Jackass customer stories

OK, but when you answer the phone, I have no idea if you’re just slammed with customers and are going to put me on hold, or if you don’t happen to be where you can check on orders, or whether you have a pen handy, or whatever. I also don’t assume that my name is going to mean squat to whoever answers the phone. And I’ve found that if I give all my info up front, I’m probably going to have to repeat it anyway. I know I usually have to ask if a bunch of info is thrown at me when I’m not ready.

My usual thing is to call and say, “Hi, I’m calling to see if my X is ready.” Then it’s the clerk’s job to say, “OK, may I have your name [ticket number, whatever they need]?” Please don’t assume that I’m being a jackass who thinks you’re a mind reader. I’m just stating my business and giving you an opening to state yours.

Gee, now I’m kind of bummed. I love mondegreens and that one gave me a chuckle. Too bad it was faux.

Yeah, I can’t really get behind this one, either. If I’m calling a business, the first thing I always do is establish why I’m calling first: I want to know if my necklace is done, I have a question about my bill, I want to order a pizza. This gives the employee a chance to make sure they’re ready to process my request and ask for the information they need in the order they want it. I’d call it basic courtesy, really.

Yes, your response is different. People who say it your way (“I’m calling to see if my repair is ready”) did give us a chance to ask for a ticket number or a name, and 99 times out of 100, the customer did say, “Sure, it’s M12345.”

There was just always a group who would call up and brightly say, “Is my necklace ready?” and when we’d ask for a ticket number, they’d say, “I don’t know what I did with that. It’s a gold necklace. Does that help?”

Well, OK then. That’s extra info that we did not have. Your original post made it sound like not offering a name or ticket number up front right after “Hello” was the jackass thing.

For many years I owned and ran a local shop where we sold parts and did restoration work on old Ford Mustangs. A good deal of my time was spent talking with customers about their cars and going over parts availability and what services we provided. Since I did 95% of the face-to-face customer work in the store, I was usually the one most people talked to whenever they came in. Though I found it more amusing than annoying, there was seldom a day went by that someone didn’t call in to ask another question about their car.

stanger:“Hello (usual business store greeting)”
them:“Yes, I talked to you about a month ago about a part I needed for my Mustang. Did you get any in?”
stanger:“What part was it exactly?”
them:“Oh, you know, that thing on the back of the big part. I think it’s blue.”
stanger:“I’m sorry sir, I’m not sure what you are talking about.”
them:“Don’t you remember talking to me about it. I’m the guy with the red Mustang!”
stanger: (to myself)"Oh, you’re the guy with the RED Mustang. Sure, I remember it now since you are the only one with a RED Mustang."
It doesn’t help that there are more red Mustangs out there now than Ford ever built.

Had one customer bring his Mustang by for me to do an estimate on completely restoring the interior of his car. We sort of specialized in replacing and rebuilding everything on the interior so that it was like showroom new. This is why we had a small shop in the back - to install the parts we sold because no one in town knew how to do it properly.
As I am walking around the car and asking questions about what he wants, he notices that I am writing down prices on parts and labor.

him:“Oh, just give me an estimate on the labor to install the parts and fix the car up. I’m not going to get the parts from you.”
stanger:“What do you mean?”
him:“I’m going to buy all the parts mail-order so I can pick the best prices and save some money.”
stanger:“I’m sorry,sir, but we only rebuild interiors where we sell you all the parts. We don’t install other companies parts.”
him: (all huffy)“Well, why not! Why can’t I bring my own parts and just have you install them?”
stanger:“Because if you buy from different dealers just to get the best price, there will be ten different shades of white in your car, a lot of parts we will have to charge extra to install because they won’t fit right without modification, and if something fails or looks bad later on, you will blame our workmanship when it is probably the poor quailty of the part instead.”
him:“But you have to do it that way if I want you to!”
stanger:“No sir, I don’t HAVE to do any such thing. We install only our own selection of parts and we stand behind their quality and our installation. If you want to save a couple of hundred dollars on a $2500 interior restore by picking parts from across the country from a catalog, you can ask them if they will install them for you too.”

The guy got seriously bent out of shape and stormed off saying,“Well, I’ll take it to somebody who will do it the way I want it. You aren’t the only Mustang shop in town!” He burned rubber as he left the parking lot.
Uh, yes we are, sir. The only Mustang shop for about 300 miles. Have a nice day.

We often had customers come up from Mexico to buy parts. Christmas and Easter are big shopping days for people from Mexico to come to the USA and buy things they can’t easily get farther south. Mexico people always expect a little freebie or discount on their purchases. This is usually no big deal because they buy a lot of parts and usually pay cash. You throw in some extra parts or give them a nice discount on a large purchase and they are happy as can be. They don’t really want a huge deal, they just want you to work with them a little bit.
One day a guy comes in and I spend about an hour working with him, piling the parts on the counter as we go.
It doesn’t come to a big purchase, about $700, but it is a nice sale. I give him several parts for free and a discount on the rest and tell him the total comes to $650.
He smiles at me and says,“This is what I will give you” and writes down $400 on a piece of paper and slides it across the counter at me.
I look back at him and say,“No, sir, with the free parts and special discount, it comes to $650”.
He just smiles back at me and says,“No, no. This is the price I will give you for all this.”
I tell him,“No, $650 is the price you must pay.”
He stops smiling and says,“I pay you this or I pay you nothing!”
I stand there and stare him down. Finally he throws his hands in the air and says,“Bah! (Yea, he really said ‘Bah!’), then I buy nothing !” and walks out of the store.
The only time in 13 years of business that I wanted to throw somebody out of my store and he walks out before I could do it.

I’ve taken to calling this type of person a Vampire. In my job at a small retail computer store I’ve gotten extremely adept at identifying this customer within seconds of talking to them. At which point I come up with comments like…

Well one of the things we pride ourselves on is superior customer service and support and a knowledgable staff. Of course this comes with a price. You can buy products at WalMart cheaper but only if you know exactly what you want. Can I have your credit card please? We charge $25 per 15 minutes for helping people purchase their products for less off of the Web or at WalMart.

Amazing how much time and energy I save on not having to deal with the Vampires.

Joe Wal-Martian (FoxNews) is an amazing creature. Sometimes I’d like to machinegun about 70% of the US population and start over.

Ah, yes. A graduate of the Three Year Old Method of Dealing with the Public Correspondence Course. It’s a wonder he didn’t throw himself on the floor and pitch a fit, screaming “Mommy, he’s being mean!” the whole time.

When I was a kid this was actually pretty common. In general, it was harder to get a credit card, banks weren’t yet pushing additional cards for teens (backed by Mom and Dad’s credit), and a married woman had to jump through a few hoops to establish credit in her own name. I recall teenaged friends using their parents’ cards (with permission), and I believe it was not unusual for a woman to use a card with her husband’s name on it. Within the last 10 years, a friend sent me over to a store where he’s a regular customer, with his credit card and a shopping list, and the sales clerk had no problem with it. I doubt that he’d be able to do that now.

That said, I’m just as glad that this sort of thing doesn’t fly any more. It was never wise.

This thread has made me more aware of one bad habit my hubby has, namely, doing everything but handing over his money to make a salesman feel like he’s got a final sale and then getting up and walking away, telling the salesman he’s going to come back another day. But if it’s a salesman who works on commission, he may end up losing out on all the time he’s put in. Hubby was shopping for something fairly expensive today, and the salesman looked so sad when we got up to leave (although was very polite about it) that I elbowed hubby and suggested he should at least find out when the guy is working so he’ll get credit for the sale. He went back and asked, the salesman told him, was clearly very pleased that his work wasn’t all in vain, and everyone was happy.

So you’ve brought to better awareness at least one bad habit we’ll try not to indulge in any more!

There’s a store here in town that started out many years ago as a camera shop, but has evolved to have a certain line of computers, and high quality entertainment systems. They have excellent, knowledgable, long-time staff, and I wouldn’t think of going anywhere else for a camera. Their service is phenomanal.

I once had a cow-orker who was a Vampire, as described in posts above. She and hubby wanted a new camera, so she was telling me about how they planned to go to “The good store”, look around, ask questions, and pick the brains of the staff. Then they were going to drive to Wal-Mart to get the lower price. When I expressed disgust with this plan she sneered at me and said “Their prices are too high!”

Right, bitch, their prices are higher. “Good Store” isn’t a cheap place I’ll admit. But it’s the best in all the ways that matter, and I’m perfectly willing to pony up for a camera, or service, at a place that really cares.

One example. I had a camera, bought from them of course. At one point the film stopped forwarding and I couldn’t figure out why. So I took it in, the guy looked it over, and with a perfectly straight face, no mockery whatsoever, pointed out that I had a 12 shot roll in there, and it was filled up. I ususally have a 24 shot roll. I felt so stupid, but the guy was polite, and customers don’t even get charged for minor exams like that. Maybe, after I left, he was telling the other staff, “boy, I had a lulu today!” but he didn’t do it to my face.

I don’t know why, but I get a vicarious thrill out of these types of threads.

I’ll throw one in, that happened at my place of employment just a couple days ago. I work tech support for a popular computer company. This didn’t happen to me, but it was one of those ‘guess what happened to me today’-type stories that get passed around.

Gentleman called in having troubles of some sort, the details of which I didn’t actually hear. The tech worked with the caller to test this, reconfigure that, and step through the troubleshooting process as normal. The final upshot was that the gentleman’s computer was now functioning correctly…with one exception. Sometime in the past, and after he had originally bought the computer from the company in question, the caller had purchased a popular office productivy suite of programs from a third party and installed them on his computer. Sometime after that, and before he called us, he lost the disk or disks for this productivity suite. Now, the caller reports that everything is working fine with his computer, except now the entire suite of programs has somehow vanished, nowhere to be found. The gentleman demanded that the computer company provide him with a replacement copy of the suite, since it had been there before he called in for support and now it was not.

A number of facts should now be related.

  1. The computer was still under warranty, such that original parts found to be defective would be replaced free of charge.

  2. Said warranty states that the computer company is in no way responsible for any loss of data whatsoever.

  3. Said warranty also states that support of any kind for 3rd-party products, whether hardware or software, will not be provided.

One can look at this scenario from either side. As far as the computer company is concerned, its representative (the tech support person) acted in good faith, using established procedure to fix the problem the customer had called up with. I do not believe that any procedure was used which would have erased or overwritten any data. The warranty basically states that the computer company will maintain the computer as the customer originally bought it for the life of the warranty. Therefore, there would be no replacement of the suite by the company, period. It was, in their opinion, the responsibility of the caller to keep track of the disks for the suite. Not their fault he lost the disks and couldn’t reinstall the programs in a worst-case scenario.

I can easily put myself in the caller’s shoes, however. My computer won’t work, so I call the company’s tech support. They fix the problem, whatever it was, but I don’t really understand what they did. I do know that my productivity suite was there before I called and now it’s not. They must have done something to erase them! Since I misplaced the disk sometime, it’s doubly important that I somehow get them back, and since the company must be responsible for my losing the programs, the company should replace them.

(Third side of the story/Devil’s Advocate: Since the customer bought the programs elsewhere, the company has no record of them, and has only the customer’s word that he ever did buy them. Or that they’re now gone as he claims. Scam? Fraud? Outright lying? Dunno. But this is not part of the company’s stance, merely a possibility that crept into my paranoid mind, and this possibility did not influence how we handled the customer.)

The final outcome was that the company refused to replace the missing programs. Was that right? Was that ethical? Was that legal? I think all those questions may have different answers. I do know the guy was very upset. Does that make him a jackass customer, or the company an evil entity? I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

  1. Yes
  2. Yes
  3. Yes
  4. No
  5. Unknown
  6. No

It didn’t work did it? A simple honest might have done it.

You make a good point. I have customers that will simply say. “Hello, we dropped off an instrument for repair and I’d like to know if it’s ready” Then I will ask for whatever info I need. I don’t assume they don’t have any other info or that they’re dense.

That’s good. Some customers seem uncomfortable or unwilling to seek put the salesperson who first helped them. It is a considerate thing to do and the salesperson usually appreciates it. Too many customers will take up a bunch of your time and then come back another day and buy it from the first salesperson who says hello.

Well then don’t go there at all. I have no problem with people who choose to to shop elsewhere. This lady was just too lazy to do the research herself and try to figure out which camera to buy from WalMart. Her solution was to take up thier time and use their knowledge and then save a couple of bucks.

The connection people don’t make is that when enough customers see this kind of bad behaviour as acceptable then the “good stores” go out of business {many have} and then you have no knowledgeable salespeople ot buy from or to help you after you buy.

I have to wonder how many dopers have read this thread and thought “Oh shit! I do that all the time” :smack:

Another thing that people like this aren’t thinking about is that the good store’s prices are high because they provide excellent customer service. Good customer service isn’t free, nor is it cheap. If you pay your people minimum wage, you get minimum-wage-level customer service (i.e., “I dunno”). To get people who care about the product and the customer, you have to pay more, and that means you have to charge more for the product to make enough profit to stay in business.

If people short-circuit that cycle by stealing (yes, it is stealing, in a moral sense) customer service from the good store then going to buy the product on the cheap at Wal*Mart, it degrades the whole purpose and eventually you find that the good stores aren’t around anymore.

When I worked at Sears they would call difficult customers “golden opportunities” pretty corny but with the right skills you can sometimes turn someone around.

1. Certain cultures expect to haggle and get a better deal even at stores that don’t haggle at all. We had a laptop on that was at a sale price plus had a free bag and a free network card with it. One of the best deals I’d ever seen. A nice Arab man came in and looked at it. Went to shop around and then came back to buy it but he just had to ask for a better deal. I explained to him that it was a really great deal already and that was it but he kept on. Insread of getting annoyed I said this."

"Let’s imagine you came in and it was at it’s regular price {I point to that price}
You insist that you want a better deal so I give you a discount{ I point to the sale price} You say “Dan, that’s good but can’t you do a little better?” so then I offer to throw in a free bag. Now you say “Dan that’s really good, I appreciate it, but can’t you do better still?” I resist but in the end I give in and throw in a free networking card. Now you say “Wow Dan what a great deal, I’ll take it”

He looked at me, got this big grin on his face and said “Okay, Dan I’ll take it” and we had a laugh over it. I’ve accepted the fact that some customers just want to haggle and I try to find a way for us both to walk away feeling good.
**
2**. I work in the south and we do quite a bit of business with churches. We regularly get people asking for a discount for that reason. {after all it’s for the Lord} Personaly I think thats tacky but what the heck.

A nice older gentleman wanted to buy a certain musical item and asked for some discount. I explained that the item was brand new and already discounted so I couldn’t do any better.
He then said “Well I’m a minister, can’t you give a certain discount to a minister?”
I replied, “I’m afraid not. You’re just going to have to render unto Ceaser what is Ceaser’s”
There was a pause and then he smiled and said, “You got me good with that one”
and made his purchase.

This is a classic line and very representative of some customers attitudes. I had a manager who explained that retail had spent years spoiling customers into expecting too much and shouldered part of the responsibility. It will take new policies and a generation of people remembering the good ole days until things begin to change.