna jump the counter. I’m holding a hammer under the counter thinking, ‘don’t do it, don’t do it.’
I pick up the phone like I’m going to call the cops. She leaves. I lock the door.
She COMES BACK AND RUNS FACE FIRST INTO THE GLASS DOOR. LIKE A BIRD.”
Retail Mayhem
“One time a Karen tried to return an expensive handbag that had obviously been used. She proceeded to say I was calling her a liar and her anger escalated as she paced back and forth at the till point.
The Karen then proceeded to tell me that she was going to call in some guys to come after me after I finish work. Throughout this I am politely repeating my request that Karen leave but in hindsight I think this must have been rather annoying… as Karen proceeded to grab the bag and launch herself over the till at me in an attempt to hit me with it.
At this point in time, a colleague who was yet to start their shift (therefore appeared as a customer) was on the shop floor and had witnessed it all. They tackled Karen into the wall, knocking down glass shelves which had been displaying around 30 bags. Karen is a crumpled mess on the floor, appears shocked, stumbles upright and runs away.”
The Reason For Her Freakout Was Laughably Dumb
“One time when I was at a Walmart in the nice part of town, I witnessed a woman call the cashier a half dozen different slurs, then chew out her supervisor when he wouldn’t capitulate to her.
After that, she loudly declared, ‘If I poop myself in your store, it’s your job to wipe my butt.’ When security showed up, she asked them out loud how many times they failed out of the police academy. When actual police showed up, she was totally calm…until they even TRIED to get the workers’ side of the story, at which point she began shouting over them that they’re liars. She wound up both banned from the store and arrested.
What set her off? They wouldn’t let her take a LOADED cart through the 15 items or less line. I was stunned because I had just moved there from previously living near the ‘bad’ Walmart in my city where there was NONE of that kind of behavior. Are you kidding me, lady?
The Bark Was Worse Than The Bite
“I work in a very high end chocolate store and I kid you not when I say we make the best chocolate in the world. How high end you ask? Some of our coworkers wanted to jazz our days up by attaching spoons to the pens we use for credit card receipts and draw some smiley faces on them. Our boss sat us all down and explained that we were way too classy of a store to allow that to happen.
We usually give out samples of fudge or ice cream whenever people ask for them, but when it’s really busy and the store is full, we just put out a plate and let people go after them. A little risky perhaps, but we seem to have faith in the goodness of our customers, something I tend to doubt from time to time.
One busy day, we had a bunch of caramel bars out in the store for people to sample, and a group of people are gathering around them, all of a sudden, we hear a voice call out above the others.
‘OH MY GOD! I found a tooth in the chocolate!’
My manager and I snap into action, all these companies and other industries have been in a lot of trouble when people find body parts in their food, so we wanted to defuse the situation as fast as possible. Unfortunately, if you find a tooth and start shouting about it in front of a bunch of people, you will start what we in the retail world refer to as a stampede.
My manager handled the situation wonderfully. She apologized profusely, gave the lady a bunch of free chocolate, and took the tooth away and threw it out. Our whole store empties out, as no one wants to buy the toothy chocolate anymore. Our manager also dons our version of a HAZMAT suit and removes the tooth from our proximity.
A few minutes pass, then we see the tooth lady open our door and walk back into the store. She walks up to the manager and in a very quiet voice tells her,
‘So that actually was my tooth, it just popped out in the bar when i chewed it and I didn’t want people to know. Could i have it back?’
My manager was very calm, and explained that she had acted as if the tooth wasn’t hers, so we handled it the way we had to handle it if we found a foreign object in our product, we throw it away immediately.
The lady has a meltdown, ‘YOU STOLE MY TOOTH!! YOU HAVE TO GIVE IT BACK! IT’S MINE!’
To which my manager responded, ‘If you had been honest with us and not tried to incite panic from our customers we could have simply given you back your tooth. But you decided to cover up your problem and create one for us. Luckily, we address our problems immediately and effectively, something you could stand to learn from.’
The lady, obviously humiliated, straightened up, took one more caramel sample, and walked out the front door, minus one tooth.”
Just Roll With It
“Back in high school I was a big shot manager at the local roller skating rink. On Saturdays, we had a 5 to 7:30 pm ‘family session’ that was cheap and tailored to younger kids. After that ended, we would close down for 30 minutes, clean up and re-open for the 8 pm to midnight ‘teen night’ which was more expensive and basically a ‘club atmosphere.’
As was common we’d usually get some teens pay the $2 ‘family night admission’ and try to hide in the bathrooms or in the back to avoid the teen night admission. Since we had an off-duty uniformed police officer these situations usually handled themselves. One night I caught a couple kids hiding in the back and ran them out.
Their mother showed up about 30 minutes later demanding to speak with me, yelling and cursing at other employees in the process. I called her over to the window and told her why her sons would have to pay. She said she didn’t know and I told her I’d take 50% off the teen admission because we told every single person who paid during family night that it ended, and the next session was more.
She flipped out and grabbed me by the collar of my shirt. While I was pushing her off, she straight up spat in my face.
The smell made me gag and some of it had gotten in my eyes and my mouth. The cop came over and put her in cuffs while I went to the bathroom to wash my face off. I could have pressed charges for assault on her, but I eventually decided not to. The cop ran her name, and she had violated her probation and was going to jail anyway. He left to take her to jail and her sons (who were both about 14) just glared at me from outside the rink. Some scary looking dude came and picked them up later and when we left that night I thought I was going to get jumped. This is when I learned my job was not worth the $10 an hour that I somehow thought was amazing pay.”