As I was buying Mrs. Napier’s liquor in the local liquor store, I was noticing how seedy it seemed - how few creature comforts and how many security related items there were. I thought about how liquor stores probably tend to attract difficult customers, perhaps intoxicated, perhaps angrily living on the edges of society, I don’t know. And I remembered how often I heard of store robberies involving liquor stores in particular, and how cash intensive I thought their business might be. It all made me wonder if liquor stores were particularly rough places to work in retail sales, with particular challenges in dealing with customers.
It got me wondering what kind of retail sales had the fewest challenges in dealing with customers. I thought of a store that specialized in grass seed and lawn planting and turf care equipment, but without selling lawnmowers. This seems an awfully limited repertoire but I know of such a place. Probably mostly middle aged guys who start work pretty early in the morning and don’t cause trouble - is this the retail sales business with the fewest customer problems? Well, wait, this business has the potential to ruin a large lawn with a tiny sale, so they may have some pretty irate customers.
Books maybe? Well, maybe not - a bunch of contrarians burning through your patience with searches for obscure books?
A Hallmark card store perhaps? Oooh, but a whole bunch of their business would be arrogant guys who make a bit too much money and resent having to run an errand themselves for once, all coming simultaneously on the eve of Valentine’s Day.
I would think the most challenging customers would be those who are difficult–but spend a lot of money. The liquor store isn’t going to have a problem if this difficult customer goes away and never comes back–but a high end retailer is going to want its employees to put up with all kinds of shit rather than lose those sales.
Do we have any Dopers who have worked in high end retail who can comment on this theory?
Well, as far as liquor stores go, it’s all about location. There are liquor stores that have all the liquor behind plexiglass, and you ask the clerk for the bottle you want and they pass it to you through a slot in the plexiglass after payment.
Other liquor stores have humidors, open bottles for tasting, Johnny Walker Blue that’s not under lock and key… you get the picture.
As far as shops that you wouldn’t get too much riffraff, I would think a golf shop like Nevada Bob’s or something like that would have a mostly innocuous clientele. I’ve never seen any really shady characters in a cigar shop (a true cigar shop, not a cigarette/beer takeaway that sells a few cigars too).
I’m sure there are plenty to list that aren’t really known for having rough customers… just thinking about a town square that I frequent, there’s a mom & pop hardware store, a western wear / boot shop, and several antique stores… You’re not going to get some scary bikers or anything looking at antique china!
Car impound lots must be pretty terrible; I had a car towed once and had to go down to ransom it out. The person was behind VERY bullet proof glass, and I bet no one ever shows up delighted to pay a couple hundred bucks to get their car back.
That’s going to be pretty much anywhere though; you put up with more shit for a client that’s very profitable for your business. I can’t think of a business who wouldn’t give preferential treatment to a client who generates a lot of profit but also requires more attention.
I used to manage a Software, Etc. back in the late eighties/early nineties. Pre-Windows 95, when we had a couple DOS machines, a couple Apples, and even an Amiga as demo computers. Computers were becoming common enough in the home that it wasn’t just technically inclined who bought them.
Tech support and troubleshooting in a retail environment … before the Internet. You think it’s hard when your mother calls and asks why ‘her Google isn’t working?’
I worked at a pro shop as a teenager and I agree. We had a couple crabby customers
… but most people were really happy. They were going to play golf, after all!
I spent two months working as an armed guard in a T-Mobile store in an urban area a few years back.
Most of the time it was so boring that paint drying nearby would have been a dramatic improvement. But there were plenty of times I had to position myself behind and off to the side of the clerks - just inside the field of vision of the screaming angry people without being right there.
“I’m not paying my bill until you turn my service back on” - yeah, that’ll happen.
“It’s not MY phone, it’s your phone, and you need to give me a new one” - say the idiots who broke their phone and don’t want to buy a new one.
All sorts of stupid fun. Was glad I wasn’t the clerk who had to deal with it.
I bet it’s hard to work in a custom shirt design shop. It’s hard enough doing b2b designs for the Web, working with clients. I can only imagine the patience it takes to work side-by-side with Joe Blow wanting cool shirts for the bowling team.
I worked at/ran a couple of camera stores in the 80s and 90s. Mostly good experiences, except the pinheads who would try to pick your brain and then mail order, and then come back to us with their problems! That was few and far between, tho. Most of the advanced hobbyists we catered to enjoyed it, too.
Worst for me was a Sears Repair center I worked at part time. Being a repair center, you knew 99% of everyone walking thru the door had a problem. It got worse from there, with company policy about deposits and very long repair times (since we weren’t allowed to perform repairs on site, had to go to the regional center). If we had a neutral experience, we considered that a success.
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I know a guy with a service oriented business who is very good at what he does. Additionally, he won a large Lotto prize a few years ago, so he doesn’t really need to work. Anyone who pisses him off, he tells to go fuck themselves. And a few of those people return to apologize.
Speaking as the Joe Blow that did get cool shirts for the bowling team, I find these places not so bad as long as you aren’t in a rush. They were really chill, would point out what looked good and what didn’t, do a sample, etc, etc.
The only time I had a problem was when I ordered staff shirts for an event that occurred on a certain day, and it was day of that they finally finished the order. The order they had gotten a month ago and said would take a week. Then two weeks. Then there was some issue and it would be done a week before the event. Then 3 days. Then 2 days. Then day of.
They may have gotten annoyed when I started calling daily asking WTF was up with the shirts but that one was really their fault.
Working in a gun shop might be stressful, with all that weaponry and live ammo. You never know when a Terminator might walk in (like Arnold in Terminator 1).
Selling beach fries on the boardwalk not so bad… if they are good fries. And Thrasher’s are good fries, no one is ever upset when they have good fries!
When I was a grocery store pharmacist, our store director had a zero tolerance for telling customers not to come back; in other words, that was a firing offense. He didn’t care who came in the door or why as long as the money was green. Never mind that we tried to explain to him that filling a prescription that we knew was forged was grounds for revocation of our licenses, even if the customer threatened us.
This store was on a state border, and we did not have a contract for the other state’s Medicaid, and we weren’t going to get one either because they pay less than cost for pretty much everything, and those payments are often a year or more in arrears. We had a customer who went on that state’s Medicaid because she had cancer, and when she came to the counter with a fistful of prescriptions and a Medicaid card, I told her we didn’t take that plan and sent her across the street to the Walgreens, which did. She called up the manager and said I had refused to fill her prescriptions! No matter how much I tried to explain myself, he wouldn’t accept it. Oh, I would have been happy to fill those prescriptions, if she’d had the hundreds of dollars to pay for them, which I know she didn’t.
The ironic thing about this is that it happened after one of his own kids was diagnosed with…CANCER! :eek:
Wouldn’t a gun store be, like, the safest place on earth? After all, the only thing that stops a bad guy (i.e. black person) with a gun is a good guy (i.e. white person) with a gun.
I used to work at a knife shop. We carried all kinds of sharp, pointy things - from the finest embroidery scissors to huge swords. The sexism was horrendous. I was told daily to go back to selling kitchen knives, as there was no way I knew anything about huntin’ and real knives.
Guys would try to nudge me out of the way to take stock down, which was against policy. They would lecture me about how owie sharp knives could be - then hand them back to me blade first.
I was cornered once by a guy clearly off his rocker, my coworker thought it was funny (she was a real darling, I tell you), it took me yelling at security as they walked past to get some assistance.
Overall, I loved working there. I did manage to get a good clientele after having been there a while, and I think I did manage to get some people to raise their knuckles off the ground.