Another Christmas in retail has passed. And people are still something else. I can’t wait for the day that I won’t be working in a store where people will yell at me for them not planning ahead. Because it’s never the workers fault that you didn’t come buy your gifts until the week of. We didn’t tell you to ignore our holiday displays for the last two months. I understand not everyone has the funds to buy ahead of time, but it doesn’t make it our fault we ran out of something.
But that’s not even the worst of it. Let’s argue about every price because you read something and interpreted it into whatever you wanted. Because “buy one get one 50% off throw blankets” translates to half off everything on this aisle. This woman went so far as to start telling everyone else in line that the sign said no such thing and its false advertising and they should all go grab blankets too and insist they be half off.
When I offered to go grab the sign to show her, she stared at me like she wished she could kill me.
She continued to argue with my cashier about the price of every item she had in her basket and then yelled at him for putting a bottle of fingernail polish remover in the same bag as eye liner. Because he could have blinded her. The sealed fingernail polish remover could totally leak and get inside the plastic package holding the eye liner stick and get under the sealed cap and then of course when she used it, she’d go blind. Right.
At this point I opened my register to ring up the people behind her because the line had piled up during her tirade. As she left she asked for my name because she would be calling my general manager. He apparently sent her in to check on me and I failed. I wouldn’t be working here after today. I said I couldn’t wait and told her to have a nice day. At my meeting that same day, my boss laughed.
On top of the rude and ridiculous, there’s the shoplifting. On Christmas Eve, I didn’t wear a work shirt and was cleaning up the seasonal sections. A teenager was at the other end of the aisle trying to open a toy. He glanced at me, assumed I wasn’t an employee, and continued to pull at the plastic.
I asked, “did you pay for that?”
He said, “I’m going to.”
“How about you pay for it before you open it?”
“Ugh, I’m gonna buy it.”
“Okay. Go buy it now. Before you open it.”
“I don’t want it then.” And he tossed it back into the table.
“Great. Have a nice day.”
I turned around and he picked it back up and went back to trying to open it.
“I’m still standing right here.”
“Okay! I’m gonna go buy it!”
“I can just call the police, since opening something without buying it is shoplifting.”
“Oh my god!” He throws it on the counter and walks away to his friends. They check out and leave, him glaring at me the whole time.
Because I’m the worst.
Sigh.
And today I’ve had people complain that we don’t have enough Christmas clearance. Because now it’s wrong of us to sell most of our merchandise before the holiday.
Here’s to another year in retail.