Crappy Customers

[Hobbit]

Something Awful recently posted the highlights of a thread they had where all the forum members traded their stories of seeing bad customers, both when they were employees and when they were other customers in the same store. It was hilarious, so I had to steal their idea.

Well, anyway, it seems that some people, when they go to a store, leave their civility in the car. Otherwise normal people turn into total jerks...and idiots. Unless you're really lucky or live under a rock, you have probably seen them, and if you've ever worked one of those boring, unskilled labor jobs, you've probably had to deal with at least one of them. So anyway, share it here, but nothing depressing. This is supposed to be a FUNNY thread. I'll start off.

I've seen some wierd things in my day working at a grocery store. I've seen people get personally mad at us because you can't buy liquor on a Sunday in Georgia. I've seen somebody using his finger to take samples of the different mayonnaise jars we have. I've even seen people move items around so they could claim a misstock and get a discount, but nothing beats these two scammers.

Scammer number one came in one day when Hellman's "Real" Mayonnaise was on sale. I think it was two for one, but it was a really good price. Well, the stuff was flying off the shelves and we were starting to run out, so she decided to take advantage of it. She claimed she was having a party soon, and needed 120 jars of mayonnaise. Well, we, of course, didn't have that much. Our store has a 'rain check' policy, where if we run out of a sale item, you get a slip of paper saying you get that item at the sale price when we get more in, even if the sale is over. So, we ordered the 120 extra jars, got them all stacked up and ready to go, and she came back in. Yeah, we knew it was a scam, but we had to pretend it wasn't. So, she came in with her rain check and grabbed ONE jar of mayo. She said the party was already over and she just wanted us to mark one off the check. Yeah, that's right. She wanted her next 120 jars to be on sale. The manager said she'd have to either buy 120 or pay full price. She stormed out, missing the even better sale on mayo we had to get rid of the surplus.

The second scammer was just an idiot. She wandered back to the meat department, grabbed a $50 ham, and poked a hole in it with a pen. Then she walked up front and claimed that she had driven all the way out from Oakwood the previous day to get a ham, only to find out that it had this hole in it. She wanted her money back. Oakwood, the town she claimed to have driven from, has a grocery store of the same chain (Publix) that's about 4 times the size of ours. This was so obviously a scam that it practically stank, but, once again, we must pretend it isn't until we have solid proof, so she gets her $50. Minutes after she left, the meat manager ran up to try to stop her. The manager saw the act, just not clearly. Anyway, they looked over the tapes (the manager and the girl who gave the refund) and saw the whole thing, so they put out an alert on her to avert future scams. Well, that was pretty dumb, but here's where it gets dumber. She came back into the store the very next day and tried it again. When she came up front, we informed her that the police had been notified. They caught her not 3 blocks from the store.

Anyway, those are my stories. Let's hear yours.

 

[fuzzykitten99]

I work at a bank, so I get my share of sucky customers on a daily basis. Most of them can be lumped into one group: the ones that can't seem to balance their own accounts or seem to think when they call to get the balance of their account, the money that's there is how much they have to spend. This is theoretically true, but they are not smart enough to realize that a check or check card transaction does not always clear or deduct immediately. Then they overdraft their account and call us and blame us for their stupidity.

There's actually a website that I frequent for this type of topic: www.customerssuck.com
if you go to the forums and register for free, there are topics and other stuff you can access only available to registered members.

 

[The ClayTaurus]

I sold shoes for almost 3 years in high school.

We used to sell these piece of shit kids sandles basically made out of foam and plastic for like 10 bucks a pair. They obviously weren't designed to last much more than one summer, but almost like clockwork at the beginning of each summer season we would have people come in with last year's style, claiming the sandals were defective. The sandals would either by legitimately broken, or the straps would sometimes even be obviously cut by scissors or a knife. Either way, the sandals were obviously heavily worn the previous summer. They would also conveniently rub out the size markings, and then ask for a replacement pair, seeing as how they're defective. And since you couldn't tell what size they were, you'd have to ask the scammer what size, and they'd bump the size up for however much their kid's feet had grown since last summer. What they were too dumb to realize was that there were other ways to tell the size of the shoe other than just the marking on the shoe. Most of the time we would just match their shoe up bottom to bottom to the size they wanted, see the obvious difference, show them the obvious difference, and tell them to fuck off. Our favorites were those who would only scratch out the US size and leave the European size, which we would just convert back to the US size and then laugh at them.

I've forgotten the hundreds of scams people tried to pull on us. I'm sure a lot of people got away with a lot just because none of us cared that much to pro-actively seek out scammers. But we took great pleasure in wasting the time of people who were too dumb to even try a good scam. We'd go to the stock room and bullshit for like 20 minutes: listen to the radio, watch tv, whatever, and the scammer would ALWAYS wait however long it took and never bitch, because they wanted their scam to be successful and they knew getting beligerant wouldn't help. I think one time we had one that was so dumb we all went to lunch, came back, and she was still patiently waiting at the register for us. We would keep scammers waiting for easily over an hour, coming out every once in awhile to keep them at bay.

But my stories are nowhere near as entertaining as the stories loss-prevention had. Those guys literally saw it all.

 

[Dan]

My coworker just haggled with 2 old ladies for about 20 minutes over the price of a big copy job. They did their own calculations and decided it should be $165, and we were charging $177. Their big worry was that they would have to account for that extra $12. And they told my coworker that he either didn't know how to do his job or didn't know how to add. And the manager gave them the copies for $165. I know I damn sure wouldn't.

 

[Said1]

I worked in a dept. Store in high school, and the girl who worked the CS desk told me that this women came in with a bag of really used underwear and a recipt, wanting her money back. She got it too, since she wasn't satified.

Then there was this guy we used to call napkin man, he came in every Thursday for the roast beef dinner. he brought everything from his own HP sauce to cheese and crackers. He also used about 100000000 napkins for everything.