How to be the kind of customer that cashiers hate

The BBQ Pit
81

:frowning:

Don’t say that. I have a friend who escaped from the store and went into teaching English, and she said it’s like waking up from an awful nightmare.

I think I could handle the awful customers, wierd regulations, and small paycheque if I just felt I was contributing something.

I’m part of this awful company, and I don’t feel I’m doing any good for the world. Every time I look up from my paperwork, I see the fashion section, and I can’t help but think that a whole forest must have been killed to provide paper for magazines that push the idea of anoerexia onto women as healthy. For political magazines with self-interested agendas. For porn, for tabloids, etc.

I’m getting a little disgusted with selling cigarettes, too. Between that and selling lottery to customers with obvious gambling addictions, I’m beginning to feel like a drug dealer.

82

Hamish. I’ve taught for several years. Teaching is a very flawed career and not because of probems with students but for many, very different reasons. Let me describe the career choice of career ‘A’.

Career ‘A’:

Starting salary: Bad to OK, depending on location
Intermediate level salary: Very close to starting salary
Advanced (15+ years exp): Close to starting salary

Stress level during job: High to very high. Unpredictable.

Career advancement (promotions): None.

Inherent respect general public has for career (the “you do that, wow” factor): Very poor

Value of experience to other fields (if wish to switch): Very low.

Value of experience within field (switching jobs to different ‘company’ doing same thing): Low. 3-5 years experience preferred. If have more makes you less desirable since won’t pay you more. May continue to get job offers but for equivalent salary of 3-5 years experience even if have 10, or 20.

Difficulty that ‘business’ has in replacing you: Very low. Can be replaced in minutes.

Question: Would you choose this career?

83

Hamish, some hopefully useful advice from someone who’s been there.

People going into teaching are almost like a cult. They will not listen to the negatives of the career but need to find out themselves. Just realize this:

You can leave it. Even if you teach for, say, 8 years, you can leave teaching and do well. Yes, the time spent teaching is will not count for much, however, businesses will respond to your maturity (say you are 30 years old then) and your zeal in trying to make up for lost time. Many teachers get trapped into the “I’m stuck teaching and can’t get out” mentality. If teaching sucks, get out, but it usually takes about 5 years or more for someone to actually do it (if they do).

Make sure you have an actual college degree in whatever you major in (English?) and not a “Education degree”. I hope I don’t piss anyone off with that last sentence but it is true. Make sure you have a BS/BA degree in English and not Education or English Education.

Keep your eyes and ears open your first year and not be so quick to dismiss the grumblings of the older teachers. See the environment as it really is and not as you hope it will be. Then decide if it is for you.

84

lol that was funny…

85

Well Hamish, I for one am glad that somebody is willing to do a very important job even if it doesn’t offer stock options. Imagine how wonderful the world would be if everyone who wanted to teach was instantly derided for their choice to make the world a better place while they pay their rent. Good luck! It’s better than slaving away making somebody else rich!

It’s my fifth day on the job, and already I’ve got enough stories of psychotic customers to keep you all reading for an eternity.

"But this hundred piece tool set was marked as $5.99". No, it wasn’t. Somebody might have set down the hundred doller tool set next to a box of $5.99 paper towells, but that doesn’t mean I have to give you the tools for $5.99. Yes, I will walk back with you to point out where and why you are wrong (not that you don’t know that already), but no, I will not be nice to you after you make a line pile up behind you just cause your trying to scam me.

"Here, let me pay a dollar of this with my Visa, fifty-seven cents in cash, and I’ll write a check for the rest" Ummmm…no. If you realize you are out of money in the middle of a transaction, we’ll let you finish up with another form of payment. But I’m not gonna run three different transactions for your miserable five dollar purchase just so you can work some finanicall voo-doo. There is a bank down the street. Use it. If I tell you “no” and you argue back that you know that I can do it, I’m just gonna say that I can bark like a dog, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna do it for every customer that asks me to.

"Hey Goddess-Face" Ugh! I think it slimed me! I can understand a little bit of hitting on the counter girl- I am kind of on “their” turf. But if you simply reek slime and insist on calling me bizarre things like “Goddess-Face”, I’m not even gonna smile nicely. I get paid to do my job, not ward off the advances of geriatric delinquites.

86

I currently work at Texaco, BTW.

People who steal packs of cigarettes: you suck. All of you. Do you know that we sell the cheapest cigs in the area, but when you take a couple packs it throws off my cig count at closing and means that I have to pay for the stolen packs? I don’t even fucking smoke, but I have to pay for you because you’re too damn lazy to pay $2.80 a pack for some friggin Marlboros. Or $1.80 for some Liggetts.

People who give me $5 for something that costs say, 4.57. That's all well and good because counting out .43 cents in change isn’t that hard, it’s when I have completed the transaction and you go and try to hand me a bunch of coins when I have your change in my hand. “Here, maybe this will make it easier.” No, just let me hand you your change. If you wanted to give me a lot of coins, please do it before I type into the register that you have given me $5, because it might not be hard math but when I look at my line of customers I realize that my mental math is simply not sharp enough to open the register again and complete the transaction in my mind for the second time. Plus I don’t want to look stupid when I type it into the calculator.

People who want gas- I’m sorry if I have just started working 2 weeks ago, but I have not yet mastered the art of getting the pumps to do whatever I want them to. If something goes wrong, please be patient enough to wait a few seconds while I figure out what is going on. It really isn’t my fault, and 90% of the time it is because you cannot follow simple instructions clearly displayed on the buttons outside. Plus- if you have a credit card, choose the “pay outside- credit” button and complete your gas-pumping experience without involving me. When you come in and hand me your credit card, it makes me think that it will be bad and by approving you to pump gas I will end up paying for it.

The only items we sell are the ones you see in the store. If you do not see something on the shelf, it will not be in the back. We don’t even have a "back’ area we are a friggin convenience store. There is the cooler, which is filled with drinks and boxes of drinks, the managers room which is simply candy and cigarettes, and the food preparation area for Subway. A sink, and storage area for cups and cans of olives. We don’t hide merchandise from you, and we certainly don’t give you a prize for guessing something that is not displayed.

A plea from anyone who has to change trash as part of their job description: if you see that the bag has slipped down into the can so that a piece of garbage might potentially fall inside and not make it in the bag, please be kind enough to pull the bag back over the rim. You don’t understand what a pain it is to remove the top of the garbage can and see that every piece of garbage is carefully sitting atop a clear plastic bag that is wadded underneath the piles of dirty napkins, pizza boxes, spilled soda and spit from somebody chewing tobacco that you inevitably sold them.

You see the large rack of maps in front of you? I promise I won’t charge you to look at one if it will spare me from having to explain that I don’t know exactly how far we are from every major city in the western half of the U.S. I will tell you where you are right now but I hope you can learn to read a map and understand a distance scale without me.

When I ask for your ID even though you are 55 years old, I am doing it because my boss is behind me, alright? I am not doing it particularly to inconvenience you, and having you swear at me because I asked to see your drivers license isn’t my idea of a great day at work, it really isn’t the end of the world. It is the people like you who would bitch me out for selling cigarettes to minors, so don’t complain that it is state law to ID everyone.

Now I am a woman, but this comtinually amazes me. Every single time I go to clean the women’s bathroom, there is paper everywhere. Nearly every square of tile is littered with little scraps of it, where does it all come from? If you drop it, pick it up. If not, I get bitched at by my manager for not keeping the bathrooms clean. The floors are relatively clean unless you urinated on them, I wash them down with bleach every night.
I believe that’s all for tonight.

-foxy

87

If an item doesn’t have a price tag on it, please don’t say, “It must be free, then. Ha ha.” I won’t hate you for doing this–I know you’re just trying to be amusing. But after hearing it over and over and over, it gets annoying. Thank you.

88

Yuck. Unoriginal jokes. We have a lottery-ticket machine at my store. The two jokes I hear at least a dozen times a night:

“It’s the winning ticket, right?”

And

“If it doesn’t win, I get a refund, right?”

89

Just be glad you don’t work at my dep, Hamish, dear.

I swear to God, with all the beer and cigarettes I buy there, I’m single-handedly keeping the man in business. :wink:

Plus, I’m such a “regular” that he lets me run up a tab when I’m broke… :eek:

90

ladyfoxfyre-um, aren’t you aware that making YOU pay for for stolen items is illegal? They CANNOT make you pay for them.

91

You haven’t experienced truly surreal cashiering (and believe me, I’ve paid my dues in that department!) unless you’ve gone to a “Beriozka” (translation “little birch tree,” aka Soviet-era hard-currency-only store for foreigners who either have no patience or connections to buy what they need at state-set prices, or are dumb tourists who either don’t know that they can buy the cheesy souvenirs for a tenth the price elsewhere or don’t want to bother with the language barrier).

I spent a semester in Leningrad, in a dorm down the block from a large tourist hotel with one of the abovementioned establishments. Every once in a while, I’d have to buy something there for hard currency, because it simply wasn’t available elsewhere, and I had no direct black market connections (and would have been too chicken to use them if I had). So I’d use a $20 traveler’s check to buy, say, some batteries, a box of tea (rationed at the time, but obligatory to offer to guests), or a can of tomato sauce, and would get my change back in whatever random combination of currencies the cashier happened to have handy: pounds sterling, Australian dollars, Finnish and German marks, Belgian francs, Japanese yen, sometimes all of the above, in one transaction, in small change.

It must have sucked for the cashiers, because they’d have to do currency conversions manually, with an abacus, because let’s just say the registers weren’t terribly sophisticated. By the end of the semester, I had quite a stash of small change in various European and Asian currencies, no matter how hard I tried to get rid of them to buy the occasional chocolate bar or decent cup of hard-currency coffee I craved. So at the end of the term, I piled it all into a plastic bag and did one last splurge of stupid small luxury items to give to my friends as gifts. I paid in probably six different currencies, in small change. The cashier probably hated me, but that’s what you get for being forced to operate in a fictional dual-currency system…

92

A good (bad?) example of a Customer You Don’t Want To Have would be my late friend Fred. He loved to harass establishments, McDonalds in particular for some reason.

Once, he took an uncut sheet of $5 bills (yes, you can get them from the Mint, for an additional charge) and ordered a Big Mac Meal. Then he whipped out a pair of scissors and cut out one of the bills and handed it to the poor teenager behind the counter. The look on that poor guy’s face was indescribable.

As another example, we were in the Dave & Busters in Philadelphia ( a GREAT chain, BTW) and were having a little trouble getting a drink. I (as well as most people) would have just walked the 10 feet to the bar and asked for assistance.

Not Fred.

He pulled out his cell phone, CALLED THE FRONT DESK and asked what we had to do to get a drink in here!

The manager was at our table in 15 seconds. Effective, but I felt like crawling under the table.

Ah, Fred, you went too soon…

93

If that’s the way you feel then you and your cashiering brethren and sistren should stop resisting --ahem–change, and advocate the abolition of the penny, and resize the nickel to something more in line with the value of that coin…what the heck, maybe it’s time to abolish the nickel too. Probably all the other coins should be “smallerized” too. My take on my fellow Americans’ reactionism when confronted with the dollar coin is well known around here, and probably doesn’t bear repeating. But when someone complains about having pennies sloughed off on them, especially when that someone is a cashier, I just can’t resist saying, “See? See? It’s time for a change in our change.” Even people who say they couldn’t bear to say farewell to the penny, or even the dollar bill, don’t like to fuss with piddly-shit little coins that can’t buy anything, even in handfuls of ten or twenty.

These days, though, if I’m at the grocery store and I get pennies and nickels, I just dump 'em into the charity collection bank.

94

Ahhh…cigs.

I feel so vindicated about cigs right now. Usually I have all the same complaints. Peopel bitch about needing ID, but I get fined and dragged to court if I don’t ask for it. So I ask. But Moday, ohhh, Monday was a great day…

Guy walks in and asks for two cartons of Newports. I ask for ID. (I’m a good little machine) He gives me a huge song and dance but agrees to go home and get it.

Two hours later he is back. He turns 18 in October. I say he turns 18 in October. He compains. I type the date on his ID into the computer (which I almost never do because I’m reasonably quick with comparing years.) the computer says he’s too young. He goes into a huge song and dance about how he turns 19 in October, not 18 and he knows how old he is… I shoo him off.

His buddy comes in, asks for the two cartons and presents ID. He is old enough, so I accept it. He hands me an unsigned credit card belonging to a Darla XXXXX. I hand him back his ID and tell him that he is not the owner of this credit card, so I can’t charge 80 odd dollars to it. (Cigs here just went up by another dollar or so a pack. A carton costs $42 before tax…) He says its his friend’s card and sends Mr. SongandDance back in, who says it belongs to his mom and he has permission to use it while he’s at school. I call the manager (this is no longer in my job description.) Before Rox gets from the office to the front kid is gone.

Darla is indeed the kid’s mom, but she didn’t know he had her credit card and he is in an awful lot of trouble. As soon as the police find him.

Remember kids, don’t try to convince the clerk you’re over age, she’ll just be able to get a better description to the police after you’ve filched your mom’s credit card.

95

Medea, that fucking rocks.

I once had some moron hand me a LIBRARY card! LOL

96

I work at McDonald’s. I’m the second window person - the one who assembles and hands out the food in the drive-through.

A few nights ago, on my second or third day of working there, during dinner rush, when I had a full screen of orders and we were understaffed and I had to rush around making french fries and urging the grill boys to finish making my orders and putting everything into bags and keeping track of what went with whose order… I accidentally gave a woman a salad but forgot her packet of salad dressing.

She came back around the drive-through circuit and started bitching me out about how stupid I was for not being able to remember to give her a packet of salad dressing when I have the easiest job in the world, working at a fucking McDonald’s flipping burgers, where retarded people with no frontal lobes still manage to do everything right and give her her salad dressing properly.

::sigh::

97

Eva, that wouldn’t have been the “Pribaltiiskaya” on ul. Korablestroitelei, would it?

Mr. Miskatonic: That was one of the most beautiful sites I’ve seen in a while. If we were all as smart as Cecil and as forthright in our relations with others as Gord, this world would be a far, far better place.

98

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Olentzero *
**

Eva, that wouldn’t have been the “Pribaltiiskaya” on ul. Korablestroitelei, would it?

One and the same, leaky windows, dysfunctional elevators, and all. I lived on the 13th floor (of the dorm, not the hotel) during the fall of 1989. What a wacky time to be in Russia! But the Pribaltiiskaya had the only decent coffee in the city. We used to like sneaking in on the pretext of changing dollars for rubles, have a cup of coffee in the hotel, and play “let’s spot the hard-currency prostitutes.”

99

Oh, hey, this would be the place for my Michael Jackson story, wouldn’t it!

Okay. Disneyland. Summer of 198(cough). I’ve got what I consider to be a primo shift - 1800-0250 in Disney Clothiers. This is primo for me because a) it’s a night shift and b) Clothiers, although on Main Street, is seldom that busy at closing. However, it is tied to three other shops going up Main to the Hub.

Right. So…

One hot July night, after we’ve closed the doors and have started counting out the registers, my lead gets a phone call from the supes.

“Don’t close yet. Michael Jackson wants to do some shopping.”

Fine. So (amid much grumbling) we flip a coin to see who has to ring him up if it comes to that and put the rest of the tills back in the drawers.

Did I mention that it was one-thirty a.m. at this point?

He left at three, having never done more than raced through our shop with his medical mask on. He didn’t even buy anything in the China Closet (his real destination, evidently).

I got home at four.

Wank.

Oh, and when the voices come on and let you know that Disneyland is closed, but the shops on Main Street will close in an hour? Don’t be surprised if after that hour (plus another) is up we refuse to let you in because we want to go home, too. Yes, I know you can see other people in the shop. Believe you me, we’re doing our darndest to get them the heck out, too. Except we’re a Disneyland shop, so we can’t tell them to get lost.

100

Not to turn this thread into my daily bitch-fest, but oh man…

Today I had three people try to pay with hundreds before ten AM. Most of them got their eighty-odd dollar of change back in fives. Sometimes the register makes it’s own justice. Then a rock star got mad at me for not being able to open the reg and give him change (or, most specifically, change his coins in for bills). It got to the point that I told him he could to the reg and press all the buttons he wants to try to make it open, because I sure as hell can’t make it open, but the only one that’ll work is the one that means we’ve been robbed and calls the police. He stalked off close to crying in frustration.

Stupid fuck didn’t even need the change, he just didn’t want to carry coins around.

Lady comes in and buys a hundred bucks worth of auto parts, and a eighty-cent bag of Cheetos. She wants to put the auto parts on her debit card, but she can’t possibly put the cheetos on her debit card. The debit card is only for major purchases, apparently, and so I get to split her bill up and conduct two transactions (with a line of people growing behind her) so that she doesn’t completely ruin her financial planning by having an extra eighty cents on her debit card.

Where do they get these people? Why do I have to work this stupid job? Ugh!!!