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.
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.
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”.