Oh, the sweet public. The generous, loving, patient general public. Where are they? Because they sure don’t shop at my store. One in ten customers are nice lately. And that’s better than none, but still. I’d like to not have to bite my tongue at least twenty times a minute to keep myself from saying what pops into my head. It’s become quite the task to keep it all in. Some people I just want to smack and ask how they’ve gotten this far in life. But that’s not great customer service.
I don’t know if I was just overtired, or my coffee wasn’t strong enough, or people were just really aggravating the other day, but I kept getting annoyed. And it was over some of the most trivial insignificant things, but I thought I’d share them with you all and you can laugh at my pain, as usual.
First customer had a handful of stuff. I honestly love this, because it’s the people who refuse to grab a basket and then it’s like a game of how much they can carry to the counter. Because they only came in for one thing, obviously. Anyway, she unloads at the counter, and I ring her up. She’s brought up several $3 packs of fingernails, $6 toothpaste, some random makeup, and then a handful of stuff from the clearance aisle. I tell her the total which came out to be over $40 and she blankly stares at me. Then she digs through the bag and pulls out one of the clearance items and demands to know if it rang up for $1.30 or not. I check it did. She pays. Whatever. But I really want to know… did she really think one clearance item put her over the top? What if it had rung up at a $1.50? Would she demand it be taken off? Like that would make such a huge difference in the price? I dunno. Whatever.
Next one… Two ladies come in and ask if I can do cash back. I’d barely opened ten minutes ago, so I told them sorry, but no, not at this time. One of them says okay and walks to the ATM. No problem. The other one says, “Ugh, I don’t want to use the ATM, it’ll charge me like $3.” And here is where I get confused because, she would probably buy something that was at least $1 to get the cash back. Then the cash back fee is $1.60. So… $2.60 is okay to get cash out, but $3 isn’t. Got it. Whatever.
For this one, I have to give a little backstory. On our old registers, the receipt printer would print receipts until the roll of paper was completely empty. You’d know you were getting to the end of the roll because a pink strip would appear down the center. Well, on our new registers, it doesn’t do that. We waste so much paper on the end of the roll, because once the printer senses it’s at a certain spot, it just won’t print. And the problem with this, besides being wasteful, is that it doesn’t tell you it’s not going to print until after a transaction, and then you have to hurry and change the roll so the customer doesn’t get mad or impatient, or whatever.
Anyway, so this happens after I ring up a lady for a greeting card and a candy bar. I ask, “Do you need your receipt?” As I’m already grabbing a fresh roll to change it out. She says yes. But then sees that I’m having to change the roll and says, “Never mind, I have people waiting in the car, I can’t stand here forever.” And she walks away. I was literally two seconds away from being done changing the roll… But whatever. I don’t know why this bothered me so much. Like I said, I was probably overtired, but it just really got under my skin that waiting two more seconds would have killed her.
Last one just has me pondering how people survive without someone holding their hand. A woman walks in and asks for the restroom. I tell her it’s on the back wall and point. Someone please tell me how that wasn’t good enough directions? Because this woman just stared blankly at me and said, “Back wall…?” Super-duper slowly, like the words weren’t in English. Then I say, “yes, the back wall. By the laundry soap.” She does it again, “laundry soap…” and then walks in that direction. But. Ugh. What? There are only four walls on the building. Front, back, left, right. If I say back wall AND I point! I feel like that should give you the information you need? I just don’t understand! Ugh.
I need a drink.