Funny Customers Archives - Page 8 of 27 - I Hate Working In Retail

Dec
21

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This Is Why Your Whole Foods Cashier Hates You

Category: Funny Customers, Life as a Cashier, Whole Foods Tags: , , Leave a Comment

JOE MARINARO/FLICKR
JOE MARINARO/Flickr

In the religion of buying organic and local, Whole Foods is like the big, showy megachurch. There’s two-hundred plus of John Mackey‘s paeans to healthful eating in the U.S. and in each store there’s a throng of cashiers bleating the Whole Foods motto: “Would you like five cents back for bringing your own bag or would you like to make a donation to charity?” The prohibitive price of the groceries (Whole Paycheck, anyone?) coupled with the granola (and we’re not talking merchandise here) the company emanates attracts a certain kind of customer. If you’re one of those customers, know that even though your actions may come from a benevolent place, you might be driving your cashier nuts. Here are some helpful tips (culled from a former store employee!) to help preserve their sanity.

Don’t joke about your ID being fake.

You’re handing over the limited-edition six-pack of microbrew or a bottle of biodynamic wine and you crack wise about the validity of your ID. Understand that this happens one to two dozen times a day and by the 15th time, it is as fresh as any sitcom tagline. They see the smirk on your face, and it’s almost like they can hearJoey Lawrence exclaiming, “Whoa!”

THAT OTHER PAPER/FLICKR

They don’t run the store.

This may surprise you, but your cashier probably does not run the store. Don’t complain and/or chastise them because the herbal eyedrops have been moved and you can’t find them or the bulk lentil bin is empty. Again. It’s not their fault, and they don’t care that things are done differently at [insert name of your locally owned organic grocery store that you aren’t frequenting anyway].

Don’t talk on your cell phone.

Actually, go ahead an talk on your cell phone. Making small talk is part of the job, and if you’re on the phone they get to forgo the ritual. Just be prepared to answer all the pertinent questions, like, “How are you going to pay for these biodegradable picnic utensils?”

Don’t assume they buy the Whole Foods hype.

Just because someone works at Whole Foods doesn’t mean they buy into your piecemeal spirituality. Don’t tell them Mercury is in retrograde or lecture them about the latest international cause you’ve taken up. They’ve been standing in place for seven hours, trying to pretend they love every minute of it for fear of losing their job. You’re paying too much for your food, and they’re not getting paid enough to pretend they care.

Put your kids on a leash.

Okay, you don’t have to put them on a leash. It’s demeaning, we know. But learn the line between raising kids to be “free” and respecting others. Maybe they let Dakota express herself like that at Montessori school, but keeping her from scattering peanut butter pretzels everywhere won’t stunt her emotional development.

Sourced from sfweekly.com

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Dec
19

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The Insane $11 Billion Scam at Retailers’ Return Desks

Category: Funny Customers, Life as a Cashier, Life as a Retail Manager, Retail Stories Tags: , Leave a Comment

A Gameboy with a sardine can inside. A printer stuffed with a piñata. ‘Return fraud’ is costing retailers billions—and the ingenious swindles are sometimes breathtaking.
She appeared to be just a happy American consumer out shopping at a big-box store.On one summer lunch hour, Donna Ann Levonuk, 50, lifted a tub of diaper cream priced at $43.98—and then stashed it in her purse. No alarms were triggered as she strolled out of the Giant supermarket in Limerick, Pennsylvania, and nobody thought otherwise.Until Levonuk reappeared an hour later wielding the soothing stuff at another Giant store 20 minutes away.

That’s when the jig was up.

“She had couple of fictitious rewards cards—but this time she used one of her own,” said Ernie Morris, a detective with the Limerick Township Police Department who foiled the spree of bogus returns. “When they steal things, they want to get all the bonus points.”

She also had a spending habit.

“As quick as they were going out, they were getting stuff—living a lifestyle where they wanted luxury.”

Return fraud has been called the invisible heist—or “de-shopping.” But the increasing number of fraudsters bringing back wares to stores to make an illicit killing has  become impossible to ignore.

Expensive items, such as $400 handbags, might be stolen  and then returned for in-store credit that is issued to the conniving customer in the form of a gift card.

Then the gift card is shopped online in a gray market to collect cold currency.

“It’s like the Wild West for trading gift cards,” Moraca told The Daily Beast. “People will buy your $100 gift card for $82, and if you want the cash bad enough you’ll do that.”

Gift cards are sold at kiosks in shopping malls or even websites that catering to this exchange market. Some have innocuous-seeming URLs like cardpool.com or giftcardgranny.com, which cloak the sinister operations.

“By selling the gift card online, [criminals] can receive up to 80 percent of the retail value,versus 10-20 percent on the street corner,” said Joseph LaRocca, vice president of loss prevention at Retail Partners, a Los Angeles-based consulting firm.

Siras’ Dustin Ares pointed to one organized crime ring that used eBay as its clearinghouse.

This return scam involved purchasing broken electronics off the auction site and then buying new items off store shelves. “They would go to the store with a repackaged and shrink-wrapped broken item inside a new box and return it for full value.”

The clever crooks managed to rack up $2 million in profits over a year, Ares said.

New numbers out today reveal the extent of the “shrinkage.” According to the National Retail Federation, the tally of red from return fraud this year is a whopping $10.9 billion in the U.S., based on figures from 60 retailers surveyed. Holiday shopping season alone accounts for $3.6 billion.

“The losses to the industry have moved up $1 billion-plus from a year ago,” said Bob Moraca, the NRF’s vice president of loss prevention. “I am frightened by how much of this is caused by organized retail crime.”

In some cases, the scammers’ tactics are so intricate that it’s hard to believe how much talent is wasted on the effort to cheat businesses out of everyday items.

The industry lore is downright jaw-dropping in the details of the cons known as “brick-in-box” returns.

“Even the retailers themselves don’t realize how extensive this is,”said Dustin Ares, a loss-prevention specialist at SIRAS, a Redmond, Washington, company that develops advanced tracking tools for electronics.

A digital media player’s mainframe is replaced with eight AA batteries, or a deck of cards. Or the device that looks like Gameboy from the front. But try to turn the sucker on—and good luck: The sardine can that’s inside isn’t going to produce much gaming.

One customer retooled a Nintendo Wii with its innards switched out for glued pennies. Another sent back a flat-screen television with a bona fide tombstone within. Another returned a printer box stuffed with a candy-filled piñata.

Laughs aside, the methods can take on other, less spirited forms.

Moraca pointed to another form of return fraud, involving gift cards.

Retailers were hammered by the scheme because checks and balances were scant in 2012, when the eBay grifting peaked.“If you don’t have any record, you don’t know who to believe,” he added.

That’s just with the physical items that you can see.

Ares said there are instances where savvy gankers manage to exploit loopholes.

For instance, “A guy goes around and purchases expensive items and at the same time buys into the extended service plan. Then he calls the service-plan provider and claims the items were in disrepair and asks ‘What can you do about this?’”

A refund for the service plan was executed, and according to Ares, this particular shakedown artist hit the company offering the service plan more than 200 times in two weeks—each time pocketing a couple Benjamins in an insurance settlement with little to no need to prove anything was faulty.

“The company would continue to refund these goodwill refunds.”

Like Donna Levonuk and her husband, Manuel—who ended up getting slapped with more than a 1,000 counts of felonies, including forgery, records tampering, and deception when they milked one store after the other—their schemes were more of the harebrained variety.

And yet brazen bandits prove time and again they are willing to try to return anything.

Bill Hedrick, chief of staff for the city attorney’s office in Columbus, Ohio, says he’s found people combing parking lots outside major stores hoping to luck out on rogue receipts to tender inside for a score.

Some have been willing to try to bring to the registers multiple box sets of popular music or TV shows only to  get nabbed pulling a fast one on the checkout clerk.

“The Sopranos box set was maybe $88,” Hedrick told The Daily Beast. “They take a .88 cent sticker off reject videos and put it on The Sopranos and two others and then go to the cashier lane.

“Even the cashier realizes that they were trying to get away with $300 worth of box sets for $3.”

And maybe even Tony Soprano might have respected the paint switcheroo that suckered employees at several Wal-Mart locations, according to a security chief at a major corporation.

The perpetrators idled in parking lots outside various Wal-Marts and approached customers with cans of paint to ask for the customers to forfeit the cans so they can be used to collect money for their school sports teams.

“They would get the cans and bring them back to the stores but they didn’t have any paint in them,” said the source, who requested anonymity. “Instead, they filled them up with water. This happened over a dozen times before they caught on.”

The industry as a whole has been cracking down.

Joseph LaRocca says some companies are upping the ante in terms of fending off return fraudsters.

For instance, with the illicit gift cards being fenced online there’s been some measures put in place to prevent thieves from pawning them willy-nilly.

“Some retailers have sent legal notices to these marketplaces to restrict the resale of cards, while others are using sophisticated technology to block these companies from checking the value of the cards online,” LaRocca said.

And Dustin Ares notes better communication has been working.

“We’re getting ahead of it now to be sure,” Ares said. “We employ inventory management to help solidify their property and make sure they have a better record of their possessions.”

Det. Morris, who brought the Levonuks to justice, says that indeed more retailers are trying to share what they know with law enforcement, but it’s an uphill battle when most follow the adage that the customer—even the crooked customer—is always right.

“Most places don’t wan to prosecute and so they give more rights to the customer than anybody else,” he said, stressing that the crime isn’t victimless since the cost rises for the innocent consumer. “In the end, we as customers suffer because we’re stupid enough to pay $40 for a T-shirt.”

Sourced from digg.com

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Dec
17

By

Retail Survival 12 Types Of Customers You’ll Encounter This Holiday

Category: Funny Customers, retail lists Tags: , Leave a Comment

This is 40/Universal Pictures

For years, I have sold computers in big box retail. While I see a wide array of customer stereotypes throughout the entire year, the holiday season brings them out, full throttle.

Dealing with certain customers can be difficult at times, but retail workers cope with it, roll with the punches and move on with a smile that never falters in the face of consumerism.

Whether you’re the customer or an associate dealing with the customer, much can be learned from the nature of shopping. Here are many of the consumers you may witness, whether you are one, or you’re the one working for them:

1. The “I just want to get this product and go” customer

The customer just wants to grab the item and ring out as quickly as possible. No protection plans, no questions, no nothing!

Advice for the Customer:

What many customers fail to understand is that Walmart is probably the only big box retail store where the expectation is to grab and go.

At any other store, such as Best Buy, HHGregg or Sears, it’s the employee’s job to ask questions to enhance the experience. So, before you cut them off, let them do their job.

Advice for the Employee:

Never falter! While you can certainly speed up your process to get the customer out the door, never cease to do your job. If a customer complains, it’s whatever. A manager isn’t going to be mad at you for providing quality customer service.

2. The “just looking, I don’t need any help” customer that needs help two seconds later

Yes, we’ve all been there. We ask customers if they need help finding anything or if they have any questions, and they shoo us away, saying they’re “just looking.”

As we begin to walk away, they have an “aha!” moment that, yes, they do have questions.

Advice for the Customer:

Don’t be so quick to the defense if you’re going to ask questions immediately after declaring you don’t need help.

Advice for the Employee:

Ask open-ended questions that don’t set you up for the “just looking” opportunity. Like, “What brings you in today?” Or, a conversation question like, “How is the weather? I’ve been here all day.”

Customers are more likely to let you build trust if you’re sincere in your interactions.

3. The doesn’t-speak-English customer

We spend the next 15 to 20 minutes trying to hunt someone down who can translate for us.

Advice for the Customer:

Be patient.

Advice for the Employee:

Be patient.

4. The “price-match this obscure seller” customer

Most retailers offer a price-match guarantee now. A lot of customers feel like they can hop on eBay or Amazon.com and just find any seller who has a listing to do the price match. But, it doesn’t work like that.

Advice for the Customer:

For retailers to honor a price match, it typically needs to be a local retailer with a verified ad, or in some cases, Amazon.com, as long as it’s an item fulfilled by Amazon.

Advice for the Employee:

Explain the store policy and the added benefits of shopping with your business.

5. The customer who wants to know all the details but has no idea what any of it means

How fast is this computer? Nine times out of 10, the number I regurgitate to the customer means absolutely nothing to him or her. What this customer wants to know is whether it’s fast or not — period. You get these types of questions all the time.

Advice for the Customer:

Before you ask a question, try to know what answers you’re seeking out. Sometimes, the question you present for the associate isn’t always the one you’re looking to ask.

Advice for the Employee:

Try finding analogies to translate tech lingo for novices. I will often compare AMD and Intel processors to Dodge and Chevy engines when asked which is better.

Brand-wise, it comes down to preference because, ultimately, they both perform the same function; maybe you know someone who’s had better experience with one over the other. Performance wise, it just comes down to which model you’re looking at.

6. The know-it-all customer

This is the customer who comes into the department and acts as if he or she knows more than every single employee, and is a complete jerk about it.

And, then, to top it off, he or she says something completely ignorant like, “This computer doesn’t have as big of a hard drive.

It only has 4GB, and the other one has 6GB,” failing to recognize the difference between RAM and a hard drive, ultimately making you want to bang your head against the counter.

Advice for the Customer:

Stop it! Who are you trying to impress? There’s no need for you to hold your knowledge over anyone else’s head, and it looks even worse if the associate can see through it.

Advice for the Employee:

If it’s not affecting your ability to close a sale, then don’t bother trumping this customer. You should always present the real facts so the customer is able to make the most informed decision possible, but, as tempting as it is to make them feel like an idiot, make sure you tread lightly on how you approach.

7. The indecisive customer

This is the customer who makes the employee grab three different versions of the same item because he or she can’t decide on a color. Thanks a lot, Apple.

Advice for the Customer:

When it comes to things like color preference, try to have your mind made up ahead of time.

Advice for the Employee:

Suggest a choice for the customer, and personalize it to his or her needs and/or wants.

8. The self-entitled customer

“I’m buying a lot of things today, can’t you give me a discount?” Hundreds of customers come through those doors spending thousands of dollars every day, and then, you have the one customer who thinks he or she is the exception.

Advice for the Customer:

Retail doesn’t operate that way. Unless it’s a price match or a coupon, customers don’t get discounts at their leisure, so stop begging.

Advice for the Employee:

Explain the store policy. If the customer asks to speak with a manager or someone in charge, just say,

I’m in charge of this transaction at the moment, and while I can certainly call the store manager over to address your concerns, I can assure you the answer will be the same.

That said, if you still want to speak with a manager, it’ll be a couple minutes, or I can get you taken care of right away at your convenience.

If the customer insists, let him or her talk it over with a manager. It’s the customer’s time. Just make sure you are aligned with your manager on the same ideals.

9. The anti-Windows 8 customer

Do you guys have Windows 7 computers still?

Whether it’s Walmart, Best Buy or HHG, the question is still asked. And, the answer is still no; we do not carry computers with Windows 7 installed in-store.

Advice for the Customer:

It’s a new day and age, friend. Technology is inevitably changing, and retail stores are paid to adapt. You’ll just have to come to terms with that.

Advice for the Employee:

Art of the demo. Show the customer the value of the new operating system, and how it can be used to enhance his or her experience.

10. The creepy, but welcomed regular customer

This customer never buys anything. He or she might talk to us, just roam around, or maybe just use one the computers for personal use. This customer wanders aimlessly, but harmlessly.

Advice for the Customer:

Keep doing what you’re doing — no harm, no foul. Just don’t ask for my phone number or send me flowers.

Advice for the Employee:

Leave ‘em be. You get used to it.

11. The high expectations, low investment customer

This person wants a gaming computer, but only wants to spend $300. Really?

Advice for the Customer:

We live in “get what you pay for” world. If an item is the cheapest one among all the other ones comparable, you should be asking yourself why it is cheaper, and what you can get for the money you have to spend.

Advice for the Employee:

Full disclosure: Always be real with your customers. If you try to bullsh*t them, they’re going to return their purchases, anyway.

12. The “where is all the help?” customer

The customer has been waiting a solid five minutes to get some help, impatiently tapping his or her foot, and prodding the associate to hurry up with the current customer so he or she can finally get some help.

Advice for the Customer:

Slow down. Understand that companies have labor budgets, and we don’t make the schedule. So, instead of making our jobs more difficult to try and make your life easier, why don’t you just step back and smile while we try to get to everyone as quickly as possible?

Advice for the Employee:

While it would be nice to get to that grumpy customer quicker, don’t rush yourself in a way that is going to cheat the customer you’re working with already.

The best way to handle a high traffic scenario is to address the people waiting, but continue to work with the customer in front of you. Say something like,

Ma’am, we’ll be right with as soon as possible. Here’s a copy of our ad, and a list of our services you can glance at while I finish up with this customer. Thank you for being so understanding.

When you acknowledge and appreciate your customers, they are more likely to be patient with you.

There are probably several other kinds of customers not listed here. Which distinguished customer group have you helped this year? Below, in the comments section, share your experience or story.

 

Sourced from elitedaily.com

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