Life as a Retail Manager Archives - I Hate Working In Retail

Feb
23

Retail and Service Workers Share Their Crazy Customer Stories

Category: confessions, Life as a Barista, Life as a Cashier, Life as a Retail Manager, Life as a Server, Retail Stories, Stupid Customers Tags: confessions, life as a barista, life as server, retail stories Leave a Comment

Sure, we’ve all had our fair share of bad (or even horrible) customer service experiences. There’s even an annual list of the top 10 consumer complaints that ranks which areas of the marketplace we find most frazzling in any given year.

But what about tales from the other side of the counter? We asked our readers who work in the restaurant, retail or service industry to share their worst “crazy customer” stories. We chuckled, guffawed and sat with our mouths wide open as we read through your submissions, then we picked our 12 favorites.

Poke and Sniff
Reader remotecandy says: “I was shopping in the meat department … when I noticed a woman picking up various packages of meat, poking holes in the wraps and sniffing each package before she put the package back where she got it. I was not only appalled, but was disgusted … I notified the meat department manager and he talked to this woman … She lost it, calling the meat manager every name in the book, and proceeded to randomly poke holes in meat packages that she had no intention of buying. Because the store security people couldn’t handle this woman, they called the police, but the woman made it out of the store just in the nick of time.”

Fishy Business
Reader Bballxlovex25 says: “A customer ordered anchovies on a pizza from our pizza place. She called back after receiving her delivery order to complain. She stated that she ordered anchovies on her pizza and received fish. We told her that anchovies were indeed fish and that was what she ordered. She proceeded to yell that she, “Did not want these f***ing fish!” on her pizza. Her son proceeded to tell her that she ordered anchovies and that they were fish. She threatened the manager by saying she was going to beat up the manager’s mother and husband.”

No, It’s Your Fault!
Reader AJH89 says: “I work at a restaurant and this lady and a little boy, about four or five, came in to eat. The little boy sat down with his mom and peed in his pants. The lady told me it was my fault because I did not tell her that the little boy looked liked he needed to go to the bathroom. She wanted us to give her dinner [for] free. I could not believe it.”

(Chicken) Bills
Reader Gerrydee1 says: “As a young girl right out of school, I worked in the Customer Relations Department of Sears-Roebuck in Philadelphia. This was the mail order division. My job was to handle complaints via letter from customers and route them to the correct place for their problems to be solved. I received a note from a farmer that said his latest sale from the catalog of poultry … included some dead on arrival. My supervisor told me to write him back and asked him to send the bills from the sale indicating how many, and we would gladly replace them … A package arrived with my name on it soon. It smelled funny even before I opened it. When I did, the dope sent me the actual bills (beaks) from the poor little chickens. It smelled to high heaven and freaked me out.”

She’s “Wheely” Crazy
Reader JCDIFFEY says: “[This] lady came into our station for full service lube and oil change and wanted her tires rotated. She returned about two hours later, went to her car and came inside the shop, really mad. She wanted all the wheels with the design on them to all FACE UP. [We] tried to explain, the first time you drive the car [they] will change and [will] not be the same. She refused to pay the bill unless we corrected the problem. We pulled the car on the rack and made all the wheels look the same. She paid bill and departed a happy customer. We let her drive it off the rack.”

What a Gas
Reader TLWidner32824 says: “I had a customer (guest) come into one of my stores at MGM Studios, Orlando with armfuls of merchandise to purchase. She laid her stuff on my counter and whipped out a Mobil gas card to pay for her purchases. I kindly told her that Mobil cards are good for Mobil gas stations to buy gas and products. She could not understand why she could not use her gas card. Even after explaining and re-explaining, she still did not get it. She left, as that was her only ‘form of payment.'”

Too Much “O” in the H2O
Reader PANJO says: “While running my family’s restaurant in NYC, I had a customer call me over one time to her table … She holds a glass of water that the busboy had brought over when she sat down, and asks in very grave tone, ‘Do you see what I see?’ Being in the restaurant business, I figured maybe there was lipstick on the glass [or] something had fallen in it, but … I couldn’t see anything … She said, ‘I can’t believe you can’t see, but there is way too much oxygen in the water!'”

Guess That’s Not What He Wanted to Hear
Reader Chrisandkim04 says: “I had an older gentleman who had purchased his glasses from one of our companies eight years ago. He came in all upset, because his glasses had broken … He proceeded to tell me his story [about] how he bought the glasses several years ago and how he had never had a problem with them until now … His dog got a hold of his glasses and chewed them up beyond recognition … I explained that the frame was no longer being made and in order to get him a new pair he would have to see the doctor … He flipped out. He threw the remaining fragments of his glasses at me and kicked his chair at my other associate.”

Not Worth the Argument
Reader Bgk9876 says: “A customer wanted to return a canteen which she had recently purchased. When I asked her why she wanted to to return it she said it leaked. After inspecting the canteen, [I] noticed [it had] a hole in the center big enough to put your index finger in. When this was pointed out to the customer, she responded by saying, ‘Well, that’s not where it leaks.’ She got a full refund.”

She Did What??
Reader WAYDOWNTOWN2 says: “A woman came into the restaurant drunk, and when asked to leave she hiked her skirt up, squatted down and proceeded to pee in the middle of the dining room. “Oh yeah, she was arrested.”

The Wrong End of Things
Reader Marcanewman1 says: “I spent many years in drug stores and had many ‘confused customers.’ A few — ‘Why didn’t the direction label say take the foil off the suppository first, it really hurt?’ ‘I choked, why didn’t the instructions say take the pill with water?’ ‘Why didn’t the label say Insert in rectum, I swallowed it ?’ [This] customer orally took a suppository with the foil on it!”

Pizza Pain
Reader Bnchudson says: “I work for a restaurant that has a website for people to place online orders. I had a customer who placed their order online for one size then yelled at us because she had [accidentally] ordered a bigger size and thought we had purposely changed her ticket. When we showed her the original copy she still didn’t believe it. We then even offered to remake it for her at no additional cost, and she flipped out saying she had already paid for the larger size (which she was shown she had not) and deserved a refund of her money as well. Needless to say she left with no refund and the smaller size.”

Sourced from dailyfinance.com

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Feb
14

By IHWIR Admin

Top 12 reasons your managers become assholes

Category: Life as a Retail Manager Tags: life of a retail manager Leave a Comment

In response to some angry comments about the large number of assholes running around in management roles here’s the first in a series of posts about assholes. There is also a follow up post on the top 12 reasons managers become great:

The top 12 reasons managers become assholes:

A boss they admired was an asshole. In trying to emulate someone more powerful then themselves, they didn’t separate the good qualities from the bad and copied it all. In their admiration they defend the bad as well as the good (note: people do this with their parents too). See The Jobsian Fallacy.
They are insecure in their role. The psychology of opposites goes a long way in understanding human nature. Overly aggressive people are often quite scared, and their aggression is a pre-emptive attack driven by fear: they attack first because they believe an attack from others is inevitable. Management makes many people nervous since it’s defined by having have less direct control, but more broad influence. Many managers never get over this, and micromanage: a clear sign of insecurity and confusion over their role and yours.
They prefer intimidation to leadership. If you have a gun, the fastest way to get someone to do something for you is to threaten them with it. But if you take away the gun, you have no power. However if you take the time to convince someone to do something for good reasons, those reasons can last no matter how armed or unarmed you are. A person who has confused intimidation with persuasion, or leadership, behaves poorly all the time. They rely on their guns, not their minds, which enslaves the people who work for them out of using their minds either.
Their life sucks. What percentage of people are miserable in the corporate world? I think 20-30% is a safe bet. If you’re miserable, you tend to inflict your misery on those who have less power than you do. If your life is miserable enough you won’t even notice how rude you are to waiters, assistants, and sub-ordinates. It may be nothing personal, or even work related, these people simply have a volcano of negative emotions that must escape somewhere, often in eruptions that they can not control. Just be glad you’re not their spouse or offspring.
They lose their way. Management is disorienting. You are not in the real world in the same way front line workers are. Everything is meta. Decisions become abstractions. People are numbers. Getting lost in middle management is common. Unless they find a guiding light to keep the bearings, and stay low to the ground, good people get lost. It’s smart when taking on a new role to ask someone closer to the ground to be your sanity check. Telling you when the front lines thinks you’re not the same guy anymore.
Promotion chasing. As you get further from front line work, the goals of promotion become clearer than the goals of the projects. Often what’s right for the project, and the people working on it, isn’t lined up with what’s going to get a manager promoted. This creates a moral dilemma, do what’s right for the team, or do what’s best for me. By spending more time with other managers than with front line workers, it’s easy to forget where the high ground is.
Their management chain is toxic. If you are a manager, and your boss is inflicting blame, disorder or pain on you, there are two choices. Either pass the pain on down, or suck it up and shield your team from the pain. Will you pass the blame on to your team, or take all the heat? The latter is much harder to do than the former, and the former will often be taken as being an asshole. Even if no solution is possible, one gutsy thing to say is “I don’t agree with this either, but I was unable to convince my boss, so we’re doing it anyway”. This takes guts as it makes you seem powerless. You must choose between seeming powerless vs. seeming like an asshole, and the latter often wins.
The Peter Principle. A 1968 book described this principle as the fact that in any hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. It sounds like a joke, but makes total sense. If Bob is a great marketer, he is soon promoted to senior marketer. If he does well, he’s promoted to managing marketers. What happens now? If he’s mediocre as a manager, he can likely stay there forever. He may not like the fact he’s not getting promoted anymore and doesn’t like being medicore, but is afraid of going back down the ladder, even though he might excel down there. He’s trapped. People who are trapped feel insecure (see above).
They’re not assholes, they’re just insensitive or oblivious. Would a Vulcan make a good manager? Not really. He’d make smart choices, for sure, but empathy is a huge part of what a decent manager offers their team. Managers are often faced with tough decisions that will negatively affect people, and they make the best choice they can. But they forget to empathize with or explain their decisions such that those negatively effected by them understand. Or even better, forget to involve those people in the decision so they become participants and not victims. The failure to do this is a fast way to earn a reputation as an asshole, even if you’re doing what’s best for the team / company / world.
Madly in love with themselves. Perhaps their Mom doted on them too much as children, or they got picked on in high school, whatever the reason, some people become infatuated with their power and fall in love with themselves. They put themselves in the center of everything because, emotionally, they need to be. The hole in their ego is so big, nothing can fill it, despite their pathological attempts to stuff bonuses, rewards, kudos and perks others deserve more into their stash. Megalomania is tragedy. It’s a good sign a person you despise has bigger problems with the world, than you have with them.
They always were assholes. I knew a kid in elementary school who always seemed like a jerk. Even then it wasn’t quite his fault, he just naturally annoyed and bothered people. Why? I don’t know. Anyway, I met him recently, 25 years later, and guess what? He’s still a jerk. Some people have been, and probably always will be, assholes. They have to work somewhere. Better managed companies hire fewer of them.
They took the promotion purely for money and status. In many organizations the only way to get higher status and more income is to become a manager. What if managers didn’t get paid more that the people they managed? Perhaps then more people would take the role simply because they wanted to be in that role, rather than because they primarily wanted more money.