Since you offered your script on what YOU think SHE should have said, why not just say “For a twenty dollar shelf? No thanks.” instead of the little “You’re kidding, right?” gem.
I’ll have to agree with your tagline, over reacting seems to be the sum of it. Asking someone “You’re kidding, right?” when they’re clearly not kidding and just trying to do their job makes you a bit of a jackass and it’s hard to feel sorry for you for the pissing match that took place after that. You might have walked out after barking at the manager but she won because you wasted a trip to get something you wanted and fought with someone for doing their job. Bravo!
Nobody here is disagreeing with your position, they’re disagreeing with your approach. You over-reacted, you even said so yourself. If you feel that over-reacting to something this silly (and something which we all have to deal with when going into a retail store these days) makes you the “winner at the end of the day”, then perhaps you’ll be even more proud of yourself when you collapse at the mall from a brain embolism, heart attack, or stroke (or any other various stress-related events) after a survey taker at the mall asks if you have a minute. It’s something stupid we all have to deal with. I have to tell the kid at Best Buy that I don’t want an extended protection plan, a free subscription to Entertainment Weekly and Sports Illustrated, or a chance to participate in a satisfaction survey, every time I go there to buy something as insignificant as a speaker wire.
The fact is, the cashier probably knows just as well as you do that the upsell policy is stupid, and only started to be difficult with you after you started up with her. Like everyone else here, I suggest that the next time it happens, simply take a breath, politely refuse the upsell, and go on about your day. They’ll get more enjoyment out of what is surely not a very enjoyable job, and you’ll get more enjoyment out of what sounds like a very good DVD collection, because you’ll live longer by not stressing about things that aren’t worth the time and effort to get stressed over. You think you won at the end of the day for giving her a difficult time, and she probably thinks thought she won at the end of the day for being difficult with you. In case it’s not obvious, most retail stores don’t give a damn about what their customers have to say anyway, whether it’s said to the cashier at the bottom, or to the store manager at the top … so why bother getting yourself and others riled up about it? We understand your frustration, but your misdirected angst towards a cashier at Office Max is inappropriate and benefits nobody, yourself included.
When I worked at a call center taking calls for a certain well-known mobile service provider (I mention getting hired in this thread) they had an upselling program they called Maximizing. When a customer called in and I pulled their account up on my computer, there would be a section on the lower right-hand side of the screen that we called the Maximize box. In that little box, there would be a number of services and whatnot, such as daily or weekly balance notification, that we were supposed to upsell. We were told about this in training. What we weren’t told until training was almost over was that we had a Maximize quota. We were expected to successfully Maximize at least ten percent of all our calls.
The thing was, a lot of the Maximize options were really hard to sell. For instance, on just about every other call, the Maximize box would have Sprint long distance services (for the customer’s land line). That’s almost impossible to upsell successfully (especially since about half the people I offered it to didn’t have land lines). Also, if you upsold something—balance notification, for example—that sometimes appeared in the Maximize box but wasn’t there on that particular call, it didn’t count toward your quota. I worked there for about a month and a half before deciding I couldn’t take it anymore and quit (well actually, I just stopped showing up and they fired me).
And you know, they focused on Maximizing almost to the exclusion of everything else. It was almost as if they didn’t care about providing good customer service, but only cared whether or not you Maximized a call. Every team meeting we had focused on how to increase Maximizes, not on how to provide better customer service.
After leaving that job, I decided to get a job taking calls at home for NBC’s shop-at-home network, ShopNBC. At the time, I only had one phone line and dial-up Internet service, so I had to add a second phone line and upgrade to high-speed Internet. I’d heard some bad things about DSL, so I went with Cox’s cable Internet service. A few days after getting set up with the cable Internet, I called Southwestern Bell (well, I guess it’s SBC now) to get my second phone line installed. My God, that representative must have asked me at least six times if I was interested in their DSL service. Even after I told her that I’d already gotten service through Cox and even after I told her I’d signed a contract with Cox. I was so irritated by the time that call was over…
For the record I was never really mad. It was more of a major rolleye.
My “you’re kidding right” comment wasn’t planned. It just popped out. Who in their right mind would buy an extended service contract on a shelf?? Even still I don’t think saying that was rude. Calling her a bitchy whore would be rude. Telling her she smells of mushroom soup would be rude. Chuckling and saying “you’re kidding” is not rude.
If that comment was the main reason her customer service skills were so bad, then she needs to find a different job.
As I don’t like to be hassled with upsales I avoid places that do it. That’s just me. If the store is more focused on greed then making customers happy, that’s fine. I’ll just shop elsewhere. If they can’t take no for an answer then I’ll leave.
I thought it was kind of a funny story so I wrote about it.
So anyway, ignoring Maeglin’s annoying diatribe…
The credit card companies do nothing to enforce any kind of coherent security policy. As I said, it’s all over the map. First of all, from the link that was posted earlier:
Even a 3rd grader ought to be able to look at this paragraph and realize it makes no sense. Can they check ID or not? It says they can if they suspect fraud, but that you don’t have to show it to them. That’s contradictory. (Well I guess technically it says they can ask to see it, but not necessarily see it, which makes even less sense. And what does “suspecting fraud” even mean? Is the thief going to stand in line at the cash register twirling his moustache and going, “Bwaaa ha ha…”?
More evidence that the practice is rampant.
More inconsistency.
In fact, the signature on the back of the card is the most asinine security policy ever conceived. In my experience, the signature gets checked less than 10% of the time. And what good does it do even if they DO check? Sales clerks are not trained in signature comparison; how would they even know that a signature wasn’t valid? My signature doesn’t look exactly the same every time I write it. Is someone with no training supposed to decide exactly how much variation from the original is allowed? It’s just silly. I’ve seen clerks, on the rare occasions when they do check, and in cases where the card was never signed, have customers sign the card right then and there. What good does THAT do? Obviously the signatures will match, because it’s the SAME person. Doesn’t tell you if they’re the actual card owner, though.
And then we have the gas station pumps that are PROGRAMMED to require the customers zip code before accepting the credit card. What the hell is that? Is that a security measure or marketing research? They don’t tell you, and they don’t offer any way to opt out of it.
Awhile back, there was a thread about credit cards, and a person who works for one of the companies admitted that they write off fraud as a cost of doing business, and really aren’t that concerned with it. You can say that ALL these merchants are violating the agreement, but at some point you have to realize the the credit card companies simply have no interest in making their system work.
Plus, think of the sheer cachet of being a Charter Member of something called ‘hump-a-pile-of-dvds.com’
And Seven? Your Ultimate Plan for the Dukes of Hazzard DVD is brilliant. Do you think you’ll have room up your ass for The Brother’s Grimm and the second Bridget Jones movie?
Definitely Seven in the wrong here and in a big way. There’s not much more annoying than working in retail. While the truly assholish customer is rare, the truly supid customer is pretty common. The customers that come in and ask the most retarded questions you’ve ever heard. But it’s your job to be courteous and nice, no matter how stupid they are, and the jackass manager is also quite common.
All of this combined is bad enough, but then you have the piece of shit, ignorant fuck customers that come in and start pitching a shit fit because of a simple question asked at checkout. Something that could at the maximum take 10 seconds to be done with.
If you had given her the chance to be polite, I’d come down on your side Seven. I’ve been in a store before where I say “no thanks” to the assurance plan but continue to have it pounded in to me for a full minute or more. But, we don’t know that that was going to happen here. She asked you, and you gave her a big assholish reply. You’re the one that started acting like a bitch, she’s only human and I think she did the perfect thing.
Ultimately I’d say she won. She’s not going to get fired for this, she followed the book precisely. The worst she gets out of the exchange is a asschewing from the manager, but if she works in retail that rolls off her back like nothing by now. You, however, wasted an extensive amount of your time in the store for nothing. She’s getting paid to be there whether she has to deal with you or not. In all honesty while asshole customers were ANNOYING to me, when I worked retail as a young man–in all honesty they also broke up the horrible monotony of my job and gave me cool stories to tell my friends later.
I can’t fucking believe people are taking the cashier’s side here. Yes, working at a place where you have to pitch extended warrantees sucks. So fucking what? That gives her a free pass to provide bad service? Look, if you’re going to offer an extended warranty on shelves that ring in at 25% of the value of the product, you’d damn well better be prepared for some snarky responses, because that’s some damn stupid shit you’re peddling.
