I worked 8 years in retail. Grocery. Waldbaums, a chain that has since went bankrupt.
Evening shift. It's me as closing cashier, a girl several years my junior "running the front". Yeah it kinda sucks when younger people with less free time than you are promoted to better positions. Whatever, she was a nice girl. I liked her. If I didn't, I wouldn't of done the following in this story.
So closing shift, the store is dead. And, we were on the verge of bankruptcy anyway so last couple hours you can pretty much just hang out. So homegirl is sitting opposite my till on the public bench, reading her phone. I'm doing whatever. This odd little man in his 20s comes up and asks to speak to a front end manager.
Now chain of command, I call homegirl over to deal with the customer. Guy simply wants to know if a blonde woman came in and bought Cooking Wine about an hour ago. Homegirl says "I was ringing... I think so, but I'm not positive. We get a lot of customers."
Guy says okay. He leaves. Were both like, "that was weird."
about an hour and a half later, he comes back with the alleged Blonde woman. Stick thin, but shes tall. Both of them really quickly corner homegirl on the bench, and she's completely caught off guard. Blonde woman is like "Did you fucking tell him I bought cooking wine?"
Bewilder, homegirl reiterates to the blonde woman that she said it was possible, that she honestly didn't remember. This doesn't satisfy the blonde woman. What we'd piece together later is that you can get drunk off cooking wine, and she must be a recovering alcoholic and the weird little man is her boyfriend whos pissed off at her.
Anyway, this conversation is getting very intense. I'm standing there thinking, "Holy shit, this Blonde woman is going to wolverine claws on homegirl!" so I... and I can't believe I did this because I was opening myself up to being attacked: I put myself in front of homegirl.
Blonde woman, she don't like that. "Why the fuck are you getting inbetween us, I'm not going to attack her!" she yells. I'm thinking bullshit! But I just just smile and ask sweetly as I can "Would you like to speak to a store manager?"
End up getting Al. Al typical 45 something dude. Tall.
So Al gets explained the situation. Al goes to the blonde woman: "I don't understand the problem here."
Blonde woman wants proof to that she didn't buy Cooking Whine. At this point, shes demanding that we pull up the security camera feed and go through all that footage to prove that she didn't.
Al goes, "Yeah. I'm not doing that."
Blonde woman goes, "I'm calling the police!"
Me and Al both go, "Um.. I mean you can if you want, but they're not going to do anything. There hasn't been any sort of crime here. bye."
At this point, weird little dude is tired of the Blonde's bullshit and storms out. She remains in the lobby for several minutes on the phone, presumably with the police. eventually she leaves, but not before saying to us:
"You're ruining a BEAUTIFUL RELATIONSHIP!" Yes, with the same dramatic tone that you would expect. We mocked her for the rest of the evening.
Parasondox said:
PaulH said:
infohippie said:
Hell no. You couldn't pay me enough to work retail. I KNOW people are assholes, no way would I want to deal with the general public. On the other hand, I also believe that retail staff are actual people, which seems to be a pretty unusual belief itself, and I will go out of my way to treat them as such. I'm proud to say I am never the asshole shouting at the cashier about my crappy expired coupon, or some similarly entitled crap. Retail staff will always get a "please" and a "thank you" from me.
I don't know ... a lot of people are alright when you scrape away the neuroses and narcissism. You know when I got the most abuse? When I was a teacher. Parent-teacher interviews ... ugh. Some students may be bad, but parents are worse. Someone once offered me a shot at year advisor ... nooooooo hooooooo hooooooo waaaaaaay~~~. You could've given me an extra 20k a year ... still wouldn't do it.
There has been a lot more stories about parent teacher conflict in the past few years now which i just don't understand. when I had my parents evening, my mom and other parents would be on the side of the teacher because, well, they were teaching us little shits. Today it just seems like the parents, some not all, are even bigger shits. No teacher deserves that abuse from a bad parent.
TEACHERS ARE NOT PARENTS TO YOUR KIDS.
Hell I can explain that. I went to public school. I have plenty of stories of teachers fucking me over and abusing their power.
I permanently have that bias against teachers, if I had kids in school I wouldn't believe a damn thing they said.