Customers: very rarely this friendly and nice (Picture: Getty)
Who’d work in retail eh?
Let’s face it, despite many of our best efforts, we’ve all been that irritating customer at a shop at some point in our lives. Mercifully for retail workers, most of us are only awkward once or twice. But not all of us.
Whether you work in a supermarket, music store, corner shop or cafe, dealing with the general public can be one of the most infuriating things known to man.
If you have ever stocked a shelf or manned a till, you will appreciate the frustrations in the following list.
Tip for all retail workers: do not read this on your day off, it will only depress you about going back.
1. The phrase ‘the customer is always right’ haunting you at every turn. Newsflash: the consumer never being wrong is an urban myth.
2. The timeless classic quip of ‘Oh it must be free then!’ when you fail to scan a barcode the first time. Oh, you!
3. ‘Do you work here?’ No, I just find the Tesco uniform really flattering to my body shape and facing up shelves of stock is an OCD hobby of mine.
4. ‘Oh I think I have the 10p somewhere to make it easier for your change’ being the precursory statement for five minutes of bag rummaging. Seriously, my till has change, just give me the tenner, buddy, and save us all a nightmare.
5. The long explanations of where at home the customer has left their loyalty card. Dude, chill, I wasn’t judging you.
6. The early entry of a PIN or waiting too long to type it resulting in chaos at the payment stage.
7. The glares aimed at you from waiting people when your customer is telling a story as if you’re expected to tell them to shut up.
8. The phrase: ‘I want to speak to your manager.’ Mate, good luck. I’ve been wanting to speak to him for three days about booking a holiday.
9. That one regular customer who is over familiar with every female on the checkout.
10. Creased vouchers with about 50 digits in their barcodes which won’t scan. Oh, good you have twelve of them and you’ll be saving a total of about 40p. This’ll be worth it.
Oh good, you’re paying with vouchers (Picture: Getty)
11. Cringe-worthy morning meetings containing painfully cheerful pep talks about squeezing the best out of every customer. Sorry, it’s Monday, I’m tired and hungover, can we wrap this up please?
12. Add on sales. WHSmith employees I salute you for maintaining your smiles while pretending this out of date Aero mint bar that you have to push on every customer is a really great deal, even if it is cheaper at Asda.
13. People taking stock from your beautiful display. How dare you come in and buy stuff, customer! I spent ages building that tinned marrowfat peas pyramid!
14. The awkwardness of breaking the news to a customer that their card has been declined by the bank. ‘Oh that’s odd, there is money in there’, is always the reply. Although they rarely meet your gaze.
15. That last minute before you are allowed to close the doors inevitably heralding the arrival of a bus load of customers who just fancy a slow browse. It’s fine, going home on time is overrated anyway.
16. Being the fall guy when delivering the crushing blow that an item is out of stock, as if you have, in your sheer spite for that customer, burned all of the remaining stock of said item so they can’t have one.
17. Parents telling their kids to behave or ‘the man will shout at you’. Whoa, when did I become the bad guy?
18. Customers changing their mind about an item and placing it just anywhere. Always love finding chicken fillets in amongst the Quavers.
Pick it up here, discard it in the pet food isle (Picture: Getty)
19. Customers misunderstanding how a 3 for 2 offer works. No, you don’t choose which item you get free, that would be a very silly oversight by a company which wants to make money.
20. ‘I pay your wages!’ From the guy who has usually had to wait a minute longer than he would have liked to buy a tin of corned beef. Spoiler: You really don’t pay my wages and your threat to take your business elsewhere will not cause an insignificant cashier like me to lose any sleep.
It came out today that ComCast has a really, really big problem with nickname leaks. As in, they nicknamed a customer “Super Bitch,” and then sent her a bill with “Super Bitch” printed as her first name.
So, first of all, who’s the ComCast fuck-up who went ahead and actually wrote “Super Bitch” literally ANYWHERE in the customer’s profile? Second of all, I do feel bad for this woman, not because she was called a super-bitch, but because she found out about it. Let’s be honest, she’s probably underselling her reaction to having to go through ComCast’s notoriously enraging customer service ouroboros, even having 39 technicians come to her house in the course of six months to get her cable working right. Um, 39 technicians! Yeah, I’d be past being a super-bitch to them by the time it was all said and done. I would not be saying, “I was a little hot and angry,” I’d be saying, “Of course I was a bitch to them, they were being incompetent as usual, and it’s still no justification for actually entering ‘Super Bitch’ as my name on my customer profile. If they don’t want people to be super bitches to them, they should probably stop fucking up.”
But — I don’t blame ComCast agents for giving their customers rude nicknames. It’s probably not that ComCast as a corporation is totally innocent and they just happen to keep hiring the absolute worst customer service agents in the history of all mankind; it’s probably that their customer service agents are regular people, trying to do a good job, who are stuck between a corporation with stupid policies on the one hand and a lot of angry customers on the other.
Lord knows, my bakery coworkers and I had plenty of nicknames for our bizarre-to-terrible customers back in the day. Such as:
Pepe LePieu:An elderly French man who complained to us every single frickin’ day that our almond croissants weren’t like the almond croissants in Paris, because we put powdered sugar on ours. We informed him that we were required to make them that way and that he could special order powdered-sugarless croissants, but did he? No, he just kept coming in, buying the sugared croissants, and complaining.
Bug Eyes: A woman who was obsessed with her kid and obviously very tightly-wound, which is my theory as to why her eyes looked like they were popping out of her head. She was one of those people who are too polite — as in, she was exceedingly, excessively polite so long as she was happy, but if you made one mistake, she would rain hellfire down on you (with some variation of “HOW DARE YOU DEPRIVE MY CHILD”). While bugging her eyes out. It was haunting.
The Banana Nut: The Banana Nut wanted banana muffins with pecans on top. We couldn’t just do this and put them out on the shelf for her to pick up whenever, because we had to include only ingredients that were on the label on the shelf, and that didn’t include pecans. Again, did she special order them? No, she’d just call and ask us to have them ready for her in 20 minutes. When we explained that the muffins took 40 minutes to bake, she freaked the fuck out. She wound up harassing us so often and wasting so much of our time that she got banned from the store — and we found out later that she had already been banned from the three locations closest to us, as well.
Granola Bitch: Granola Bitch liked to come in on her bad days to vent her frustrations and grill me about the nutrition information for the house-made granola, which I explained repeatedly we didn’t have. Finally, one day, I told her that it was probably comparable to other granolas. “No,” she said, proceeding to over-enunciate, as if I didn’t speak English. “This has flax seeds and almonds in it. That means that it has more fat in it. I know this, because I make my own granola at home.” I hope the dumbfounded stare I gave her was enough to communicate how deeply confused I was as to why, if she never bought granola from the store, she was so concerned about the contents of our granola.
Cupcake Bitch: This one was my favorite. There was a customer who would come in in the evening maybe three times a week, for about two months, to complain to us about our cupcakes, contending mainly that they were ugly or tacky. We made them to appeal to little kids, of course, because little kids were the main cupcake demographic, so yeah, they were kind of tacky. On one occasion, she said, “If this was ‘Cupcake Wars,’ you’d lose!” On another, she looked at a cupcake that had orange-colored frosting swirled into chocolate frosting (we were approaching Halloween) and told my coworker, “These cupcakes are disgraceful.” My coworker, fed up with this woman’s repeated visits, said, “Your ignorance is disgraceful,” and then let our store manager handle the rest of the conversation. That was (blessedly) the last time she came in.
So, ComCast customer service agents: I feel you. I understand. But did I ever once tell The Banana Nut that she was crazy, or Bug Eyes that her kid was not that special, or Granola Bitch that she could go stick some granola up her hoo-hah? No, of course not, because that wasn’t my job and it wasn’t what they deserved. Like Super Bitch Bauer, and like you, they were just trying to get through their days however they could. It’s totally understood that back-of-house nicknames provide a lot of catharsis for people who have to deal with customers, but really, they have to stay in the back of the house.
Customers: very rarely this friendly and nice (Picture: Getty)
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