Jackass customer stories

The BBQ Pit
21

This is not a story about a bad customer (although at the video store I had my share and more), but about clueless coworkers.

Well, not even much of a story, but I often worked the night shift. I had to count the drawers (three of them) every night, and this included the change. I always tried to leave the drawers with a small but workable amount of change available for the next day shift. If they needed more, they could always pop open a roll. But without fail, whenever I showed up for the night shift, I’d find that some moron had emptied 3-4 rolls of each kind of coin into each drawer. They were overflowing. And as often as not, I’d collect even more change from customers during my shift. So in addition to my normal closing duties, I’d have to count approximately 1000 surplus coins every night. Just so some idiot dayshifter could have a bottomless pit of change from which to work.

I left sticky notes on each drawer with my pleas for reasonableness in large, purple, magic marker letters. They went completely unheeded.

22

I used to work in a sex shop, and we sold vidoes and dvds, amongst other things. One morning some guys comes in and buys a video from us.

That afternoon I get a phone call.
Guy: “You remember me? I came in this morning and bought a video.”
Well, quite a few people buy videos, you don’t remember all of them. But I say “Yes” anyway.
Guy: “Well it doesn’t work.”
Me: “Ok, bring it back and we can exchange it for you.”
Guy: “I want some money back because I have to get a bus back to the shop and it will take me over an hour to get there.”
Me: “I’m afraid we can’t do that, we can only exchange the video, or give you a different one.”
Guy: “But it’s going to cost me money to come back to exchange it.”
Me: “I’m sorry about that, but I can only exchange the video, I cannot recompense you for your bus fare.”
Guy: “But you are a sex shop.” What???
Me: “Even so, I’m afraid I can only exchange the video.”

He never actually showed up to exchange the video, I guess the bus fare was too much.
Another one.
We used to sell a mini dvd for 4.99. It had highlights of something like 50 films on it, only about 30 seconds of each film. If you bouth one of these dvd’s you could bring it back and get 4.99 off the price of a full dvd.

One day a customer comes in and tries to buy one of the mini dvd’s for 2.50. I say I can’t do it, he could bring it back and ask for the 4.99 off a full price dvd. So he says, but I won’t bring it back. Yeah, right.

23

For a while, the record where I used to work had a satisfaction garanteed policy, that meant you could exchange a CD or DVD or whatever for any reason. This lead to tons of people bringing back a CD after a day or two and saying “I don’t like it.”

So fucking what? There’s nothing wrong with it, we had nothing to do with its production, and we didn’t put a gun to your head and make you buy it. One guy exchanged five CDs in one day thanks to this, rendering four CDs unsellable. This policy ended soon, helped along no doubt by the increasing availability of CD burning technology.

24

You know bringing the CD back because you did not like the music seems to me to be exactly what a satisfaction guaranteed policy is for.

25

Oh man, I do not miss working retail.
Some of my favorites:

Customer: I want this DVD player exchanged.
Me: Sorry, It had a 1 year parts/labor warranty on it. It’s almost 2 years old.
We can get it repaired but you’ll have to pay for it.
Customer: What!! Don’t you guys stand behind the product you sell.
Me: Yes. We stand behind the manufacturers warranty.
Customer: So what your telling me is that I’m screwed? You guys suck. What ever happened to the customer is always right? I’m calling channel 5.

Customer: My PC is broken.
Me: Okay. We’ll get it repaired in 7-10 days.
Customer: You can’t just give me a new one?
Me: No. It’s under warranty and we’ll fix it for you.
Customer: You don’t understand. I need it NOW! I need it for school/my business.
Me: Sorry, you’ll have to wait like everyone else.
Customer: Can I have a loaner.
Me: We don’t have loaners.
Customer: Well you don’t have to get snippy! I’ll just buy one and return it after mine is fixed.
Me: Sorry. Can’t return opened PCs unless defective.
Customer: You guys are determined to screw me anyway you can!

Customer: I want to return this camcorder I got as a gift. I even have the receipt.
Me: No problem, however since it has been opened we do have to charge a 15% restocking fee.
Customer: What the hell is that for.
Me: It says it on the receipt. It’s so people don’t use them for special ocassions and then return them.
Customer: But I didn’t do that!
Me: Well, I don’t know if you did or you didn’t. But it is opened.
Customer: But I just wanted to look at it.
Me: Well, that may be true. But nonetheless, it’s still open. And the next person who wants to buy this is not going to want to pay the “new” price on a box that has been opened.
Customer: Well that’s not my problem. Just tell them I looked at it but didn’t use it.
Me: Ah yes, I sure that next customer will understand completely and take my second hand word for it.
Customer: That’s for you guys to deal with.
Me: Actually no. We charge you 15% restocking fee and then we sell it at 15% off as an open box unit. We don’t lose money that way. Get it!
Customer: Yeah, I get it. You guys just always want to screw over the customer.

26

Working at a cable company. A woman called up to report that her cable wasn’t working.

Me: “You know the little red light on the set-top box? Is it on?”
Lady: “Yes, it’s on, but the green light is off.”
Me: “Our equipment doesn’t have a green light on it. Ours is the one with the red light.”
Lady: “Well, the green light hasn’t been on all day. When can you send an engineer?”
Me: “If the problem is that the green light is off, it’s not something our engineers can fix. See, our box is the one with the red light, and if the red light is on, then it appears to be working.”
Lady: “But the GREEN light is off!”
Me: “I’m happy to send out the engineers, but just for your information, if the problem isn’t with our cable, there’s a 40 pound charge for the visit, and it sounds like the problem isn’t with our cable, it’s with whatever has the green light on it.”
Lady: “But the green light isn’t on and I haven’t had cable service all day …”

I think I did send out the engineers in the end. I should have just done it in the first place. It’s not every day you have the opportunity to charge your customers a 40 pound fine for being stupid.

27

During my mercifully short time in retail clothing sales, I had this gem - customer comes in to return prom dress the day after the prom. Prom dress has noticable sweat stains under the arms and heel marks on the hem. When I explained I couldn’t accept the dress for return because it was worn, the customer explodes and starts cussing me. I hear “I didn’t wear that damned dress 'cause it was too damned small.” I further examine the dress to find that the zipper was busted.

Heeheehee. I didn’t take it back.

28

Oh yeah,
If I had a dime for every threat I got about:

-You’ll hear from my lawyer.
-I’m calling your head office and you’ll be fired.
-I have a friend at channel 9 / local paper and they’ll run a bad story on you guys.
-You’ll be hearing from the better businees bureau

I would be rich and would have retired years ago.
I have:

-Never heard from a lawyer.
-Never been disciplined for sticking to policy.
-Never had the local news run a story on me or even contact me.
-Never heard from the better business bureau.

29

At my first job, I worked as an intern on a government contract. For archaic reasons, the application I maintained managed printing by having the mainframe send a stream of (IIRC) PCL5 data to the end terminal (user’s PC), which was intercepted by a custom app that redirected it to a printer port. The end result was that so long as your printer was one of the many laser printers that supported this standard, everything was fine.

Well, that was about the time that printer companies started introducing these all-in-one units that used some proprietary language, and thus didn’t work with this setup. One guy called in, and I tried to help him for a week with this. I triple-checked his PC to make sure everything was set up correctly, inspected the driver settings to see if there was a compatability mode, downloaded and read all the docs for his printer to see if it said something about this, and went over the source code for this application to see if there was something I could modify to help him.

When I eventually had to tell him that it was just not going to work, he went ballistic on me and started freaking out about how we didn’t support the latest technology (tell me about it - at that time the mainframe didn’t even have support for TCP/IP). I forget exactly, but eventually he said he was going to call the minister in charge about it. I’d almost forgotten about it when a few weeks later my boss walked in saying “Hey, this thing came down from the minister…”.

I explained what I’d done and how it just wasn’t possible to support this guy’s printer and that was that. I still find it funny that this guy’s problem went way up to the top, and still came right back down again to me. :smiley:

30

How did you keep a straight face?

(emphasis mine)

31

Well, recently… let’s see. I work for a network of AIDS and health clinics. We buy a censoredload of computers, sometimes. Not huge, but not tiny.

Recently, three computers for a senior center (So I was away from my main site) were delivered and to be installed. And they were great… except that nobody put the key in for Office. Now, we bought the license, and so on.

I call up customer support. He goes to his supervisor. Twenty minute delay, and he comes back to me, “Well, it’s there.” Check, it isn’t. Packing, anywhere. “Well, I can’t give it to you. I don’t want to say you stole it, but…”

Now, the guy’s clearly operating under his supervisor’s instructions. So I get his supervisor’s tag, call our sales rep, pass it along. Eventually, we get the proper code, and the computers go up, and the seniors are all happy.

Should I have reported the supervisor? Sonbitch done called a customer a thief. Course, it might be policy, and the rep on the phones with me was only doing what he was told, I know, so I didn’t harsh him any.

32

We deal with people who haven’t filed their taxes in years and years and the IRS is looking to collect their first born. Our rules:
[ol]
[li]You need to be completely honest with us and the IRS[/li][li]We wont lie for you[/li][li]You need to stay in current compliance[/li][li]No, seriously- we wont lie for you.[/li][/ol]

Well, this guy comes in who owes some huge amount (probably somewhere about half a million). He asks us to prepare his current year return, we agree and give him the necessary information to fill out for us. He brings the form back complete- except for the income section.

Me: Hi. Mr. Hopefully just forgetful guy. I was looking over your information and I see you didn’t fill out the income section- you also didn’t give us any wage records. Surely this was just a mistake. Can I get that information from you?
Him: Look sweetie (grrrr!!!), how much can I claim where I will still get the earned income credit and not owe the IRS any money.
Me: Uh…sir, you have to claim the total amount you made.* (Not to mention, it’s not like I could just pull the requested number out of my ass anyway).*
Him: Let me talk to your boss.

Me: Yo dad, homie wants us to lie on his taxes.
Dad: We can’t. You know that.
Me: Yeah, well he isn’t listening to me. Cuz, ya know, I’m just a girl, girls don’t know taxes and stuff. So you tell him that.

Anywho- my dad explained that we cannot lie on tax records and all that jazz. The guy gives us all his info, we do the returns, he ends up owing about $2000. Well, when he came to pick up the returns (with his 6 year old son, no less), he started screaming and cursing up a storm.

Tax Frauder: “I talked to you fucking man to man! How could you do wrong by me like this?!? You fucking screwed me over and this is fucking bull shit!”
—It is to be noted, he could have just given us incomplete records and we wouldn’t have known. He had his own business and could have told us he only made $100, we have no way to verify that. But, instead, he gave us complete records (which is the right thing to do anyway) and blew a gasket when we prepared his returns.
This is one of many, many crazy people stories I have.

33

A Micky D’s story: We used to have a guy who would come in and order a sandwich. He would then eat all but the last bite and then return the bite, complaining that the sandwich wasn’t cooked enough or hadn’t had pickles or some horseshit. The managers would always cave and give the guy a whole new sandwich.
One day, when he came to pull the same trick, a manager fetched him a new sandwich, snipped off a bite-size piece, and gave it to the guy in a new box. The look on his face was priceless. :slight_smile:

34

Policies like this deserve to be taken advantage of. Every time I have to wait 10 extra minutes in line because the manager is either too chickenshit or has his hands tied by corporate idiocy from telling some blowhard that he will not get a refund and if he has no other buisness to conduct he needs to get the fuck out of the way and let the paying customers through, I at least get a small bit of joy thinking about the money that they’re losing.

35

I’m sure every ex-bartender will have a million variations on this theme. Young couple comes to the bar and orders. When I ask for ID the male shows his - he’s been 21 for about 12 hours. When I ask to see the young ladies’ ID, she’s forgotten it. Going to a bar, right? “But she’s with me and I’m 21.” It doesn’t matter - either she has an ID or she doesn’t come in. My whine is: Why do these people think a stranger is going to lose her job and face a whopping huge fine both for herself and her boss, for someone they have never seen before? Do they actually believe the rest of the world is as clueless as they are?

Wait a minute. That would involve actually thinking. I think I answered my own question.

36

I worked in a coipy shop in a large university town and we invariably would get the PhD students who needed multiple copies of their dissertaions…NOW. The thing at the time about dissertaion copies was they required a lot of attention, believe it or not, and there was a deadline for submitting them (note, this is after they have been approved and now they are creating ‘final’ copies for the schools records). If they were lucky we could concievably drop everything we were doing and do it right then, but usually it would’ve had to wait in line behind all the other jobs, which would of course have included dissertations that did give enough time to finish.

37

I worked for a national coffee shop chain that used to have those little frequent purchase cards. When you bought a coffee (or a bag of beans) you would get a little stamp on your card in the shape of a coffee cup, and after 5 such purchases you’d get a free coffee (or bag of beans).

Now, we had this man who came in every Sunday to redeem his card for his half-pound of Continental Dark. Five little coffee cup stamps, all in a row. Every Sunday.

We grew suspicious, having never seen him in there without a redeemable card, or having ever purchased a bag of coffee. But we thought, “who would be enough of a fool/loser to figure out some way to fraudulently stamp five little coffee cup shaped stamps every week?”

Who ineed. We had a closer look at his redeemed card and it became clear that he had, indeed, developed the skill of reproducing little coffee-cup shapes (honestly, these things were less than a centimeter across, and fairly detailed, with a handle and everything) with an X-acto knife. He was good enough at it that we didn’t notice for several months.

I shouldn’t keep being surprised by asshole customers who go to great lengths to systematically rip off coffee chains’ customer loyalty programs. It happens more often than you think. I’ll return with the story of the Noisette Lady.

38

Last time I was at Ross, I happened to notice that all the prom dresses had these bright red 8.5 x 6 inch cardboard tags that said, “Dresses cannot be returned if this tag is detached.”

39

I once had a customer call me up and demand to speak to the president of the company NOW. This was about 7pm on a Sunday night. I explained that the president of the company does not take calls through customer service, but I’d be happy to help out if I could.

This nutjob goes off on me, explaining that he is a doctor and his time is extremely valuable. He is angry because he wanted to buy our product through our website, but he’s upset because it’s a subscription service rather than a one-time buy. After he finishes yelling (several minutes) I explain that he can purchase it one-time through me, it’s just that subscription purchasers get a $10 discount. This isn’t good enough. He wants the discounted price, and in addition, wants me to pay him for the half hour he looked at the website at a consultant rate (several hundred dollars an hour). I explain that nobody is going to do this. He rants and raves that we wasted his time, which is incredibly valuable. This goes on for about 20 minutes. If your time is so valuable, why didn’t you just buy it at the non-discounted rate, or hang up, rather than screaming for a half hour.

Another time, I had a customer try to get a free product from me because his “friend” ordered, but was mad about something that happened with the order. Now, his friend is too mad to call or to talk about it, so he doesn’t know what was wrong. He also doesn’t know his friend’s address or last name, but of course, he’s happy to give the package to his friend if we send it to him directly. I even search through everyone of a certain first name through several zipcodes. I explain that his “friend” never ordered through us and we don’t send free products to non-customers. He then starts to guilt trip me about how I, since I’m American, should feel bad not sending free product to him since he is “from The Holy Land”… ??? Eventually he asked for a supervisor, who ended up shooting him down again after pointing out he lied. I wonder how often this technique worked for him?

I once took a supervisor escalation, where a customer wanted a several hundred dollar refund for overcharges because she ordered a product but didn’t have enough money, causing a bunch of checks to bounce. I explained we couldn’t refund for overdrafts where we were not at fault. Her reasoning: “It’s your charge that caused the overdraft, so you’re at fault!” Uh, no; you placed the order, you gave us your credit card number, and we charged you with your authorization. Then, she started to tell me that she was a single mother, so she needed the money. We sell very expensive products that are certainly nonessential, so color me unsymapathetic. She didn’t get it: she kept asking “Who can I talk to that will refund me? I want your manager!” We had actually escalated this all the way to the top before I had called her back, and nobody short of the second coming of Jesus was changing this decision. She finally hung up on me threatening to never order again. You promise?

40

Heh, reading all these stories just reminded me of one…

It was about 10 years ago when I was managing a health food store. The clerk at the counter called me to the register because an item had wrung up at the wrong price. The correct price was over $20 and the wrong price was barely $5. The clerk had scanned the item using it’s bar code and thus the register showed the correct price, which did not match with the tag.

I checked and the item was stickered with the wrong tag. The code on the tag was for a different item… in fact it was the item that was on the shelf next to the one in question.

Stepping back to the shelf to double check, I found that the first bottle of the other item was strangely missing it’s price sticker. While stuck to the bottom front edge of the shelf was the correct sticker for $20+. It was blindingly apparent that the customer had simply peeled off the high priced sticker and substituted it with the nearest cheap price he could find.

When I informed him that the register price was the correct one, he insisted that I had to sell it for the price it was marked. He said it was the law! He was astounded that I continued to refuse to sell him the item for only $5. When I was adamant about it, he actually called the police!

The police arrived, heard his story, and asked what he wanted them to do about it, while trying not to laugh out loud. (They were in the store regularly and knew me.) He insisted they arrest me! They were amazingly patient with him (more than I could have been in their shoes for wasting their time) and kept telling him that they couldn’t do that. Finally he went away and we all had a good laugh about it.

Then, a week later, the same clerk at the register called me up again because something rung up at the wrong price. It was him… with the same product and the same wrong (switched) tag trying to insist that we it to him for the lower price. … this time I just threw him out of the store and told him to never come back. He never did. … It was good being the manager.