Jackass customer stories

The BBQ Pit
61

A while ago I worked in a factory shop (outlet shop?). We had a “super-duper 50% off everything” sale. A woman came in and bought 2 shirts at $10 each, still marked with the retailers $79 tag (we sold end of lines, seconds and samples).

A week later the husband came back, one of the shirts was the wrong size. “No problem” say I. Only it was a problem. The shop policy was NO refunds but exchanges or credits.

Hubby took a wander round the shop looking for something to exchange his shirt for. He couldn’t find a shirt he liked so he demanded his money back. Me “I’m sorry sir I can give you a credit if you can’t find anything you like”

So he had another (20 sec look) “I want my money back!!!”

Me "I’m sorry, I can only give you credit or exchange. If you want your money back you can come back on Monday and discuss it with the manager (I only worked 2 days a week)

Him “I need my money back”

Me “I am not allowed to to that. Let me just go to the stockroom and see if there are any other colours in your size”

I found three other colours in the same shirt he wanted a refund on.

Him “No I don’t like them. Give me my money back”

Me (It is a uni sex shop) “Maybe we could find something for your wife”

45 minutes later!! Me showing him a million fucking things. “This is a big problem, you need to give me my money”

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH !!!

I explained to him AGAIN that he needed to come back when the manager was there or take an exchange or credit. After arguing for another 15 minutes he VERY quickly looked over a rack of T-shirts and paid the extra $5.

Over an hour with a customer quibbling over a fucking $10 shirt! Some people need to get a life!

I really, really appreciate people who work in retail, there are far too many people who treat them like shit.

62

There have been times where I’ve hesitated before buying a CD – unsure of whether I’d like it enough to justify shelling out the twelve or fourteen or sixteen bucks or whatever – and the clerk has told me, “Hey! Great album! But if you don’t like it, just bring it back and we’ll give you your money back.” Really? What a great policy. Sold!

I’ve never actually returned any of these CDs, because I’ve liked them all enough to justify keeping them. But the point is that, in these cases, the existance of the satisfaction guaranteed policy was what made the sale.

63

It’s just money. Companies judge that giving in cost less than confrontation. When the percentage of customers who do take unfair advantage gets too costly then policies change. That’s why they’re changing now.

64

True, which makes it a dumbass policy for music and movies.

65

Customers hate it when their scam doesn’t work.

Two college guys buy a laptop to do their term paper on without asking about the return policy. Whne they try to return it they find out there’s a 15% restocking fee if it’s not defective. That’s $225. They swear their salesman told them they could return it with no restocking fee. Nope. Manager boots up computer and sees term paper on desk top. “Got your term paper all done boys?” he asks. At this point they become abusive and start cussing. Manager “We’re all done talking. Your choices are keep it or return it and pay the fee” They pay. Exspensive term paper. Good manager.

66

That is funny.

I had a friend who was an assistant manager at MD. A customer pulled ahead of others in the drive through and announced he hadn’t got all his combo meal the last time he was there and expected a new one. My friend informed him that they couldn’t give him anything based on that. He throws a some money at my friend and gruffly orders a combo. My friend picks up the money and hands it back. “We don’t want your business sir, go someplace else” {yeah Patrick} the customer goes nuts and grabs my friends arm and cusses him out using racial slurs. Just before Pat clocked this fool the manager stops him. Turns out the guy was a successful realtor as well as an idiot.

67

VegemiteMoose got it in one. You have no idea how many books are stripped. Where I worked, there was a constant stack of books awaiting stripping. Once, our order for serial romance novels got messed up, so instead of 2 boxes of books a month, we got 22. So 20 boxes of books had to be stripped. It took them a couple months to straighten out the order. And, yes, selling stripped books is illegal, because they’re reported to the publisher as destroyed.

68

This happens all the dam time but yours is a really good story. Imagine the nerve. What used to piss me off is that cooperate policies prevent us from telling jerk customers what we really think.
We had a customer that picked up a used credit slip off the floor and tried to use it. We know this because the right custoemr came in the next day} The computer showed that it had already been used. Instead of accepting that she got nasty and demanded that we give her her credit. The clerk said to me “What do I do?” …“Tell her NO!!” which is what we did.
Another young man tried to buy a CD which I rang up. He said it was on sale and when we checked the bin it was clearly a different CD by the same artist. I pointed that out to him but he insisted that since it was in that been I was bound to sell it at that price. I said no. It’s clearly marked and it’s a different title.
“But I didn’t notice that”
I know, that’s why I’m pointing it out now"
“Well it’s not my fault it was in the wrong bin "
It’s probably just an accident but I’m afraid I can’t reduce the price”
“Well you have to, that’s how retail works.”
“If it wasn’t clearly a different title I might agree, but it’s right there in big letters”
“I want to talk to a manger”
You need someone else to tell you no? {ok that was sarcastic}
Manager also says no and young crook goes away.

It surprises me more that people will want to argue that their scam is legit more than the attempt.

69

HAHAHAHAHHAA! that’s awesome.

i’ve been working in customer service pretty much since i was 15 (i’m 23 now), and to this day, legions of jackass customers later…one stands out as being…heinous. cruel.

let me set up the scene for you:

AMC 24-plex, Memorial Day 2001. Opening weekend for Pearl Harbor. These two things combined made it very, VERY busy.

Your friendly storyteller was, at the time, a supervisor…the highest rank of supervisor you could get before management. It was summertime, obviously, and I was home for a few months from my first year of college before heading off for the second. (this is relevant.)

Anyway, onward.

Around 4:30 or so I got a call asking how many seats were left in the next showing of pearl harbor (5:10, let’s say). I looked, and in a 500 seat auditorium it was down to about 20 seats. I told him this, explained that there were still seats but there was a high likelihood of said seats not being together (he said he was bringing his wife) and probably being in the very front…but hey, lookit this! A show 45 minutes after THAT which has only sold two or three seats so far!

He thanks me for my time, and i hang up, thanking the powers that be for customers that think to call ahead.

Which made the next move an even bigger shock.

Maybe 15 minutes later, someone comes up to the guest services counter, looks hard at my nametag, and then stares me down, giving me the nastiest, most evil smile you can imagine. short-ish, balding, bespectacled guy in his mid-40s.

him: i just spoke to you on the phone about tickets for the 5:10 pearl harbor?

me: yes?

him: shoves tickets in my face I GOT THEM FOR THAT SHOW. why did you want me to wait?!

me: explains again that i never said there wasn’t seats, i said there very likely wouldn’t be two together, and that i was just trying to make his life a little easier

him: but you gave me incorrect information!

me: explains AGAIN

him: well, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

me: sir, statistically when the seating gets that low -

him: STATISTICALLY, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. now why don’t you go back behind the food counter and scoop popcorn with the other high school dropouts, and let the people who know what they’re doing work the guest service counter?

i was stunned. beyond stunned. his wife was fawning all over him like fucking Eowyn on Aragorn as they walked away. (i’ll let you figure out what that made me in the analogy.)

i went out back, wished DESPERATELY that i smoked or was of age to buy a goddamn beer, settled for kicking the brick wall behind the receiving dock instead, swearing a lot, crying a little…

and then another supervisor - also a good friend of mine - came back to check on me and said that they’d just exchanged their tickets for the showtime i recommended, because…

all the seats were scattered. and in the front row.

YOU FUCKING OOZING MONKEYFUCKER. i hope…aw, shit, no wishing death. i hope you contracted syphilis. yeah.

i am, as a result of dealing with years of jackasses, the nicest customer you will ever have. really.

70

I keep expecting to see a salesperson post this one here, in which I was the bad customer (though provoked by seller screwups):

A few months ago, I went to a major, fairly high-end department store in a mall I don’t visit often, to purchase clothes. I hate shopping, and avoid it as long as possible… and literally needed a new wardrobe. Paid for them with the store’s own credit card, so the store didn’t even have to pay the usual Visa/MC processing fee. Most clothes were still full-price. Very profitable sale for them.

I spent a small fortune. Got two large bagsful of things. Took them home, hung them up. Few days later, went to wear a garment. Still had the *&^% antitheft sensor tag on it. No clue how I got out of the store with that on - obviously it didn’t do what it was supposed to! Took out a second garment - still tagged. Took out a third - still tagged. All in all, 3 out of 14 garments had the sensor tags still on, and were therefore unwearable.

I went back to the store the following weekend, clothes in tow and receipt in hand. Told them that I wanted a 20% discount on those specific items (not on the entire order) because I was really unhappy that these tags had been left on. They tried to offer me some sort of courtesy card good for my next shopping visit. I said sure. Then I found out the card was valid for the following weekend only and I said absolutely not.

After much grumbling on their part (I flat-out told them that if they did not give me that discount, I would return all three items plus an additional one that coordinated with them) they finally credited my account. For 40 bucks. Out of a thousand dollar purchase.

End result: disgruntled customer who has had to take nearly 2 hours out of the day to sort this out, totally peeved salesclerk who may have had to eat the 40 bucks. And I’d probably do it again - it was a clear screwup on the part of the store staff, leaving the tags on in the first place, but if they’d shown any remorse I may not have been nearly such a hardass.

And yeah, I’ll probably shop there again.

71

Not so much reporting them to the publisher as destroyed but reporting to the IRS by proxy that they were destroyed.

20 boxes a month…pfft bookstores. ITs not uncommon for us to have 2-3 4+ foot pallets of destroy required items either due to damage or printing issues. Then again I work in wholesale childrens books and we intercept alot of problems before they ever reach a customer or store shelf.

As horrifying as stripping sounds its often the only way for businesses/publishers to recoup any of the cost of a defective item without incurring the costs to return them to the publisher. IIRC there are limits on how much a corporation can donate to charity without incurring some kind of scrutiny by the IRS and many times donations are already “budgeted for” via organized programs planned well ahead of time using older or slower selling product. A minor misprint was not planned or budgeted for donation so it gets destroyed. To do otherwise would easily amount to felony level tax fraud in a business of anything but the tinyest scale

72

So, how did your store get rid of the remains of the stripped books? At my store, we chucked 'em all into some worn-out shipping boxes along with the stripped magazines, and then hauled them out to the (shared) mall dumpsters. After a while, mall management came 'round to visit, and said that people were dumpster diving for books and magazines, and leaving the place in a hell of a mess.

So, instead of just using the four-way tuck to keep the boxes shut, we started using excessive amounts of tape. (My suggestion of soaking the boxes before throwing them in the dumpster was rejected as too cumbersome.) Later, we found out that it was the mall security guys going for the porn mags…

73

Hey, here’s another memory of working at the bookstore:

I worked at the information desk a lot. At this time, the info desk was right next to the magazine corner, and the magazine guy thoughtfully put the game magazines right next to the desk. So, every night, the kids would come:

“Can I use your copy machine to copy these codes?”
“No.”
“But I just want to copy these codes.”
“No.”
“Okay. Then can I borrow a pencil and some paper?”
“You could just buy it, you know.”
(kid gives up, goes to open up another polybagged videogame magazine)
“Hey, even though YOU’RE not gonna buy it, we ARE trying to sell those, you know.”

Another time, an elementary-school-aged boy came up to the counter.
“Can you get me a copy of MAXIM magazine, please? I can’t reach.” (We kept that one at the top of the magazine racks for some reason…)
“How old are you?”
“Ten.”
“No.”
“But I just want–”
“That’s a men’s magazine. For adult men. No.”
“Wait, it’s…it’s for my brother!”
“How old’s your brother?”
(without thinking) “Fourteen.”
“No.”

74

guess i should toss in a hell customer story or two also…

In my amusement park ops days…

Woman with 7 kids in tow orders a bunch of food items from the snack bar (about $40 worth of chips, cookies, corndogs, sodas, etc). Only to discover we are out of mustard. She goes apeshit on some poor 16yo seasonal casher who basically has no clue beyond whats within 5 feet of her. Customer asks to speak to a manager and gets me. I know we are out, one of the managers just left about 10 min ago to run to Smart&Final to pick up a case of mustard packets to last till our food delivery tomorrow. I apologized for the inconvenience and offered to comp her the corndogs and explained that we would have some mustard probably in 5-10 minutes. This instigated a HUGE tirade about how we are totally incompetant and every manager here should be fired for letting the place run out of mustard. Trying to get her just to chill I offer to comp her whole food order and replace the 2-3 corndogs with other selections from the menu. She still demanded to speak to my boss as well to make sure I didn’t “dodge responsibility for this huge failure of customer service”. I explained that my supervisor is out buying mustard but I will happily let him know and could have her paged to discuss the matter when he returns. Not good enough… now she wants my managers boss, which would be the owner of the park.

The owners of this place were some of the most decisive, fair minded, and demanding people I have ever known. They had very high expectations of the staff and got what they expected. Calling them in to a situation like this could go either way, yes we screwed up but this womans histronics were way over the top.

I call upstairs and get one of them, expain the situation, explain my attempted resolution, and ask how I should proceed and he says he will come handle it.

He comes down stairs introduces himself as the owner of the park and asks how he can help. She then proceeds to start screaming at him about how he obviously must be some kind of retard to hire such incompetent managers who can’t even manage to keep tabs on the mustard suppy around here and how shes amazed he managed to say in business for a week let alone years.

He stood there and agreed with everything she said. After finishing her rant she said something about knowing this place was all fucked up and marched out the door with her little tribe in tow. She never did get her refund.

The manager who went to buy mustard missed her departure from the park by 2 minutes.

Current job childrens book warehouse:

We occasionally have large sale events where our customers can come down and purchase older slow selling stock at deep discounts. One area we were allowing folks to fill up boxes for $40 each. Some customer only wanted a couple items from the area so trying to be accommodating we off to sell those to them for 50 cents each. This quickly started a HUGE commotion among the customers in this area who started demanding any larger thicker odd shaped items be sold a 50 cents each and bagged up separate from the $40 per box orders. Many of the items in question were small quantities of very expensive hardcover books and activity kits, gettting 5 or 6 of them in a box for $40 was still like 65% off cover price. Groups of customers were coming up to the people monitoring this area and demanding the price break on the larger items and gave it to a few more hoping to forestall complaints etc. Then the cashiers called us asking about literally HUNDREDS of hardcover books coming up to the register by the cartload demanding 50 cents each. and the customers getting very belligerent about any questioning of this price. When management got involved it was already a total disaster 20-30 customers demanding what amounted to 95% discounts on tens of thousands of dollars in product because they “heard someone say” that things were 50 cents each or $40 per box. Of the 14 shopping cart loads of books at the cashier demanding this, only 2 walked away when we packed it into the standard sized box for them and charged them $40 a box. Even so there was massive argumentation, complaining, accusations of illegal business practices, and that we were just flat out assholes.

Every single one of those customers was a currently employed teacher or librarian in one of our local school districts. The same people who bring up a display tub of items labelled $2.95 each and insist that the marked price of the whole tub is $2.95. My job often makes me want to weep for the children these people teach.

The vast majority of our customers are good folks looking for a decent price and we do alot to accomodate them. Among them however are hidden some very insidious and royally stupid people wo think that any private company is a fountain of money where they are free to play robin hood for their own benefit and hide behind the “its for the children” defense.

75

Can I just tell you I think a can of Magic Gift Wrap would be a wonderful invention?

I’ve got one, but in this case, I feel rather badly for the customers.

It’s Sunday. It’s Mother’s Day. I work as a server in a seafood restaurant. We normally get food deliveries on Monday.

Can you guess where this is going?

I’m greeting customers who have waited 45 minutes for a table only to find out once they get seated that we are out of Just. About. Everything. I kid you not…we ran out of the butter pats, cheesecake, baby back ribs…we ran out of shrimp, for God’s sake. I’ve got customers screaming at me, I’ve got people in tears because all they wanted was to take their mother out for a nice meal on Mother’s Day, and all I can do is sympathize, because all of us servers were pretty disgusted with the situation by that point. We had an “86” white board (86 is restaurant code for “out” or “cancel” or "hold, as in one Caesar salad, 86 the croutons) that was completely covered in food items. We ended up closing an hour early that night, and I can’t imagine how many pissed off customers vowed never to return.

76

Some stores used to encourage you to buy CDs that they thought you would like. If you didn’t like it, you could return it. They believed that the increased sales outweighed the increased returns.

77

I think I worked with this moron! :rolleyes: I used to work with a woman who would, every day without fail, open a roll of each type of coin and dump it in the compartment before she left so there’d be plenty of change. No amount of pleading on my part could get her to stop.
I worked in retail for waaaay too many years and have lots of stories, but I hate that “The customer is always right” bit.
I used to work at a nice jewelry store and one thing we sold were bangle bracelets. They’re a two-piece thing with a hinge, and are hollow. You need to be careful with them, since gold is pretty soft. As I said, this was a nice jewelry store; we didn’t sell seconds or damaged stuff - it was all first quality.
Most women knew bangles were easily damaged, and knew how to take care of them, but at least once a week, we’d get an irate woman coming in who would scream that we’d sold her a dented or scratched bangle bracelet. She’d then insist we either replace it or fix it for free, of course. I always loved it when they came back months later, shrieking that the bangle we sold them was dented.
The owners were the type that wanted to keep every customer happy, so of course, we fix them or replace them. Made my blood boil.

78

Oh, to have Drachillix’s amusement park manager!

This is less a customer rant than a management rant, but still…

A few summers back I worked in a ‘wild west town’. I ran the saloon. Only air-conditioned place on the lot; my buddy in the blacksmith shop usually worked in 110+ degree temperatures doing physical labor for 8 hours a day.

Anyway, the saloon seemed to be the complaint shop. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the whole ‘We can sit here and drink and bitch’ thing. I got complaints about more of the park than anyone else, and, of course, there really wasn’t anything I could do about it.

Now, sadly, we had management who looked at their employees as ‘disposable’. You did exactly what they said, and they’d constantly add hours and workloads way beyond what you were hired for. If you looked in any way iffy about it, they’d make your work unpleasant enough until you quit.

Well, I wasn’t going to quit.

So, the complaints I started to hear became my problem! Because people were heard complaining in the saloon, it was obvious that I wasn’t doing my job well. I was told I had to become more upbeat and more suggestive in my selling. I wanted to say, “These people are complaining about other areas of the park. Things I have no control over.” I knew that wouldn’t sink through management’s skulls, so I said nothing.

About a week later, it was the hottest day of the year. Management decided to put a large container of ice water just outside the saloon, free to anyone who wanted it. Good idea; keeps people from getting heat stroke. However, do not come to me the next day and start telling me about my obvious attitude problem as the saloon didn’t sell very much. Gee… Pay for soda or beer… Or free water… Hrm…

The next day we did just fine (no free water) and management asked me, “What did you do differently?” In the condescending tone of voice that sounds like, “See, you did what we asked, and it made it all better, didn’t it?”

I told them flat-out, “I didn’t put free drinks outside the saloon.”

I was scheduled for no hours the next week. And the week after that. The following week, I asked my direct supervisor (a friend who’d gotten me the job), and he pretty much told me I’d been fired, my check would be mailed to me. Cowards couldn’t even -tell- me.

I give the place the bird every time I drive past it now.

79

Customer: I wanna know where my rebate is?
Us: Sir, the manufacturer sends you the rebate. When did you send in the form?
Customer: What form? Nobody told me about any form?
Us: Sir, in order to get the rebate you need to send in a filled out rebate form, a copy of the receipt and part of the box containing the serial number.
Customer: So how am I supposed to get my money?
Us: What did you buy?
Customer: [del]Fuck[/del] Geesh! I wish you guys would get your [del]fucking[/del] act together!
Customer: I bought one of those game machines! Nintendo… Sony… I don’t know? My grandson was with me.
Us: Do you have the receipt?
Customer: Who keeps receipts? I paid cash. This was from Christmas! I don’t have it. My grandson took it home.
Us: Let us call our manager and you can sort this out with him.
Us (as soon as his disappears into the managers office): What an asshole? How hell did he even expect to get anything if he paid cash and didn’t fill in any forms or sign anything? We don’t know who he is, don’t know what he bought, or when he bought?

Last we heard, the manager gave him money out his pocket just to get rid of him!

80

I was a tour guide for a local tourist destination (a fairly nice set of caverns) when I was a teenager. The caverns were privately owned, so the owner could set whatever price he wanted for a tour. When I worked there (early- to mid-80s), the price was around six bucks for an adult. Fairly pricey for a one-hour tour, and occasionally we tour guides would get an earful from a disgruntled customer about the tour not being worth it.

Once I overheard a fellow tour guide having a price argument with a customer prior to the tour. The customer (a semi-drunk guy, one of a group who had just come from the Winston Cup race at Talladega) was complaining that $6 was too much for a one-hour tour. The tour guide mentioned several things that the customer would see on the tour, but the guy was insistent … the price was too high. He was getting rather loud, and the rest of his group was egging him on. The tour guide, who was a sweet, demure little Southern girl, was the only person at the register at the moment, but I was about to go out there when she administered the coup de grace.

“Well, sir, we DO have a $3.99 tour option, if you’re interested.” (Say what? We didn’t have a $3.99 tour.)

“Oh, yeah, I bet you do. What the hell do you leave off the tour?”

I walked out of the storeroom at this point, figuring I’d need to lend some moral (and possibly physical) support to the other tour guide.

“It’s a full tour, sir,” she said, still smiling. “But when we get to the back of the caverns, I turn the lights off and leave your ass in there.”

I stopped, thunderstruck. Angry Tourist became almost apopleptic, but his buddies laughed like loons and made so much fun of him he stomped out of the gift shop. I myself nearly soiled my Hanes, twice … first with fear, thinking the guy was gonna go apeshit, then with laughter, once he left.