From one retail worker to another. My most recent one was a lady who had the arrogance to comment on my weight who then yelled “fatso” at me when I ignored her and walked away.
When I was a barista not too long ago, this older customer with an Israeli flag on his car asked me (androgynous, gender-neutral name) in the drive-thru: “What’s the name on your birth certificate?”
That exact phrasing. Not even “what’s your real name?” or “what’s the name on your ID?” to achieve merely the most basic level of boomer transphobia. He wants to go way back to the hospital I was born at when my mom told the doctor to write this particular combination of letters on my birth certificate because he must know what that combination of letters is; that’s very vital information for him.
I told him that the name on my name tag at work is my birth name (which isn’t true, but who cares? Not like he deserves a true answer anyway). Thankfully, he took it and drove off with his shitty decaf espresso.
I think if I saw someone with an Israeli flag at work I would straight up refuse them service, even if I got dinged for it. It’s like showing up with a swastika and being like “service, please!”
I worked at a grocery store for about 5 years in a completely white southern town with an average age of 68 years old. I don’t even know where to start.
Nearly every day I’d hear the n-word get spoken casually. Often it was in the context of something like “why’d this price go up? It’s all that n-word’s fault” (they meant Obama). Why did they think this was ok to say to the 22 year old shelf stocker? We didn’t take orders from Obama himself. “Uhh lemme be clear. Twinkies are going up 30 cents.”
We also repeatedly got requests to see the manager, even if he wasn’t there and maybe I was the acting manager (since sometimes only two people would be working). Just endless complaints about the most minor things. The store’s AC is too cold, the aisles are too narrow, we should take expired coupons, there are too many Latinos working that day. Just endless parade of white goofy ass problems from people who could barely walk. Like literally barely walk, and then they’d get into their cars to drive home at 70 mph. More than once we had customers who’d shit themselves in the bathrooms and leave piles of feces everywhere.
I got so many pamphlets and DVDs too of insane conspiracy theories. I used to have a stack of the Loose Change movie, the one about 9/11 being a hologram or whatever. A bunch of them were very odd Christian evangelical home movies or church movies or something. Like there was one centered entirely around how thirsty people are in hell, a bunch of short vingettes about what led people to go to hell. Including:
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a woman who goes to college and becomes a liberal
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a man who wears an earring
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A woman who gets an abortion
They’re all shown being tortured in hell by demons with pitchforks. It’s nuts. And it’s terrible production quality, like they were filmed in the back room of a church or something.
I had a giant stack of Chick Tracts too, the pamphlets about how Muslims worship the moon and Family Guy makes you gay.
My favorite customer ever though was a lady who came to the register crying. I felt kinda bad so I asked her if she was ok. She said it’s fine, but she was experiencing culture shock. She had just moved for the first time and didn’t understand our culture or how to do anything. “Everything’s so different here” were her words. And so I did feel really sympathetic, thinking she had just made a huge change to her life at an elderly age. So I ask her where she moved from. Turns out she moved 9 miles, from the neighboring town, and within the same county. She didn’t even change zip code.
she moved 9 miles, from the neighboring town, and within the same county. She didn’t even change zip code.
white americans are not functioning human beings lmao
Turns out she moved 9 miles, from the neighboring town, and within the same county. She didn’t even change zip code.
More than once we had customers who’d shit themselves in the bathrooms and leave piles of feces everywhere.
A lifetime ago, I watched an old man circle the salad bar from my vantage point on the other side of the deli counter and witness a full sized dookie fall out of his church pants and onto the floor. Either this dude had a killer poker face, or he had no idea he just shat himself…
So I ask her where she moved from. Turns out she moved 9 miles, from the neighboring town, and within the same county. She didn’t even change zip code.
To be fair, it’s a huge fucking difference being from a small town and moving to a small town. You go from being almost family with everyone you meet to being an outsider to 95% of people.
That could be, hadn’t considered it. I’ve thought about her for a long time though.
The two towns are very interconnected although now that you say that, little pockets or families tended to stay in one place or another. The place she moved from is a dead lumber mill town that once threw a parade because a Chili’s opened up. She moved to a white flight town made up of former residents of the nearby larger (and more black) city.
She also moved to the white flight town right as the housing market collapsed in 2008/09, where America was starting to build its current, even more predatory real estate system. She could have been talking about that, she could have been talking about the lack of churches in town, or the fact there are traffic lights.
It hurts my brain to think about how to handle these people after the revolution 😕
I worked at a grocery store for about 5 years in a completely white southern town with an average age of 68 years old.
That’s all you needed to say. I’m so sorry.
Yo! Those fucking Chick Tracts lol. I remember finding one in a vending machine in DC (like I grabbed my soda and there was a pamphlet in there too). Me and my friends pissed ourselves laughing at that shit. It was all about this dude who ended up in hell, and what caused him to go there. It was legit like one time he looked at a girl’s ass, and another time he told a dirty joke.
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My worst customer service experiences were in call centers, and my absolute favorite, which really showcases how fucked up corporations are is this:
A problem caller, would call in every day multiple times a day, asking for a (I’m going to be vague here because I’m not sure how easy this would make it to find me by like, company social media teams or whatever) niche service that we offered that most customers never asked for and almost no customers needed more than once or twice.
We charged a small (low double digits) fee for it and he would have the service 3, 4 times a week, and then call in demanding a credit for the fee and screaming and cursing and using slurs until he got it, multiple times a day, every day. Even on the days when he’d already been credited.
Well we’d been complaining about him to management for months because he was so abusive and scary for the agents to deal with, and then a bomb gets dropped. He was using the service to cover his trail so he could harass his ex wife.
I thought, damn, motherfucker, we’ve got you now. That’s a felony. That is against TOS. You’re going to get your whole account shut down.
Told upper management, they didn’t give a single solitary shit about him harassing our people or his ex.
Tracked his stuff obsessively for several more months, noticed that due to getting multiple credits for every time he got that service applied, he actually hadn’t paid us in over a year. Looked over his address’s history and found that he had like 3k in charged off accounts where he’d done the same exact thing and then when people were consistent enough about refusing credit and the bills weren’t fully negated, he just didn’t pay them.
Sent this information to the same upper management folks, shut down within a week, address marked as forbidden to open a new account for for sales agents.
So I guess the moral is that for a publicly traded company:
: harassing people including our own employees and/or your ex-wife
: you owe me money
Call centers are fun. Had a woman demand to know why she was charged for an x rated movie. Asked he who could have been home at the time. It took her way too long to realize if her husband was the only one home, and the movie was purchased from their bedroom TV… 2+2.
I like the time a lady was screaming about getting scammed by someone who bought a new phone with her account. I noticed a lot of notes about her phone being broken recently. At one point she was yelling to me about when her husband gets back from the store I’ll have to deal with him. That’s when I realized it was Valentine’s day. Ma’am if you’re husband is at the store right now, and a new phone was purchased for your line on Valentine’s day…
She got real quite and just hund up lolThat’s actually a pretty good story haha!
Poor husband was just trying to surprise his wife
I worked at a call center a lonnnnng time ago. The guy was asking for information on his deceased mother’s account, which we legally cannot do without death certificates and probably probate letters. (Fuck I don’t remember). I told him that it was impossible. They guy stayed on the line for 5 minutes calling me shit like “low rung clerk” and “going nowhere in life”. In the end, he agreed to get the government documents, because there was no way he was going to get what he wanted without it.
It was probably my first ever experience with white boomer syndrome.
CS is its own special hell. I’ve never been yelled at more and in so many languages before. It took a while but when I realized that I had more power than the person calling for help I could severely fuck up their day if I simply chose to
Stocking the dairy section shortly before Christmas and the store is insane, like some aisles body to body. My u-boat tips over twice and I have to clean a bunch of broken dairy stuff (I’m vegan too so not a fan of actually touching dairy stuff). Then a special needs guy comes through the aisle and is telling his caregiver/aide he’s gotta go the restroom but I think she was an immigrant so she either didn’t understand him or she was just ignoring him. A few seconds after he passes by the smell hits and I see poop fall out of his pants. It keeps falling out as he walks down the aisle and around the corner.
I run to my supervisor who tells me to put wet floor cones around the poop so I grab as many cones as I can and set them out while she pages someone to clean it. I was gagging (it smelled really bad) so I went in the back for a minute to pull myself together. Then I go back out to see the supervisor and a coworker trying to ward customers away from the poop and the wall of cones but the customers keep stepping in or rolling through the poop with their carts. Multiple people moved or completely ignored the cones and then went through it despite it being brown poop on a white floor surrounded by yellow cones and was stinking up the whole aisle.
My supervisor tells me to post up in front of the biggest pile to ward off customers while she goes and finds someone to clean it so I stood there over a pile of shit for ten minutes trying to get the most clueless people in the world to stop being mesmerized by the treats for two seconds so they wouldn’t step in the very clearly marked out shit. Like it’s a wonder most customers can even make it to the store without getting hit by a bus or something
Congrats, you have the nastiest story in the thread
Why are people like this? WTF?!?
I worked in a corner store underneath a housing assistance block. All the customers were either alcoholic, disabled, drug addicted, demented, very elderly, or all of the above.
One guy lifted his top, and showed me his recent heart surgery, which immediately started bleeding once he took the gauze off. I had a lot of instances of them showing me their weird medical ailments, actually. This particular customer was a pathological liar, but reportedly had once murdered a man. He was now approaching dementia, but sometimes attempted to use his dementia to not pay for booze.
The worst, but funniest, was this infamous customer called James. He had inherited a fortune and spoke poshly, but was now a seemingly demented alcoholic. Just hangs around the village charmingly harassing people. Kind of a local myth type character.
One day he comes in and starts calling me common muck and all this other stuff, says he could buy the entire shop, and so on.
Another customer was there, who was friends with all the staff, and also a posh old alcoholic (but still totally functioning outwardly), starts defending the staffs honour. The two old men get into a shouting match. Then it escalates so they’re now both whacking each other with walking sticks. We split them up. James gets banned from the store. As he leaves, he does a big diarrhea shit mostly in his pants but a little bit on the floor.
The boss kindly opted to clean it up for me, given that it was my first few days on the job.
A while back, I’m the only person doing checkout and there’s one other person working returns/ customer service. That person inexplicably up and leaves for lunch without getting a relief person for either of us.
I’m working the long checkout line and a return customer walks over and yells in my face, “Hey do you see us over here!” I politely but sternly say back “I’m not going to do two things at once. I’m going to service the checkout line. You’ll have to wait until a person services the return line.”
Finally, after 15-20 excruciating minutes, a relief person comes up to work the returns. After being helped, that woman who yelled at me walked out right past me with her middle school aged son, no apology, no nothing.
I did feel good for sticking up for myself that day because previous me might have tried to do something stupid like work both lines simultaneously.
As a teen, I worked in a supermarket for years. People would always ask if the out of stock item was in the back. Guy, it’s not in the back. I’m aware that this is a meme now.
To this day, I can find items in a supermarket super fast, as I just understand how everything is laid out. I’m usually in and out of the store in 5 minutes.
I’ve noticed in the last 5 or so years in the area I live, that there aren’t overnight receiver/stocker shifts working large retail chains. Day shift employees will be trying to receive a delivery, stock the delivery, while constantly getting pulled away to tell customers that “well, technically the item you want is in the store but its buried under 1950 pounds of other products on a pallet that is packed in the middle of six other pallets. If you want to wait an hour or two, we might be able to find it for you.” while secretly hoping the customers will just fuck off so they can actually get the receiving/stocking done to stop all the questions.
I used use to do night shift stock work, and we got paid more for working late. I’m guessing this is the reason they’re stopping it??
Ya it’s super hard to stock with customers around. We used to lay all the boxes all over the aisle BEFORE we’d put shit on the shelf. It was so much more efficient. Some guys used to just throw all their cardboard on the floor and clean up all at once before the store opened. Also we could blast music all night. Of course we argue about tastes in music.
aren’t overnight receiver/stocker shifts working large retail chains
If that’s the case those companies are in bad shape. That’s a form of cost-cutting that will impact your bottom line badly very quickly. I can’t imagine how unusable my store would be if we didn’t have freight crew.
The only store I’ve ever seen where “the back” is a real thing is microcenter. I’ve seen the salespeople there offer on their own to check the back, then come back a few minutes later with the item.
Yes hello I am very smart customer shopping in a warehouse that has a cash register, wanting to know if you have it in the back???
I’ll offer to check the back when I want a little micro break lol. I don’t actually look for anything, just take the chance to grab a drink of water (no water bottles allowed at the tills per company policy) and check my phone in a camera blindspot before going back to them and saying “no sorry it looks like we’re all out”
(no water bottles allowed at the tills per company policy)
That has to be against OSHA, that’s some fucking bullshit. You need to stay hydrated! Call their bluff.
I’m not in America, and as far as I can tell they’re just required to provide safe clean drinking water, which they do. They require any water/drinks to be kept around a corner since we deal in food prep sometimes, and as far as I’m aware it doesn’t break any labour code. Don’t get me wrong, I still do it since only one or two managers actually cares, but it sucks when the power tripping dipshits are on the schedule
This is how to do it. A nice water, bathroom, and phone break
Worked in a grocery store for a long time. People don’t like being told “no” or corrected in any way.
If I worked in the bulk foods section and told somebody’s kid, politely, to stop sticking their naked hands into the food bins or smearing peanut butter all over the place, I almost always got the stink eye.
Told a customer once that we’ve never carried that item they insist they’ve bought here before and it really felt like it was going to end in a fist fight between me and him until his wife appeared and told him that, “No, we didn’t get that here.”
I once mistakenly told a customer who looked barely old enough to have started college, that it’d be helpful for us employees to not put things on the floor when you didn’t want them, just find somebody who works here to hand it off to or leave it at the register when you check out. The amount of offense that this young person took at being asked for the bare minimum was astounding.
The I couldn’t even guess at the number of times that I told a customer “no,” only to spend the next half an hour being drug back to them by other employees who where asked the same question by the same customer who was just shopping around for an employee to tell them “yes.” Only to be disappointed that I was brought back out to tell them “no, we can’t give you that for free. no we don’t have any in the back. no, we don’t carry that flavor. no, we’ve never carried that brand/size/flavor. no, we can’t mail you things. no, we can’t just get anything at any time we are limited to what is in the catalogs from the distributors we have contracts with. no, us buying stuff from amazon.com and selling it to you will not be cheaper than you buying it from amazon.com and having it shipped to you.”
Yeah I also worked grocery for a long time and this is true. They also really hate being told they parked wrong, or they parked their stupid car in front of the shipping area, or they’re triple parked.
They hate reading too. It doesn’t matter if a giant sign indicates something, they’re still going to ask or get mad.
One time we had to rearrange some shelves to make room for a bakery expansion, so that involved changing where stuff was located. There was a ton of confusion at first, but most people acclimated. One very obese elderly woman apparently was unable to find anything so she had to do several laps around the store finding stuff. At the register she was clearly exhausted, but had enough energy to scream at us, getting more belligerent until she made the claim we were attempting to kill our elderly customers (even though 99% of them were elderly). We tried calming her down but she demanded to use the phone to call the cops on us. We refused, but she came back the next day with a cop who interrogated us. America
My “favorite” type of customer is the customer who refuses to understand “no we don’t have that here”. They’ll ask the same question again and again only to be told once again “we don’t have that”.
I work in produce at a grocery store and we often have people ask us to cut roots for one reason or another. My coworkers absolutely hate dealing with customers sometimes and I don’t blame them.
I had a woman shove a yellow yam on my chest and demanded (I think?) in broken english/creole to cut the bad parts off. I guess my autism/tolerance levels were through the roof because I just went and did it for her for some reason. When I got back to her with the yam, she clicked her tongue at me in disappointment and began ranting about how I cut the soul of the yam too deep. She didn’t even buy the damn thing lmao
Well, there are some evergreen classics like people barely acknowledging your existence when you’re serving them/running them through the checkout (I love when I say “hello/good morning” and they just shove a coupon at me wordlessly), people taking out their anger over pricing/selection/whatever on me the minimum wage employee who personally sets the prices and dictates company policy (/s), getting mad at me for it being busy/having to stand in line when we’re (almost always) understaffed since corporate is slashing hours, or people asserting that they have been given military discounts or other deals before when the location has never offered that (one of my few pleasures is making guys with military IDs pay full price, makes me smile inside every time).
Then there are the rarer ones, like running an errand in my uniform after work (different store, different uniform color) and being accosted by people demanding my help. I had to explain to someone that no, I didn’t work at this hardware store, I just got off work and haven’t had time to change. That’s happened to me twice, separate jobs and separate uniforms.
Or the time I was working at a theatre in highschool and a guy started chucking 3d glasses at me for politely asking him to stop holding up the line with small talk after buying his tickets.
Then there’s the time at the same job where the same fucking person puked in the bathroom sink three fucking times over the course of the same night. He passed at least two garbage cans and was two steps from the toilets. I will not go into how I knew it was the same person other than saying the “samples” were consistent with each other. I was the one who cleaned it since I was 18 at the time and the manager was a piece of shit who wasn’t going to do it
There are times I really miss working where I didn’t have to deal with people
I was working customer service one Christmas and some dude comes up wanting to make a purchase. Like 600 dollars of kids clothes. Kids clothes are very small and cheap and so that was a lot of fucking shit. Literal piles on the register, which wasn’t designed for checkout btw so there’s nowhere to put this pile of shit except back into the counter or in bags on the floor.
I get through it, like 10 minutes later, finally done scanning all this motherfucker’s shit
He’s mad at me for not folding it, all 5000 pieces of fucking bathing clothes
I had to leave and make a manager deal with it, I wanted to scream at him
I was working at this media store where I rode out the beginning of the pandemic and my transition, it was a weird time all around. Not the worst by any means but still retail.
There was this one dude who walked up to me when I was running cash, looked me in the eyes, then down to my tits, then down to my nametag, then back at my eyes and did the sign of the cross. He would later come in on a regular basis to use our restrooms and go to every section, display, and employee that he found objectionable to shake his head and then do the sign of the cross. I had the unfortunate habit of always being there when he came in. He found me objectionable. That guy didn’t piss me off as much as the one dude who started laughing at me as soon as he walked up to my register. That was honestly the first time in my life that I felt rage and indignation over how others treated me for my gender identity, before then I just assumed that I somehow deserved it.
I have a gazillion stories but the full realization that the company I worked for profited off the dissemination of material that called for the abuse of women, children and minorities was a moment for me. Of course we couldn’t send those books back or anything because of the freeze peaches policies the company has. That, and the not-insignificant share of income reactionary and “christian” material represented.
Actually he was making the sign of the cross because he was thinking “Lord save me from this beautiful seductress
”
Just kidding but transitioning in retail sounds tough, shoutout to all those braver than the troops
retail and fast food workers should all have katanas and be free to use them against customers at their discretion
I used to work at a gas station. One time, a guy wanted to return some used coolant because he needed the money to fix something else about his car. I called my manager on his behalf to see what I could do. Store policy said we couldn’t do anything and I was about to give him the money myself when he just started punching the little stall I was in. Screamed the most horrific profanities at me and then sped off in his truck. He comes back an hour later attempting to return something else we didn’t even sell and proceeded to do the exact same thing.
Another time, an older gentlemen said he paid for his gas already when I knew that he didn’t. I thought it was a hustle so I just called my manager to see what I should do. I told him the guy hadn’t paid but was insisting that he did. My manager told me I probably fucked it up and just give him the gas. The camera recording showed I was right but I still got yelled at for it.