Retail Articles Archives - Page 14 of 18 - I Hate Working In Retail

Nov
19

Lane Bryant Shopper Let Her Dog Pee on Clothes

Category: lane bryant, Retail Articles, WTF Tags: disgusting customers, gross, lane bryant Leave a Comment

There are bad consumers, and then there are shoppers who allow their dogs to do their bathroom business inside the store. And we’re not talking a little “oops” of a light sprinkle, but New Jersey police say one Lane Bryant shopper let her little pet pee on $2,000 worth of store merchandise.Police are looking for a 35-year-old suspect who’s accused of allegedly allowing her pooch to tinkle on 14 dresses and 11 pairs of pants at a Lane Bryant store, reports the Smoking Gun.

Investigators say the woman and her dog entered the store on Monday afternoon, whereupon the canine went about urinating on the clothing, which totaled about $2,000 in soiled products.

That wasn’t cool with store personnel, who reportedly asked the woman to leave the store. She “became belligerent and refused,” the police report says, so workers called 9-1-1.

But before officers could nab the suspect, she drove off, running several red lights while police followed her. Cops called off the chase upon encountering a wet roadway, concerned that the chase could turn out dangerous for others.

The suspect was identified through her license plate and a physical description, and is now wanted on counts of eluding police and obstruction.

Sourced from consumerist.com

Share the joy

Nov
16

By IHWIR Admin

WHAT IT’S REALLY LIKE TO BE A SHOP ASSISTANT IN THE UK

Category: Life as a Cashier, Retail Articles Tags: cashier life, CASHIER PROBLEMS, cashier stories, uk Leave a Comment

It’s 3pm on a Saturday afternoon and I still haven’t eaten since breakfast (a Yorkie from the vending machine, if you must know). I’ve been standing at the front of the fitting rooms for three hours, and two girls have just run off without buying any one of the 12 items they’ve been taking selfies in.

A lady hands me back a white T-shirt with a slog of orange foundation around the neckline, as another customer suggests she purchase it at a discounted price. Still, it could have emerged with a much worse stain on it. So much worse. I am talking about shit. Yes, shit. But more on that later. Fancy a job in retail?

I’ve worked at a flagship women’s high-street retailer for two years now and still, every day, the general public find refreshing new ways to leave me without words. I’m certain none of my friends are the ‘general public’. Because I know none of them are the kind of people who don’t know to stand on the right hand side of the escalator. Or who’d ask me where the bikinis are while standing in the swimwear section.

They can’t be the people who refuse to see the clearly marked fitting rooms. I’m sure that nobody I know has ever attempted to try on clothes at a till point.

And I really, REALLY hope that they are not the kind of people who poo not once, but twice, in a changing room – or, as one of my colleagues once had to deal with, wrap up their turd in the clothes that they have just tried on and then brazenly hand it all back to a shop assistant, who will uncover it one minute later and have her day, if not year, ruined.

I hope they don’t include my friends, but but you just don’t know, do you?

ONE OF MY COLLEAGUES ONCE HAD TO DEAL WITH A TURD WRAPPED UP IN THE CLOTHES THE CUSTOMER HAD JUST TRIED ON AND BRAZENLY HANDED BACK TO HER

To be honest, I can forgive this sort of naivety, or desperation if you will. It is customer complaints that I am not mentally equipped to cope with. I can deal with difficult situations, but I will never be able to fathom the insane levels of frustration that some shoppers feel over bits of fabric.

How happy I would be to have a day off work to peruse a shopping centre at my leisure. To even have a taste of what they are used to. Forgive me for pointing out that there is more to life than the correct size in a dress that you only knew existed several minutes ago.

When you grow old and reflect upon your life, you will not look back and think, ‘This was great, but I really wish they’d had those shoes in a size 6.’ Let it go, people. Stop shouting at me!

If you don’t have any complaints to make, but you do fancy some special treatment, I’ve got a fail-safe tip: Pretend to be from head office. When you enter the store, stand and look at the window displays for a bit first, but make sure to put your hand on your hip and nod at them. This will begin to incite fear in the staff.

Bring a well-dressed friend along and only ever converse with each other when facing mannequins. That alone is enough to make me radio a manager. Then, when heading for the tills or the fitting room, try to spy some mess. Give it a bloody good looking at in front of someone who works there. Et voila! Super-smiley staff and extra helpful service. Trust me.

Now that I’ve given you this valuable advice, do not give up the jig by asking why we don’t sell styles that everyone stopped wearing years ago. We do not sell fishtail skirts, elasticated waist belts or shrugs. Nobody is going to go to the stock room to look for them. ‘Do you think I could find them anywhere else?’ Only if you have the means to travel back to the ’00s. Soz. (NB: To the lady that asked where our bootcut brown corduroys are, I would not have let you buy them, even if we did sell them.)

If you do ever feel compelled to yell at a member of staff, please weigh up the circumstances and think about who has the most right to be frustrated. Yes, it is very hot in here, but I’m trapped here for nine hours and you are free to leave at any time. One particularly hot day earlier this summer, I had a delightful woman accuse me of trying to kill her mum because I had no control over the air con. No, I do not want your mother to die on the shop floor. No, that would not look good.

When I’m not on trial for attempted murder, I am accused of lying, false advertising (I am sorry you found it in the sale section, but the tag clearly shows it isn’t on sale) or the classic utterance of ‘bitch’ when I refuse a dodgy refund when it’s ripped to shreds.

If you do have a genuine complaint to make and wish to be taken seriously, I recommend looking like you’re going to spend a lot. Great leniences will be made, I promise. The best way to do this is pick up a ridiculous amount of items to try on, but make sure you leave off almost all of the hangers. Rich people HATE hangers. Try it.

When a shift finally ends, it’s nice to head to the closest bar. But no, I’m not quite free yet, because regardless of what genre the venue is supposed to play, they’ve managed to slip in at least one of the songs I’ve had to listen to at least 20 times today already. The closest place for me to get an end-of-shift cocktail has the actual real-life same album as my store. Awful. ‘Oh my God, I love this one!’ your friends shout. I did, a long time ago, before it induced mental images of bright lights and shiny white floors…

The redeeming thing about these frustrating occurrences is that a large team of people around you are experiencing the exact same thing. Regardless of the fact that it’s a forced environment for friendship and you aren’t sure if you’d be friends ‘on the outside’, there is serious bonding to be had over shared experiences of being shouted at and treated like crap.

Before working in retail, I didn’t know how close it was possible to be to another human being, while still only knowing each other by ‘babe’ (the general term among my fellow troupers, those shopping assistants too tired to remember names).

Sometimes it can be hard to deal with £68 in cash being thrust upon your counter instead of into your palm, leaving you to fumble around in the pennies and feel like trash. As you scrape up each coin, it’s nice to have someone standing by you with a sideways glance that just says, ‘I know.’

Anyway, I’ve got to go. There’s a customer begging for cash off that dirty t-shirt.

Sourced from thedebrief.co.uk

Share the joy

Nov
14

By IHWIR Admin

Retail and Wegmans, a Horrible Place to Work

Category: Retail Articles, wegmans Tags: articles, wegmans Leave a Comment

Wegmans- A great place to work, really?

If you are at all like myself, the retail world is something you’ve been in and out of every other year. In and out of partly because you know to take appropriate mental breaks; from the horrible wage, the customers not worth the wage, and the managers that pretend to care about your well-being, but more importantly, because you always hold yourself in that ‘light’ of having the potential to do much more with yourself. Hence, you continue a journey for a ‘great place to work’.

Again, don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with working retail if that is what you do for a living, you get into the right position and it’s not so bad, but at the bottom of the chain, you might as well slap a chain on and start singing, because it feels damn near close to slavery.

Wegman’s is considered one of the top 100 companies to work for, really? Their slogan ‘Wegmans, a great place to work’ I have personally experienced their charade, and I don’t have much positive to say about them, but I’m going to say it anyway. They base the very cornerstone of their company on ‘Values’ and god do you ever get sick of hearing them, primarily because no one truly follows them. It’s one thing to preach for a common purpose and goal, and it’s another to try and get another voice in my head, I’m full up on opinions and voices that scream inside, hard enough to get them to quiet down when I want them to.

Wegman’s and its legendary values

If you ever have a manager, who has been demoted by the corporate strands of a company, talk to you about ‘company values’, it is code name for “you have the potential to ruin my ass” Which is what I got from my Produce manager on a near regular basis. This is yet another essence of this being a great place to work. Anytime a full-time position became available I was told how other people had more potential at the given time, and by potential, it means that their heads were buried so far up management’s ass they had a permanent glossy brown color along the ridges of their lips.

Back to these concepts of values, the driven message of the company is to pretty much love thy customer and do everything you can for them, but then, they go the extra mile of essentially saying Wegman’s employee’s come first, because if they don’t feel happy, they can’t provide good customer service.

Oh my, If there was ever a statement that claimed ‘welcome to hell, this is work in retail, be happy knowing your manager makes 70 grand a year, meanwhile, they found hiring me at $9.00 an hour to be a hell of an increase on labor hours for the week’

To further this analysis, I understand, retail operations use employees as they need them based on business needs. It’s a common ratio of supply, demand, estimated goods sold, and estimated man-power needed to run the operation efficiently.

I’m fully aware of the mathematical perception, I also know if you go from feeding an employee 30-35 hours a week, and then drop him down to 12-15 once business slows down a bit, he won’t be very happy with you. Well, this was one of Wegmans mottos; apparently they left it out of the hand-book. Essentially they treated you like a pimp, when things were busy you got used, when business slowed down, you got put on the shelf. Ah, such a great place to work.

Dramatic Virtues

Working within the Wegman’s environment is very much like sitting down with a table of pregnant women, it’s like a slew of problems unleashed by uncontrollable hormones that lead you to having a damn near panic attack. The people who work there that last operate on a level of professionalism that I will label as ‘High School’, on account of the following:

You like gossip
You have no real true care about your own dignity, and you live for drama.

From the moment you walk in the door it’s almost like a game has been set off toward who can be the largest tattle tale. I lost count of the times people had mentioned things I had ‘done’, which led to ‘pure denial’ on my behalf simply as an act of trying to get ‘promoted’.

The people who remained worked with the capabilities of keeping their balls intact, I will refer to both of these people by name, Steve and Vinnie, and it is an ongoing battle.

Vinnie is gunned for on a nearly regular basis on account that he doesn’t kiss ass, the part about it that should be a human resource dream war: Diabetes has claimed over half of Vinnie’s foot, yet the audacity is put forth in my proud produce department to complain that he doesn’t work fast enough.

Have they lost their damn minds? Nope, they have simply been shitheads all along. This is further validated by the fact I know now that Vinnie has been fired.

Yet another example as to why it’s such a ‘great place to work’. As for you Steve, you have been placed in the range of what I call an abused mental patient, because the shit you have to pretend to enjoy upon arriving there is enough to make a grown man cry.

Favoritism- A great place to work with the right blend

The assistant manager of my particular location may have written the concept on being a fake piece of shit. While he took several man hours pretending to be nice, his real goal, as a grown man, was to be buddies with all the young teenage girls of the department, which among discussion with my peers: several found to be creepy, but what was creepier was the fact that we all pegged him to be a homo from the beginning. The way he talks is very similar to taking the male anatomy, taking a very strong rope, tying it to the anatomy, and yanking is hard as you possibly can. The high pitched yelp that is released once this is done is the pitch level of a voice this particular individual had.

When he wasn’t stalking people half his age around the department trying to seem like he was hot shit, he was attempted to be bossy with the other workers, which much to his disadvantage never got him very far. He was very easy to ignore.

Wegmans- A great place to work? I think not

Wegmans has all the common concepts of your basic retail store, the problem is they are generated into a cult like perception point and distributed among the employees. The place is entirely based on kissing ass, which most retail tends to lean that way sadly, but this is a bit above and beyond the ‘natural’ idea of kissing ass. Unless someone has truly experienced it, they wouldn’t understand.

The company itself continues to go to hell on account of carrying value that appeal to pretty much no one, and being run further into the ground by a management staff that couldn’t find their way out of a basement. The room for intellectual growth in the management systems stays in the higher ranks of the company, with good reason. The people you run into in a majority of stores may seem awful nice, but underneath it all, if they are wearing the tag of a manager, they are an ass-kissing moron who is about as enjoyable to talk to as getting a shot at the doctor. Find another place to shop, there are plenty of options.

Sourced from smonaghan119.wordpress.com

Share the joy