Jerks and Stupid Customers at your job

[Tyrinus]

Anyone else run into the customers who demand a discount for buying so much stuff?

All the time.

The only customers I'll give discounts to are the ones with friendly dispositions, sometimes they ask sometimes they don't. Ask for one and I tell you no, then you drop the matter, then I'll probably give you one depending on what/how much you're buying anyway. Demand one because you have a sense of entitlement and you get nothing. Being nice goes a long way, far too few people realize this.

 

[DarknessOfDeath]

Sometimes I'd like to let out a can of whoop-ass on my manager

 

[Hobgoblin]

All the time.

The only customers I'll give discounts to are the ones with friendly dispositions, sometimes they ask sometimes they don't. Ask for one and I tell you no, then you drop the matter, then I'll probably give you one depending on what/how much you're buying anyway. Demand one because you have a sense of entitlement and you get nothing. Being nice goes a long way, far too few people realize this.

Amen. Be nice to the guy behind the counter, you need him.

 

[Ace of Knaves]

It's funny, when I do a job for less well off people they are always willing to sort me out a nice cup of tea or a bacon sandwich. But then when I do a job for rich people, they don't even acknowledge you.

I suppose a lot of rich people around my way look down on construction workers, wankers.

 

[LostSon88]

Amen. Be nice to the guy behind the counter, you need him.

Second to that.

Seriously, being polite goes a LONG way. I hate it when a customer comes to my line and I greet them ("Hi, how are you doing today" or some other variation on that) and all I get back is either a blank stare or a disinterested look...or they completely ignore you all together.

Once they do that, i'm pretty much done with trying to be nice to them and want them to get the hell out of my checkstand ASAP.

LOL...even when they finally leave, I can't help but mutter under my breath or fake cough, "a**hole."

 

[OctaviusINC]

I remember my 1st day I worked in the music/movie store, and this couple came in and basically started to assault me in a weird professional type of way. You could tell they always did this, because they were really prepared. It was like a surprise court room case. My Manager went to the back for 10 minutes to make a phone call prior to them coming in. They were very upper class looking. They were complaining that they bought a CD from us and it didn't come with a free Itunes card like the ad in the store said. I remember just laughing after 5 minutes because they seriously started to pull out documents and folders proving all of this. It was a $5 itunes gift card. Geez.

I told them that this was my first day and I understand their problem, but being a newbie and all, there's not much I could do about it. I told them my Manger will be back in 5 minutes or so and he'd take care of it. So they began to walk around the store and whipped out their digital camera and took pictures of all the ads in the store, including the little text at the bottom. It was quite entertaining. They told me how they were going to send this whole "case" to headquarters.

The best part was when my manager came out and they bombarded him and they did the same thing they did to me. They told him how they talked to me and I seemed "disorientated". That was hilarious. So he gave them their $5 gift card and sent them on their way. Crazy people. It's just that it wasn't THAT big of a deal. Show me your receipt and tell me you didn't get the gift card and I'll just give one to you. Talk about being prepared.

I always think it's funny when customers look at your name tag and call you by your name. I don't know why. I just thought it was cute.

There was this other dude that used to come into the store that we used to call "Porn boy". He would come in almost everyday and buy porn while having an insanely long discussion to me about weather satilites, how traffic builds up, polar icecaps, etc. And he'd talk FOREVER. And My manager would just laugh at me.

I also had some Christian guy randomly come up to me and give me a short bible lesson for 2-5 minutes every Wednesday WHILE I was working. He would wear a suit and come in and continue the lesson like it had a point. After a few months of this he brought HIS FAMILY into the store to meet me.All of them wearing their Sunday's best. They looked so honored. Really strange. Especially when I went to the food court on my break and seen them eating Taco Bell Last Supper style.

 

[Carcharodon]

Color-matching paint at a hardware store is nowhere near as easy as they make it seem in the commercials. There are people who just don't get it. Yes, there is a machine that we use, but 60% of the time the color requires some extra tweaking, and you need a good sense of volumes and colors to do it. I did it for two years and got really good at it, but it was STILL amazingly hard at times.

I've had customers bring in some crazy stuff to match. Like, entire doors, or drawers, or cabinets, when really the only thing that would fit well over the 1/4" hole in the machine would be a paint chip or a medium-sized piece of wood or something. It was ridiculous.

Nevermind matching FABRIC or ROUND objects. It was virtually impossible.

Still, people could never realize just how hard it can be. They think YOU'RE dumb because you have to tweak it AFTER using the machine because it STILL doesn't match. Then there were customers who used to say the color was off when to everybody else it seemed to match, and they would make you continue to work with it regardless of how many other people you had to serve.

You haven't lived until you have to color match 10 consecutive samples of paint.



Thankfully it's been a LONG time since I've worked there. I mean it wasn't terrible, but it was retail.

 

[Tyrinus]

I always think it's funny when customers look at your name tag and call you by your name. I don't know why. I just thought it was cute.

Oh, I hate it when a customer ask your name and then proceeds to call you by it like they know you. You calling me by my name when I don't know you will not get me to help you any differently, it only grates my nerves.

 

[Drizzle]

Here's a gem for you. Not about when I was working, but it involves a stupid cashier. I go to the gas station and after I'm done filling up, I go inside to pay since the pay at the pump machine was broken. So I go inside and give the guy my card. I tell him I put $22 on pump 3 or whatever. He swipes the card and says "Oh, it declined." I'm panicking for about three seconds and then he laughs and says "Haha, I'm just kidding, sir." I just gave him a **** eating grin and said "You want to be a comedian, huh? Well, don't quit your day job." He laughed because he assumed I was joking too. I wasn't. There's some stuff that you don't say to the customer. Saying that their card is declined when it really isn't is one of them.

 

[Arcturus]

With my current job, I don't have to deal with the public, so that's a plus.

 

[Hotwire]

Anyone else run into the customers who demand a discount for buying so much stuff?

Just yesterday I had a customer who was purchasing a $40 item, and actually had the nerve to ask me to thrrow in an $80 item free.

 

[Hotwire]

As I said, I work in sales. However, I'm not in the same store every week, I travel quite a bit. However I do end up in the same store from one promotion to the next from time to time. I've had customers tell me that the last time we were in their store, the guy gave them a deal, only to have me drop the bomb that it was me who helped them last time, and I didn't cut them a deal.

 

[Tyrinus]

I also like it when customers claim to be friends with the owner and that he was giving them a special price on an item.

"What's the owner's name?"
"Uh, I don't recall."(some friend)
"Well if the two of you worked something out you'll have to talk to the owner about it."

I walk away and several minutes pass, and the person either leaves or they come and get me to buy the item at full price because their bs didn't work.

 

[Schlosser85]

I work in a florist shop. Around the holidays, everyone jacks up their prices, and many customers are sending things out of state to relatives for Christmas or whichever. What I always dread around the holidays are customers who can't wrap their brains around the fact that we are only the middle-man in wire outs; we in Warren, Ohio do not deliver to Arizona or California, we just relay the order to a florist in the area, and thus we can't do anything about their sometimes admittedly exorbitant holiday prices. On Mother's Day I had a woman who could not understand this no matter how many times it was explained to her, and kept expecting (eventually demanding) that we give her some kind of deal. Obviously we can't lower another store's prices, but after my fourth or fifth time of trying to tell her this, she snapped "If you can't give me an answer, go get me someone who can". So I went and got Bonnie, who argued with the woman for about twenty more minutes, repeating all the same things I did (Bonnie is older than me, so I think the woman expected me to be a newbie who didn't know what I was talking about and thought Bonnie would tell her what she wanted to hear), until the woman finally goes stomping very loudly out the door, nose high in the air.

There was another time when a very well-dressed lady straight from church wanted a sympathy cross arrangement (which takes about two hours to put together) made up for her in twenty minutes. We told her it'd be at least an hour (even that was pushing it), and she said ok, fine, she'd go get something to eat. No problems yet. She returned in forty-five minutes max, expecting it to be done. She then stared at Bonnie (who seems to attract unpleasant customers) as she worked on it for about fifteen minutes, which we all find extremely distracting, and made little nit picky comments like it looking wider on one side (because Bonnie hadn't gotten to that side yet), and told her she wanted more flowers on top. The woman returned hours later, but obviously hadn't thought through how she was going to transport it, because she returned in the same little car she was driving before, which this was not going to fit in. We were fairly annoyed by her already, so we watched her first try to cram this four-foot-tall cross into her trunk, breaking off one side, and then circle around and around her car, first trying to stuff it in the right side, then going around to the left side (as if that's going to make a difference?), and finally coming back in and giving Bonnie a twenty minute lecture about how she didn't make it properly, how she has been coming here for years (even though no one remembered ever seeing her before) and everything has always been made properly, how apparently it was Bonnie's fault that it was broken, and ended up ripping pieces of it off and throwing them at Bonnie's feet. The woman ended up getting another arrangement free of charge for the same price, even though she was the one who broke it herself.

 

[Manic]

Not a jerk, but I had one damn annoying customer that used to come around all the time. He'd talk you ear off, and always about how Sony's Playstation 3 was the superior and best game console on the market. He never shut up. It was practically impossible to get away from him. I'd walk away and start putting stuff on the shelf, and he'd follow me around and keep talking. We all hated that guy. None of us could stand him.

Luckily, I had my department's phone number programmed into my cellphone, and I later memorized how to reach my contact list and call without looking at my phone. Every time that guy came around again, I'd reach into my pocket, pretend to listen, and secretly call my department phone. I'd then answer the department phone and pretend I was talking to someone until he walked away.

 

[Dave McFly]

Not a jerk, but I had one damn annoying customer that used to come around all the time. He'd talk you ear off, and always about how Sony's Playstation 3 was the superior and best game console on the market. He never shut up. It was practically impossible to get away from him. I'd walk away and start putting stuff on the shelf, and he'd follow me around and keep talking. We all hated that guy. None of us could stand him.

Luckily, I had my department's phone number programmed into my cellphone, and I later memorized how to reach my contact list and call without looking at my phone. Every time that guy came around again, I'd reach into my pocket, pretend to listen, and secretly call my department phone. I'd then answer the department phone and pretend I was talking to someone until he walked away.

now THAT is brilliant

 

[LastSunrise1981]

Have I had stupid customers? Yes. I work at a movie theatre and there was one night in particular that will always be fresh in my mind.

Last year in October we had two big movies come out on the same night. It was SAW IV and Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married, both films were selling out left and right during the course of the shift that I was working. This lady came in and I tore her ticket explaining where she needed to go. I told her Tyler Perry's film would be around the corner to her left.

Apparently she gets this information and goes on her way. She goes straight into SAW IV which was next door. I saw she was going in and almost chased her down, but at that time I was tired, irritated, and was ready to go so I decided to let her see the beginning of SAW IV before she realizes it wasn't Tyler Perry.

So I'm standing there with my manager waiting and she comes out fussing, yelling, and all upset because it wasn't Tyler Perry. Above the doors we have the title of the film and everything, so it wasn't my fault that she was too dumb to read and didn't have common sense to tell the difference between the films. My manager considers me one of her favorite workers so the customer yelled at her and my manager pretended to give me a talking to, but instead we just laughed in her office about how funny the whole thing was.

 

[CConn]

Customer: Do you have this portable DVD player? (shows me an circular)

Me: Yeah, it's right here. It's $259.99

Customer: But it's in your ad for $189.99

Me: Lemme see... (see's that its last weeks circular, and clearly marked as Dec. 7-13) That's last week's circular.

Customer: You mean you won't honor the price?

Me: No, it's last weeks ad.

Customer: Can I speak to a manager.

Me: She's standing right next to you.

Manager: It's last week's ad, we won't honor the price.

Customer: Then I won't buy anything. *drops all of her merchandise and walks away*

...

 

[Manic]

I work at a movie theatre

I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.

I don't think I could work at a movie theatre without flipping the hell out. It is the only business in which it's perfectly acceptable for customers to drop all of their food on the floor. I don't think I've ever met anyone who felt sorry for dropping half a bag of popcorn and a soda on the floor, except that they were planning to eat that.

 

[Silk Spectre]

Color-matching paint at a hardware store is nowhere near as easy as they make it seem in the commercials. There are people who just don't get it. Yes, there is a machine that we use, but 60% of the time the color requires some extra tweaking, and you need a good sense of volumes and colors to do it. I did it for two years and got really good at it, but it was STILL amazingly hard at times.

I've had customers bring in some crazy stuff to match. Like, entire doors, or drawers, or cabinets, when really the only thing that would fit well over the 1/4" hole in the machine would be a paint chip or a medium-sized piece of wood or something. It was ridiculous.

Nevermind matching FABRIC or ROUND objects. It was virtually impossible.

Still, people could never realize just how hard it can be. They think YOU'RE dumb because you have to tweak it AFTER using the machine because it STILL doesn't match. Then there were customers who used to say the color was off when to everybody else it seemed to match, and they would make you continue to work with it regardless of how many other people you had to serve.

You haven't lived until you have to color match 10 consecutive samples of paint.



Thankfully it's been a LONG time since I've worked there. I mean it wasn't terrible, but it was retail.

That sort of thing I'd blame on the company or at least their advertisers. They make it seem like you can bring in any random object no matter how large or small and get an exact match in seconds.

 

[Hobgoblin]

Second to that.

Seriously, being polite goes a LONG way. I hate it when a customer comes to my line and I greet them ("Hi, how are you doing today" or some other variation on that) and all I get back is either a blank stare or a disinterested look...or they completely ignore you all together.

Once they do that, i'm pretty much done with trying to be nice to them and want them to get the hell out of my checkstand ASAP.

LOL...even when they finally leave, I can't help but mutter under my breath or fake cough, "a**hole."

I never understand how a person can do that. Personally, it was nailed into my head to say hello to a person that says hello to you. Seriously, its something that people learn in pre-school, how can someone not do it?

This happens a lot:
Me: Hi, how are you?
Customer: Half pound of ham.

 

[Silk Spectre]

People on cell phones

I can not and will not give service to someone who won;t even acknowledge me. Then people get so wrapped up in their BS conversation they don't pay attention to what they are doing with the credit card scanner and get all mad when it screws up.

Cell phones are annoying everywhere. I seen one dumb broad out on the road try and drive a stick shift while texting

Of the people who feel the need to talk extra loud just so we all can hear how important they are.

 

[Hobgoblin]

I used to stand back and watch people try to push their shopping carts and talk on the phone at the same time. They were always running into things, best of all, each other.

Or they'll be listening or talking on the phone and pointing things out that they want. Ordering thier food and being polite is obviously a distant second (in terms of priorities) to yakking on the cell phone.

I wish I could swear and talk to co-workers while a customer waited to be served.

 

[JTIZZLEVILLE]

Even though I work at a Christian Bookstore, you wouldn't believe the amount of people who try to cheat us out/expect us to give them stuff for free.

We had a lady a couple weeks ago who walked in and wanted to listen to a new Christmas CD that had just came out. Well, we have the special computers where we can scan the barcode of a CD and it will play about 2 minutes of each track. The computers had evidently not been updated because the CD she wanted to listen to wasn't in there.

The lady ends up buying the CD anyways.

About 15 minutes later the woman comes in claiming that the CD doesn't work right in her car. I ask what is wrong and she can't give me a straight answer ("it pauses for a second before going to the next track"). I stated that we couldn't take back CDs that are already opened because of copying, but I said that I would be more than happy to exchange it for a new copy of the same CD because it was "defective."

She demands a manager who comes over and says the same thing. I then proceed to take the CD over to one of our crappy Walmart CD players and it plays perfectly. It's obvious to everyone that she just listened to the CD, didn't like it, and wanted to return it.

She then claims we aren't Christian because she can't buy and return things as she pleases.

 

[Hobgoblin]

She then claims we aren't Christian because she can't buy and return things as she pleases.

Huh?