Why Retail, Why?

A Lifetime in Retail, A Lifetime of Horror

[whyretailwhy]

Motivation

This is how I lose it all. First my job has a "career day" in which they have a whiteboard of everyone that's been promoted. Of course I'm not on it, but the dipshit who did no work and everyone was happy to see gone was on it. Then the loss prevention manager starts telling me about a guy whose been stealing, and asks if I read my E-mail. I say no and she says to check it. I figure it's related, it's not. It's about us not entering and exiting at the right place. I of course had been coming in a side entrance to get some shade. I would had told her it was stupid, so that's why she just told me to check my mail. Tl;Dr work sucks

[whyretailwhy]

So I've had a new store manager for a few weeks. Had a customer ask for him by name. When you know the store managers name after 3 weeks, your probably an insane customer. I bs'ed her away.

[whyretailwhy]

So a guy I work with blew all the ligaments in his leg. Saw him working today and was wondering why he was in. Well it seems our genius HR head told him if he wanted to take off for an injury, he'd have to use vacation time. Oh and while at work today someone tripped over his leg and he had to go home because of the pain he was in.

[whyretailwhy]

Giving Credit to Dave

So I take Mass Transit to and from work. Last night as I was making my way over to the bus stop, someone stopped and asked if I wanted a ride. It was this guy Dave who I had never met before. He pointed out that it was 10 degrees outside and he was going my way so he thought he'd help out.

Thanks Dave, sometimes people surprise me in a good way too.

[whyretailwhy]

It's a blizzard outside and people are buying the dumbest things at my store. I understand when you need a shovel, but why decide todays a good day to do a project around the house?

[whyretailwhy]

Customer steals almost 1000 dollars worth of stuff, someone gets a pic of their license plate. That person gets in trouble because "we aren't supposed to follow" shoplifters. Store won't actually call the cops and report it because "they don't want bad PR"

Meanwhile same store has just changed their policy about veteran discounts. Now all Vet ID needs to have pictures on it, or we aren't supposed to give them a discount. I pointed out that not giving a vet his discount is FAR worse bad PR.

My boss just shrugged. Hate my life.

[whyretailwhy]

The worst customers

are the ones that show up with 5 minutes left on a Sunday. We close early on a Sunday. So of course these jackasses only come in so they can try to haggle the salesman down easier since they know we want to leave.

Wish my boss would have just kicked them out of the building after 10 minutes. Really should have.

[whyretailwhy]

Black Friday

Not too many horror stories from my Black Friday or this weekend. Actually we were kind of dead, to the point that reportedly the store manager was in his office crying. But I did have to deal with at least one crazy couple.

So I've gotten to the point where I've been at the job long enough that I know the regulars and the people who come in on a pretty frequent basis. On Black Friday this woman and her daughter come up and ask me where something is. I point them to the right direction and figure conversation is over.

Nope, they come back to complain that they aren't buying anything without a deal. See, what they wanted wasn't on sale. But since this is Black Friday they are demanding a deal. Now if I knew they came in on a regular basis or had seen them around before, then sure. But I've never seen them before and will probably never see them again.

I'm just about to go off on them, when my boss intercedes and takes them to the item they want. The reason this took a few days for me to write is because I just remembered to ask him what happened yesterday. Apparently he gave them a decent discount on what they wanted and they left happy.

I argued with him that I never would have done that, the people will never come back again. If they do come back, now they know they can bitch and yell and get a deal for no good reason. It's ridiculous.

[whyretailwhy]

In this day and age people have unprecedented access to knowledge and information via the internet. Yet you wouldn't believe how many times they show up to the store and ask me. I'll take them to the computer and show them the "magic" of entering their question into google and getting an answer.

[theyearofelan]

As some of you know, I had a bit of an altercation today with a woman named Diane on an airplane.

I had a great time antagonizing her, reading your responses, and just generally trying to have fun with an irritating person. But I did have a point and I just want to put it out there.

I know I can...

[whyretailwhy]

So True

[whyretailwhy]

This is what Thanksgiving looks like at a Wal-Mart. 5 trays of food, 3 of which are either corn or mashed potatoes. A tray of turkey, a tray of ham. For roughly 300 employees. Oh and for the muslims that make up a good chunk of the crew? your shit out of luck.

Edit: Forgot to mention they did get 24 Corn Muffins

[whyretailwhy]

So I was working one December for a store, stocking kitchen goods. I noticed a woman and her two kids had been around for a bit. After trying on a bunch of shoes, she comes over to me and asks if we have shoes anywhere else. Not a bad question, considering we also had a separate children's department.

I tell her no, and she proceeds to start ranting and raving at me. Complaining about our selection of kid's shoes and how dare we not have more kid's shoes. I had done nothing to make it seem like I had anything to do with Shoes, even less to do with what we got in.

But she spent a few good minutes ranting at me about it, and I couldn't do anything but shrug my shoulders. It still confuses me to this day.

[whyretailwhy]

So this woman calls up the store with 5 minutes left of the store being opened. She proceeds to torture the customer service employee who is being as diplomatic as possible and nice. He's trying to tell her there's literally nothing he can do.

He's not just trying, he did at least 20 times during the conversation. You see, she bought something thinking it was on sale. The sale had ended, so she got charged the full amount but didn't realize it at the time. I should mention there was all of a 10 dollar difference in price.

She believed we were going to run and rip down the sale sign as soon as we hung up with her and refuse to give her the money. This store I worked for would let people return stuff that had been used FOR YEARS. I once got a product in that had a 2002 copyright on the side of the box. So yea, the place would have given her the 10 bucks in the morning.

But no, she had to have it immediately, as if we had a way of putting the money back on her credit card from the store. You see, when we closed the system actually shut down for the night and we couldn't do anything about it. We could keep a register open past closing time, but that was it.

So the kid was trying to get off the phone, and by this point he had put her on speakerphone and she was just cursing and screaming at him. The manager in charge didn't want to deal with her. Another manager didn't want to deal with her. So I picked up the phone and said I was security and we were closing the store for the night. She started screaming at me, I told her a second time the store is closing for the night and we couldn't do anything. She proceeds to start screaming at me and telling me she's a customer and I can't treat her like this.

So I did what anyone else would have done, I hung up on her. She proceeded to call back 3 more times between when I left the desk and when I left the store for the night about 10 minutes later. So this was a woman wasting at least 40 minutes of time to get back 10 dollars.

[rocksteadyash-blog]

I thought about going about this in a sarcastic and brutal way, but then I remembered how being in retail has taught me to be polite even in the worst of circumstances. So, in keeping with the theme of this blog, I’m going to clue some of you in on the Do’s and Dont’s of shopping in a retail...

[whyretailwhy]

So True

[whyretailwhy]

Wegman's Sucks

So they opened a new Wegmans, and I tried to apply given the ton of experience I have at multiple stores. I've worked at three different grocery stores, other then the multitude of retail stores I've worked at. Here was their response

'you're too brainwashed by Walmart and are over qualified for management here'

They also told a friend of mine:

'we can't get the WM smell off of you' so he filed a complaint.

[whyretailwhy]

So I worked at a place with flowers, and they had flowers for sale at the front of the building. I watched one day as an older woman stopped her car in the middle of the road at the front of the building, get out and get flowers. The people behind her honk and more then likely yelled at her. All she did was look at them and yell at them to just go around her. Because obviously they were in the wrong. And it's not like the road was busy or anything...

[whyretailwhy]

So I had been at this job for a few weeks, and this guy asks me if we have anymore of the stone (Patio Stone) that he wanted. I checked the stocks on the floor and we didn't have any. I offered to check the computer if he was patient. So I go and check the computer and no one else has more then 10 of the stone. I double check and see that we are getting rid of it because it's last years stone. I tell him this and he begins flipping out on me.

He claims that the stone was so popular last year, we were selling it by the pallet load. That there was no way we weren't going to be carrying the stone, we would be losing money if we didn't have it. He carried on and even demanded to see the store manager. Thankfully I talked him down from that perch, and he eventually left. Meanwhile when I checked the stone in the system it had barely sold the year before. So WTF I don't know.