Beezlebubba, you and Gomez are my heroes for today!
I just don’t understand. I should clean up after myself after taking one item off a display? Uh, no, that’s the clerk’s job. I am a customer, hence, I give the company money, hence, I help to pay the store staff. That means I get to let them tidy up the store. If they want other people to do their job for them, they’ll bust themselves up to manager. Not doing someone else’s job does not make you an asshole. And doing their job doesn’t make you a nice person. It means the clerk is using you to promote his laziness.
As has been said, these guys hardly ever work alone, and it’s not as if the store in question is a warehouse-sized price club. Hell, those stores are so small, the clerk could probably toss the thing back onto the display without disturbing anything. Plus, it’s one item. It’s not like jpeg left a whole pile of stuff on the counter in the clerk’s way.
Choice (b) is good customer service, it just isn’t good for the company. Besides, there is a ©, which is call your co-worker out to fix the display, thus maintaing proper product placement, and remaining behind the counter to continue ringing customers. Nevertheless, leaving a display slightly low on product will not bankrupt the company.
Dammit, it is not my responsibility to make sure the clerk is happy. He’s there for my convenience. As I was taught during my stint in retail, “The customer is the most important person in the store. Your time is not as important as his.” It may suck for the employee, but it’s true.
It apparently WAS a big f***ing deal, if the guy who gets PAID to do this sort of thing couldn’t handle it!! And I believe that JPEG mentioned that he was blocked in by other customers, so it would have been a complete inconvenience to all of said customers to have him push his way through the crowd, just so he could do the clerk’s job for him. I’m not saying that store clerks are there to run around like slaves or anything, but for pity’s sake he was asking the guy to step out of line and elbow his way through a knot of other customers, just to save HIMSELF 10 seconds! I bet it wouldn’t have been such a big thing if the store had been empty, but JPeg already stated that he was BLOCKED IN. IMO, the clerk was just being lazy.
Yes, it is. It is perfectly polite and appropriate for a customer to abandon one’s intended purchases at the counter when the clerk is rude or impolite to the customer. What would have been rude is to have gone “Fuck you, moron!” and thrown the merchandise in his face, or across the sales floor. The proper action whenever you have selected an item from the shelves and then decided not to buy it is to turn over the item to sales personnel to reshelve; it is almost never appropriate to attempt to reshelve it yourself, and completely wrong to abandon it at some random location in the store.
And it is most rude of a sales clerk to impose on a customer to do his job, even if it would “make the sale clerk job’s easier”. Besides, as restocking merchandise is part of a sales clerk’s job, it’s not really making his job any harder.
I’m tempted to submit this one to Judith Martin for her opinion, except (1) I already have a pretty damn good idea what it would be and (2) I doubt any of you would really care.
The key question is this: What sort of a display was it?
Was it a rack full of the games, or was it a carefully executed scene starring a single game box and a backdrop and some action figures?
If it was a special display designed to be entertaining and/or beautiful, then it’s rude to take the game box out of the display.
But I suspect that in this case, the “display” was just a rack full of games.
A rack full of games says “buy one of these games!” Therefore, the OP is perfectly justified taking one off the rack. There was no reason for the clerk to ask him to replace it.
Exactly. Even a sign at the display would have helped the situation… something like “Merchandise also located at the register”. I would have taken one from the display anyways, as I would hate to stand in a line to be told “We ran out here, you can get one from the display though.”