The retail customer unappreciation thread.

[ranonranonarat]

there was this douche asian husband and wife in their 40s, at the last retail space i worked at, who would come in from time to time to try on 5-10 pieces of clothing. not exactly a problem but we had 2 fitting rooms and they would always both use the same one together and spend approx 40mins inside each time. don't really want to know what they were doing.

the only items they tried on were sale items and because they came in so often (sometimes they didn't buy though), they would demand for an additional discount (even on a $40 item that was already on a 50% discount). best part of this is that they always use their CC without a credit ceiling cap. makes me wonder if that was how they got so rich. disgusting.

[billiam]

working retail sucks, i feel your pain du

[OkayOkay]

Why the fuck do parents hold up a shoe and ask me if I think it'll fit their kid, who isn't with them. HOW THE FUCK WOULD I HAVE ANY IDEA WHATSOEVER? I don't know if your kid has some fucking triple E fat as fuck foot, or is missing 3 toes or whatever...how would anyone know that. It's your job to tell me the size YOUR kid wears, not my job to know the accurate shoe size of every human being on the planet. You wouldn't believe how often I get this. I don't even know what to say when I get asked this kind of shit, and I tend to have a fairly witty response for most everything...these ones baffle me.

[OkayOkay]

oh, and this shoe brings out the most astounding levels of idiocy in human beings possible:

[wahwho11]

dear god, please make toms go away.

[fads]

wonder if retail was bad back in the old days too

asking the shopowner if the chain mail really works

taking the horse for test rides but never buying the damn thing

[blm14]

[OkayOkay]

so I'm moving my shop, and we've got about 2 weeks of downtime while we build the new space. We cleared out everything yesterday and handed the keys back to the landlord today, and it's the first day in 5 years I've genuinely not had to deal with people, and IT FEELS FUCKING AMAZING. This is gonna be the most relaxing 2 weeks ever...but then it's back to the grind. God, I'm looking forward to nobody asking me why a $29 tee shirt is so expensive for a little while.

[mogizzle]

I work at Brooks Brothers and I always get people who ask me to match a tie to a shirt for them. I ask them their preferences and they say they don't have any but then proceed to shoot down every option I present for the next 5 minutes. They eventually pick out something on their own and ask me what I think of it...

or the people who claim they forgot their "coupon" but are really vague about it. and we don't even have any promotions going on at the time

[philosophiliac]

people that don't get that if they're nice i'm more likely to be nice to them.

customers that don't understand that for a whole range of reasons, you're not going to be able to buy anything domestically for the same price that you could get it in indonesia. fuck's sake

[Denton]

get ready for a long one (pause)

guy walks into my store and says "what's this place about?" there's furniture all over the place but i guess skills of induction aren't being taught anymore. i say "we sell furniture." he wanders around for a while and having looked around says "can i look around?"

"sure."

"what's back there?" he points to a back room.

"we have a few more pieces back there."

"should i not go in there?"

"no, go ahead."

he heads in. i begin to get nervous cause this guy's acting high out of his mind and he looks borderline homeless. i have some of my own stuff back there and he's in there unsupervised. after a veeeery long time, just as i'm about to check on him, he emerges and offers, "everything here has a history." (we sell mid-century furniture mostly.) i concur. he wanders over to a stack of business cards and says "iwantthiswhatisit." whut? "it's a business card?"

"can i have it?"

"...sure."

he wanders over to me so i can smell his wonderful odor.

"is there any way i can help this business?"

"you'd have to talk to the owner."

"oh, well, i have a lot of things to do. i go to school full-time and i have two - three! - jobs." right, so you have time for a fourth job but not to actually apply for it.

"well... i'd love to help this business out. you have an... importance." i stare at him. he leaves.

later i go back to my bag in the back room. he left my wallet and passport... but took my comb.

[olmecasteve]

i use to work at gamestop

one thing that really pissed me off was the parents of some of these kids

like one time we had this mom and two sons come in and the little kid just goes at it with the games

throws them out of order, leaves them on the ground and destroys a rack.

Not only that, but the mother notices the son doing this and does not do anything. In my head I'm like

WTF lady tell your son something

parenting at its worst

and in the end, they didn't buy anything

[evisu 2000]

that's because gamestop is a ripoff

[burgerking]

I know this says retail, but I would rather not make another thread for it....so

I work at my college's dining commons and there are these camps that take place during the summer, so we have to serve about 1000 kids every 4 hours shift. One day I was working tray/dish return and like people don't know how to clean up after themselves. It's a really simple process where you dump your food/napkins in the compost bin, throw the utensils in this bucket, and then stick your plate on the rotating carousel. Yet, people just leave the shit in front of the carousel without emptying out their plates, dropping shit on the floor and not picking it up. So annoying.

[madstaxbro]

reminded me of this.

I created a situation like that. I went into SELA a few months ago because I was in the city and there was this cool edgy new denim with a cattlehorn patch or whatever so I wanted to check it out.

I don't know what it was that day, maybe it was too hot and just the store being empty but as soon as I walked in I just got this awkward antisocial feeling. I started walking around and handling the belts and poking at the jeans for a few minutes and the guy at the counter comes over to entertain me, I ended up making him run around the store to get me different sized belts/wallets in a bunch of colors that I stared at for a few seconds and put them all back.

I asked about the jeans I came in to buy and he said they were out but a restock was coming, offered to let me try on some other jeans, I felt like I should just buy something because I'd stretch out these other jeans I don't want for nothing but I just couldn't walk away. Then after that he walked me upstairs and I played around with the shirts and he was educating me on loopwheeling talking about the artisan crafting etc.

I ended up costing Johan 2 hours. on the bright side nobody came in while I was there so I wasn't exactly taking away business.

It makes me feel especially guilty because he was perfectly helpful and polite the whole time.

PS I still haven't bought any jawnz from SE since

Edited July 4, 2012 by madstaxbro

[carlanton]

You know what i fucking hate? Rich people who act all poor.

Person 1:

Dirty, smelly, old man comes in to my store and asks for a hat. I show him the rack of hats and he picks one out. Its a plain black one with a the north face logo on. He looks at the price, contemplating over the price (maybe £20) for a few seconds and then mumbles something and walks to the till. When i scan the item, the scanned price is higher than the marked price, which was completely normal as this was the day after the Vat went up last year. He got really mad because of this, and told us how this was illegal and how we were all breaking the law and how he'd accept it just to be nice, but that the next person walking in wouldnt't be etc etc etc.

"What a poor old motherfucker", i thought to myself as he handed over his credit card. Guess what? He gave me his black titanium amex centurion card.

Person 2:

Dirty, smelly old lady with tattered old berghaus clothes. She was quite nice and all, and was looking at this £500 ski jacket. I thought to myself "aw, she is really nice and all, but there is no way she'll be able to afford that jacket". Well, she decided to buy it, and when we went to the till she handed me a Coutts credit card. Boom.

[shinobi2000]

i've only experienced working in retail once in my life the summer I was 18. That was when I first encountered the no-intention-of-keeping-any-of-the-shit-i-buy guy. It was the day of the puerto rican day parade here in nyc and I was working soho. some guy comes in saying he wanted nice new clothes for the parade. He was just pointing to things indiscriminately and buying things left and right, "i'll take that...and that...and that". I was like, this is awesome, this guy is such a push over, he's buying everything I recommend. God how stupid i was! The next day I saw on the daily sales balance for each salesperson -- he had come in and returned everything. He really did want clothes for puerto rican *day*, only one day!

[somethingauthentic]

i worked at disneyland for a summer (with insomnia actually lol) as a cashier in the emporium (biggest souvenir shop, right at the entrance). had to deal with all of this same shit, except since it was disneyland, you were required to just take it and act happy all the time. even if you saw someone shoplifting, you were not allowed to do anything yourself about it except call a backroom manager who would never come out in time to do anything about it.

the only exception to all this was if you worked a grad nite. all the regular rules for how to treat "guests" were gone and you could chase down any little high school fucker who tried anything.

[Walt Thizzney]

watching people shop just makes me realize how superficial our society is tho

[ojsimpson]

what about the douchebag sales associates

[OkayOkay]

make your own thread for that bullshit, this is about the other side of the coin.

so the last month or so of not dealing with people has been amazing. I could stick with this.

[Desi]

watching people shop just makes me realize how superficial our society is tho

One of these days I will probably get in trouble for telling folks to "look inside your closet". Tired of matching corny basic tees with dopedealers.

[Booji.]

only thing i hate most is when clients come in 10 minutes before closing time and touch everything but dont ever buy.

[julzkind]

CLIENT : i need a foundation, used to use clinique, i have oily skin, I've had skin cancer and removed it from my nose and he froze some age spots too.

ME : do you wear a moisturizer or anything with spf?

CLIENT : no

BUT SHE WANTS FOUNDATION.

hey lady in most cases oily skin is dehydrated skin. when you wash your face eliminating the moisture and throwing your skin off balance, your skin overcompensates and then creates more oil…and why the fuck isn't your doctor telling you to wear an spf?!

is it just me that thinks this is common sense?! ugh

[koala]

people who come in to the apple store demanding windows technical support. smh

[Mauisnake]

hey lady in most cases oily skin is dehydrated skin. when you wash your face eliminating the moisture and throwing your skin off balance, your skin overcompensates and then creates more oil…and why the fuck isn't your doctor telling you to wear an spf?!

is it just me that thinks this is common sense?! ugh

to be fair, i have barely any idea about you're saying.

[funkdoobi]

Here's something that happened to me (however it's not exactly retail since I work as a graphic designer).

So I prepped a book's indesign files and sent them over to the printer who was to follow up with proofs. The printer calls my boss and acts like a prick saying that the file is all fucked up and what kind of business are we running sending off files that aren't properly proofed beforehand. He was making my boss feel like a fucking idiot.

That all happened after I left the office on a Friday. I come in on Monday to a stack of emails, then boss walks in and he gives me shit. So I'm like, fuck this. I call the printer and tell the owner to put someone in their production department on the phone with me. Because I knew 110% that I set that file up beautifully.

The idiot comes on the phone. I ask them to open the file and tell me what they see.

Idiot asks me 'what file?'

Me '.....The indesign document that lets you see the book you're about to print...'

Idiot 'Oh, okay.'

Me 'So what's wrong?'

Idiot 'All of the images are of poor resolution. They're all pixelated and we can't print this'

(I double checked the file 3x to make sure all images are of perfect printing resolution)

Me 'Do you have preview mode turned on?'

Idiot 'Preview mode?'

(I tell him how to turn it on)

Idiot 'Oh! it looks good now!'

=/

[blm14]

people who come in to the apple store demanding windows technical support. smh

You can run windows on apple machines now. You may have heard about it.

"People who work at apple stores who think that they don't have to support windows when it's officially supported by apple. smh"

Edited July 17, 2012 by blm14

[evisu 2000]

aren't you guys supposed to be geniuses

[BlakFate]

A little background before I start being a bitch:

I currently work at a sunglass store part time, for both the extra income as well as a time killer. I work as sales coordinator for a compressor company as a full time job.

It is my choice to work retail and it allows me to be helpful but only to the extent that is beneficial to myself. Unfortunately this can at times cause poor customer service, especially if you are being a "loose butthole" as some would describe.

We currently have deal where it is buy one get 50% off another pair of equal or lesser value. Generally when a customer enters the store, I greet them and am often given the good old "we're just looking." Number one, I care not if you are here to look, what I asked is "How are you today?" or something akin. Often times my answer to this is "well you're looking eh? whatcha looking for?" This is meant to be a snide comment, that rarely is recognized for the snideness.

Often times it proceeds to, "Oh hey, just so you know it is buy one get one 50% off," which often the response by these degenerate dildo's is, thinking they are the Louis CK of the mall, "Well can I get 50% off the first pair? Har har har har har," Yes you think you are hilarious, yes I have heard that line 50x today, no you are not funny, yes you should have been swallowed.

Edited July 24, 2012 by BlakFate