shrug Maybe I’m just unbelievably unobservant but I do not have these kinds of experiences. I drive to the store, grab a basket, find the stuff I want, go to the checkout, try to guess the shortest line, lose, wait, pay for my goods, grab the bag and head out. No one tries to interest me in a loyalty card, no one pushes more products to buy at me, I’m served as quickly as reasonable given the traffic in the store. In my experience, I take it with a smile because there is no short end of the stick. The only way it could be more pleasant would be if they just gave me the stuff for free.
And that’s the funniest thing you’ve said all week.
Maybe you missed what the OP was being given shit about, to wit: dumping on the barely-above-minimum-wage workers who didn’t create these policies and don’t have much choice about carrying them out, instead of the suits who invented these policies in the first place.
For instance, JCPenney, where I’ve been buying clothes, towels, etc. since practically the beginning of time, has just had a massive makeover that seems aimed at driving away anyone over 35. It wasn’t the idea of the people who actually work in the stores; some guy from Apple took the reins of Penney’s and decided to shake everything up and aim at younger customers. If I should ever run into that asshole, I’ll rip him a new one. But if I take it out on the store clerks, then I’m the asshole.
This shouldn’t be a difficult concept.
I just can’t believe anyone would turn down the opportunity for a duodenum lube job.
I’ve had three already.
Today?!? How do you get any work done?
And, in closing, lubelicker. Also, ballbouncer. Pogostickhumper. It turns out I quite enjoy making up these terms. 
ETA: Catsucker.
How do you prevent someone from seeing your tag number in a parking lot? Did you physically get in front of it?
Frankly, that behavior would make me more suspicious that you’d stolen something. It’s not as though we have an expectation of privacy about our license plates.
No, we were still close to the exit. I just waited for him to go back into the store and left. I was parked a good way from the store.
All I need is some nimrod calling the cops with my tag number reporting that I’d stolen something from KMart.
I offered to go back in the store and settle it, and also offered to call the cops right there and let them settle it. Back then I probably also offered to whip his ass, but I don’t remember doing that.
I do remember what we were doing at KMart; my dad had started building radio control planes and wanted a toy for a pilot, but didn’t want to go browse the toy isles looking for something. Me and a buddy went and looked, didn’t find anything, and left. This is when the store dick showed up.
Possibly. I’ll stand by my general observation, since it crosses a number of recent threads.
But yeah, dumping on the schmos in the aprons doing what they’re told because that’s how they impress the boss man - that’s lame. We need to gang up on the head aprons and the suits.
And why shouldn’t the OP dump on those who annoy the crap out of him, and get paid to do it? That’s what gets me. I’m spending my money, my time, and these fucknuggets (which, apparently, has nothing to with copulation or small nodules found occurring naturally in nature) are harassing me, even when I tell them I am not interested in their crap.
I have all the sympathy for the downtrodden. I spent my time working minimum wage (and below minimum wage) jobs. Fortunately, I have developed skills and work habits that are of higher value than those I had as a teenager.
Is it fair to blame the minimum wage grunts who are actually doing this harassing? Sure it is. They are the ones being obnoxious and doing it for money, the dirty whores (which, interestingly enough, does refer to prostitutes, people who trade their morality for cash). While I certainly believe that their superiors are telling them to act the way they do, I can’t help but believe that the guys in the suits don’t really want them to annoy the shit out of the customers, but they do want them to be aggressive with their message. I wouldn’t be surprised that somewhere down the chain of command the instructions got garbled and lower level managers just don’t understand that harassing customers isn’t good for business. Or, maybe they just don’t figure they are getting paid enough to teach teenagers how to be assertive without being annoying. I am not sure, but, while the people who think up these promotional campaigns may harbor contempt for their customers (our customers are scum, so it doesn’t matter if we treat them like scum, they’ll come back anyway), they don’t want their customers’ “shopping experience” to be unpleasant.
So, I’m with the OP on this. It seems his worst crime was that he used a term that could be taken as derogatory towards a very small minority of the population (and wasn’t even aiming it at said very small minority) to vent with. Perhaps not the best choice, but, in the grand scheme of things, not really a BFD.
excavating (for a mind)
I see you picked the perfect user name.
I catch your drift and on some purely theoretical level even agree, but there’s nothing to be gained by dumping on front line employees who are, almost without exception, just following orders. Orders that will let them keep their job and gives them the hash marks to move up out of it.
The right way is to ask for at least a supervisor, if not the manager, and tell them in no uncertain terms that you want to buy your beer, smokes, cereal, whatever without being bitch-slapped into upsells and add-ons, and if they don’t implement some way for you to tell clerks to turn it off, you’re not coming back.
One person doing this: worthless. All of us doing it: game changer.
because it’s pointless. Dumping on the cashier over this is only going to earn you a rant on Facebook about asshole customers.
They aren’t going to fight for change just because some self-important jerk thinks his money’s greener than everyone else’s.
careful you don’t fall off of your high horse. It’s a long way down.
So where’s the hard line between aggressive and annoying? Seriously, what possible benefit do you see in lashing out at cashiers? Other than stroking your own ego, that is. Yelling at them isn’t going to get them to stop, because if they stop they get fired. And once they get fired, the job market is such that there’ll be someone else right there to step in who will play ball.
A lot of these schemes are cooked up in MBA-land by people who have never worked a retail or service job. They look at “case studies” and reports where company X did something and it correlated with a rise in profits, so “OMG we gotta do that too!” They don’t get “garbled,” the people coming up with these schemes genuinely don’t realize how they work in practice.
the other problem is, the practice has become so widespread that the simplest explanation is that it works on some level.
I’m convinced these MBA-types don’t even see their customers as “people.” Just a “market.”
Once again, yes, some of the stuff the touts/cashiers/sales floor folks do might annoy you. The simple fact of the matter is that, by whatever metric “corporate” is using (and that’s usually “the bottom line”), this stuff works. So long as it works (brings in more money), the only likely thing that’s going to happen is that there will be more of the stuff that annoys you.
Even if local managment can’t actually chance policy in most cases they are supposed to log customer complaints and send them on to corporate.
Cripeys! I remember trying to apply for a job at a bookstore. One question was that a customer was going on a trip to a foreign country and was asking for some books/items they might need in preparation. I named six things. Then the interviewer implied that I got the question wrong and named eight more things I overlooked.
That was one of the reasons I wasn’t “qualified” for the job.