Way back when I worked in retail we had a lady switch tags on some articles of clothing.
I worked in the fitting room, so I caught it…she’d switched the tags on a skirt and a suit. What she didn’t know is that each category of clothing had its own code prefix on the price tag, so it was pretty obvious to us worker bees that she’d put the skirt price tag on the suit.
I quietly called the registers, told them what was going on, then they played dumb when she came up and called me up to “confirm” the price.
I wasn’t the cashier, but I had to run price checks more than once on items that the customers insisted must be on clearance because they were on the clearance rack. And they were almost never even civil about it when I told them it must have gotten there by accident. Look, people, it’s Wal-Mart! It’s already cheap!
At my current job, it’s callers saying, “I saw a rate of (something far cheaper than anything on my system) on your website.” I’ve learned to ask them exactly what website they were looking at, and if they insist it’s ours, all I can do is tell them they must have misread or misunderstood something, but I can’t give them that rate. What is on my computer screen for those dates is what I can offer. Yes, I understand that it’s more than you want to pay, but there’s really nothing I can do about that. I’m sorry.
The other main “I want to lie to you so I can pay you less money” lie goes like this. Fortunately it doesn’t happen often, but I’ve gotten it a couple of times.
“I have an arrangement I made with my friend Mr. Big Boss to get a special rate!” Okay, then, I will happily put you through to Mr. Big Boss and you can speak to him, because I don’t know anything about it. He’ll inform us of any special arrangements he’s made with you and it’ll be no problem once I have his okay. What? You’ll call him yourself? Oooooookay. Well, in that case, is there anything else you need today? No? Okay, then, have a nice afternoon.
The best one was when they got his first name wrong yet claimed to know him. I didn’t bother to correct them.
Well, this exact thing happened to my husband today. The liquor store where he goes is still trying to unload the gift boxes of Johnny Black, so the bottle was inside a black tin. The bottom fell out of the bag just as he came up the steps. (We managed to save the wine; we tried to save the scotch, but it didn’t work.) I said, “Hey, take it back, tell them they gave you a defective bag, make them give you a new one!” And then we both laughed because we were sure it wouldn’t work.
The box is now dry. The broken pieces are in the trash. The front porch and mat are gonna smell like booze for the foreseeable future.
So…it would have worked? :smack: Would it work tomorrow?
I don’t know, maybe it’s because of the late hour, but how was the customer caught in a lie? Did he look that much younger than 44? Did he look like a teenager trying to pass himself off as being 21? I’m a bit confused.
Well, they’re paying the adult price (if they’re over 11), so since they’re adults, I don’t really feel like I have to pay another $9 for ME to see a movie I KNOW I don’t want to see. I’d go in if the kid was under 11. I do hang around to make sure they can get in, but that’s the extent of my parental guidance at the point of sale. So far it’s always worked.
(I also once went in to a different theater than the kids I was accompanying. I don’t remember what they saw; I saw Madonna in Swept Away and boy, was I sorry. I was embarrassed that my kids were even in the same building.)
Well the only reason for me to check the age of an I.D. would be to see if someone is over 21 or not. There is just no way that someone who looks near 21 can be around 44 years old. I’ve made silly mistakes before, but I’m not that bad.
Unless you are a super customer, no it would not have worked at my store. There is just no way of knowing you are telling the truth.
I had one guy come in and claim to be good friends with the boss and tell me that he gets discounts all the time.
I took great pleasure in telling him that the boss sold the store about two weeks ago. You’d think that a good friend would inform him about something like that.
Not too long ago I had to buy cigarettes for a friend of mine, as she’d misplaced her ID (in the bar where we’d been drinking, we know she had it then because they checked, too). She’s 35, and she was a little miffed, and you only have to be 18 to buy cigs and surely, surely she looked over 18. But if I didn’t know her, I’d have checked her ID myself. She looks like she could possibly be 18. Her mother is 60. If I were selling booze, I’d probably check her mother’s ID, if I didn’t know her.
I think it might have worked had he gone right back. After all, he had just bought it, had the receipt, had the sack, at that point the gift box (or tin) was, in fact, still wet. And he is a pretty good customer. Probably too good.
Tomorrow? Probably not. (Anyway he needed the scotch tonight. Monday, first day back at work after vacation, mouthy wife, cheeky kid throwing out vague hints of pranks in immediate future.)
Many years ago, I bought a bottle of Jim Beam and a bag of ice from Traders Joes. When I got back to my apartment I lifted the shopping bag (paper) out of the car. The ice had melted somewhat, the water soaked the bag, and the bottle of JB hit the sidewalk with expected results. A fifth of Jim’s finest all over the sidewalk.
The next day I was complaining to my friends at work about my bad luck. One of them used to work in a grocery store that had a liquor dept. He asked me if the tax stamp on the neck was intact. I said yes, it was, the bottom broke out of the bottle. He told me to take the neck back and ask, that the store could get their money back from the distributor if the tax stamp was intact.
So that night, I went out to where I had parked the car the night before and recovered the intact neck and went back to TJ’s.
The result was a replacement bottle of JB at no charge.
YMMV.
Back in Las Vegas, it seemed that a lot of people were “friends of the owner” or “child of the owner” when they’d try to get free or deeply discounted stuff. I took great pleasure in calling the owner over a couple of times (he liked to check things out himself). The most amusing thing were the teenagers who’d claim to be his kids. His oldest child was 3 or 4. The teens were generally told not to come back to the store (they were generally trying to get stuff for free).
That seems to be a big one “I know the boss.” When the TV station where I worked in Charleston was sold, I had some guy call up pumping for information. I asked him why he wanted to know, and he said he was a good friend of the (former) owner. So I said, “Oh, good, you’ll be able to get all the details from him then” and hung up.
This one only works with the accurate, albeit non-PC, Spanish-American pronunciation; sorry about that.
I was working the front counter at KFC in Ohio on a busy Sunday some 25 years ago when a big Mexican(?) man and his family filled our small lobby.
Big Guy: We bought some cheecken here yesterday, it was baaaaad. We want a refund.
Me (who’d worked the previous day and would have remembered this customer, and who could clearly see his car with its Texas plates parked outside the window): I’ll get the Manager.
BG (to Manager): We bought some cheecken here yesterday, it was baaaaad. We want a refund.
One of the main things I hate about working in corporate retail is that, despite the obvious bullshittiness of this guy’s story, the company would rather cave than alienate one asshole. That’s why I made this face :dubious: when I read the “one bite of a QP at McDonald’s” story in an earlier post. I don’t work in fast food, but if I tried something like that, as a manager, I’d be reprimanded for sure, and fired if it were a repeat offense of “insubordination to a guest.”
Yes, it is a vicious cycle. People get away with these scams by yelling and insisting so they continue to yell and demand until they get their way. It just makes it harder on the next clerk or vendor who is trying to do his/her job. More managers should read this.
One from my property management days, although it’s more about stupidity than anything. A tenant is signing her lease, and when all is said and done, she asks about how to arrange for the free cable. Free cable? We don’t pay for any of the utilities, unless it’s a duplex with one water meter. So she goes ballistic and wants to cancel the lease, get her money back, etc. because we advertised free cable and we’re not giving it to her. Advertising free cable? WTF? She said she saw it on the website and that’s why she wanted that house - free cable. So we check the listing.
“Cable-ready.” :smack:
To this day, I’m not sure if it was stupidity or trying to scam us, or a little bit of both.
Someone I know was the office manager for a State Assemblyman. She got frequent calls from people claiming that they attended high school with the Assemblyman and thus needed his personal attention.
Said State Assemblyman is 6’8" tall, and attended a very large local public high school (twenty years ago). Um, the fact that YOU remember HIM from high school does not in anyway mean that HE remembers YOU.
I’m not sure that this group of callers were lying, neccessarily, as opposed to just hoping that stressing their personal connection would get them better service, but it annoyed the office manager and wasted her time. And thus did not get better service.
When I interviewed at Panera for a second job, the manager asked me if the customer was always right. I laughed and said no. He laughed too and said that was the correct answer. He asked me how I would deal with a customer with a complaint, and I said I would treat them with respect and get the manager if I needed to.
It was a second job, I really didn’t need the money all that much, so I had no problem standing firm with customers. One guy wanted to cash in two punch cards for one free coffee (you know, a punch every time you get a coffee, and his two punch cards did add up to one free coffee, but they weren’t on the same card.) I gave him some song and dance about how the manager would see two incomplete punch cards in my register and I would get written up. He shrugged and said he understood.
I found if you have confidence in yourself and what you’re doing, and know when to get the manager, you can handle most situations. One thing I will not do is listen to someone cuss at me…that got an immediate hang-up/walk away. I do not get paid enough to listen to that crap.
OK, I can understand that. It’s the law you have to be 21 to purchase alcohol. It’s just different stores have different policies on when to ask for I.D. Some stores card if you look under 26. I’ve been carded at Wal-Mart where the policy is to card everybody. I’m 50. And although I’m vain enough to think I don’t look 50, I don’t remotely look like a person in my 20’s either. I just wasn’t sure where your store sets borders on when to ask for I.D. Some places will ask for I.D. even if you look much older than 21. Although, having worked in liquor sales myself, I agree you are always justified in asking for I.D. when in doubt.
Wait, they don’t add up? Why not? Say the magic number was seven. So if I came in 4 times with my card and got it punched and on the 5th time I forgot my card and got a new one, I couldn’t use the new one for the 6th and 7th punch? This doesn’t make sense to me. I once paid for a $200 piece of electronics with the combination of like 6 gift cards ranging in value. They didn’t have an “all the money has to be on one card policy”. I just think that if you have a “buy 7 get 1 free” program, and I buy 7 I should get one free regardless of the number of cards. I, or someone else or a combination of people bought seven coffees. If I was a manager and saw seven cards with only one punch on each I would ask how many free coffees the person gave out. Seven would be a bad answer…one would be perfectly fine. Sorry for the hijack.
-KJC
PS. I have a feeling the reason for this policy falls somewhere along the “Yep, that’s how they getcha!” lines.
