LOL, I do the same thing!! Have been since my son was a little tyke. He’s almost 13 now.
What people can’t use change in your store? It is money.
I don’t think Mama Tiger, or the person in her post meant this as a slam against the worker, more like “here’s a good opportunity for a lesson for the kid”. I’ve seen a lot of stuff she’s posted, and I’m pretty sure she didn’t mean it in a derogatory way against the worker.
The KIDS don’t know that the person working at the yukky job may or may not have a college degree, all they see is a stressful NOT fun job.
That makes an impression upon them, the constant mom admonitions of “get-a-good-education-so-you-can-go-to-college-and-get-a-good-job” isn’t as strong of an impression. After all, what does old MOM know??
But the stressed out looking kid behind the counter, who is young, (unlike mom) well THAT makes an impression.
Whatever- it comes off as pompus and fucking rude to me. My father, by the way, is an educated man and HE works at Wal-Mart because he loves his job and enjoys the customers.
I think it’s an incredibly assholish thing to say.
Have you ever tried to pick up a coin when you have no fingernails? try doing that a hundred times, it gets old real quick like. Change is fine, I love change, the more I have, the less I have to deal with the management.
I also have these things called hands, see the amazing opposable thumb? You could kindly place your coinage into one of them, instead of turning your ziplock bag upside down, sending a shower of lint, prescription pain pills and pennies scattering all over my counter to get lost in the poorly designed conveyor, and the numerous other cracks. You also dont need to dump said bag in said manner just to get 7 cents, thhn expect me to pick it up.
There was more stuff going on today, but I shant bore you.
In some cultures it is considered rude to put the money directly in someone’s hand.
Or maybe they spend a lot of time at the casino.
You ever try counting several dollars worth of anything but quarters in loose change while customers are stacking up behind the guy? It’s not that it’s change, but that it’s loose change. The guy is perfectly capable of rolling his change before I get there instead of expecting me to do it.
And if you try to give me a bunch of pennies in a dime wrapper, don’t be surprised if I’m really pissed off and insult you. And if you try to pass a counterfeit on me, I’m getting a plate and calling the Secret Service.
… didn’t you forget the folks who wanna put their paltry purchases on a credit/debit card?
Y’all don’t do that, right, because of the fees involved?
Q
Dollar Guy - Just be glad they ain’t hungry. You don’t want to see those people when their blood sugar has run out. I’ve seen them. It ain’t pretty.
What was really funny is when I switched from fast food (where they’d spell in front of me) to a public library, in roughly the same neighborhood. All of a sudden I was a respected source of information! Same person, same type of work; different perception.
And IME it is true that people are more reasonable when they love the product. I worked at a fancy soap store during the Christmas rush & it was actually mostly fun. People would get a smile on their face as they walked in the doorway, in anticipation of a product they knew they wanted.
You CSR folks doing phone work have my pity - I’m amazed at what you’ve described. Perhaps the telephone itself & its implied anonymity is one of the root causes of this horrible lack of civility.
A fucking Men! I have a neighbor who, up until recently, was employed by a high tech computer company that, thanks the shitty economy, went belly up. Now he’s driving trucks, hates it and wants his old job back. The guy at SAM"S might not be working there because he didn’t study. He might be working there because that’s the only job available at the moment insert shock-n-awe smiley here.
IDBB
Yeah, telling your kids that they need an education so they don’t end up like the poor schmuck behind the counter might be good for impressing the need for an education on the kid, but it’s also gonna make them look down on anyone in a service position. Maybe you should find a BETTER way of getting the point through, hmm?
Gee, the kid’s making biased observations already. How wonderful is that?
Good point, Venoma. I was all ready to agree with Canvasshoes and Mama Tiger, until you made that point.
Working crappy service industry jobs were what pushed me through college. Working with 50 year old waitresses and cashiers gave me all the “push” I needed to finish school. I never looked down on them though. I suppose if my mother was telling me that I would “end up like them” from a small age, I might’ve.
A different way of getting the message across would probably be a good idea.
[sub]not to mention the fact that if by any chance the guy behind the counter heard her say that, it would be horrible. How rude can she get?[/sub]
The parents at my job can be quite pushy. I think because the tutoring center I work at is very flexible (Members come in on a walk-in basis, the software the kids work on is constantly adjusted to suit their own academic needs, etc) it gives parents the perception that they have 3 metric tons of leeway when it comes to just about anything.
I work with approximiately six children at a time, supervising their own individual lessons, and helping them with any questions/problems they have. Even though our center clearly outlines this (I work at a Score! AP center) parents still think their kid is entitled to one-on-one homerwork. Sometimes I’ll have a parent come up to me with an armload of the kid’s homework and ask me, “Can you help him with this?”
How the parents can forget that they SIGNED A CONTRACT OUTLINING THE CURRICULUM is beyond me. We are not a babysitting service, we cannot take priority on one child over another, we CAN customize the CCC software the child works on to match specifically he’s doing in school, but we’re not there to help him with the homework he dragged with them (ok, in all fairness I could explain maybe a problem/concept very briefly, but I am too busy to sit down wtih them and hammer out every thing they are working on)
I was once laid off from Lockheed-Marietta and forced to take retail-job paying minimum wage. There’s nothing like going from 12 bucks an hour (back then) to just over 4, and having to “make do” with less. It’s also a great boost to one’s ego to know that you did it and could again if need be.
This has nothing to do with customers being morons, but I wanted to comment on the fact that the person behind a sales counter may not be there because he or she “didn’t study”, but because (as Ray Davies of the Kinks so succinctly wrote) circumstance has forced their hand and they’re on a Low Budget!. 
Q
Naw, don’t make threats like this. Identity theft is a crime. You might think it’s funny and a way to get back at someone who was rude to you, but it’s not funny.
I dunno if it’s ment to be funny but it’s damn true. I worked at Customer Service (now I deal with internal support -yay!) and I can’t tell you how many times people have bitched and hung up thinking I couldn’t find them again. HELLO!?!? I fucking work at the PHONE company (well, cell phones) and I can trace any call you make including blocked ones. Hell, I over heard one of our dealers doing this and that agent called them right back!
I’ve never heard of identify theft occuring from a customer service agent but, in this day and age, I don’t think I want to increase my chances of being affected by such a thing.
I wasn’t trying to be funny. I’ve seen CSR’s lose their jobs and be prosecuted over Identity Theft. No assholish caller is worth losing your job over…but it’s something the assholish callers need to THINK about before they call and act like assholes.
Personally, I just jot their addresses down and sign them up for every piece of crap offer I can find on the Internet…
(Not really…but I SHOULD!)
Not to sound all sanctimonious here (OK not trying hard enough), but I don’t care why someone is in a lousy job. I’d rather teach my kid that people have dignity and are worthy of respect regardless of what they do for a living, or how much education they have, or even how much drive they have to better themselves.
Then again maybe that’s because I held two jobs where I cleaned up people’s body wastes for minimum wage and I got smacked in the head really hard with the idea that a few years in college didn’t help me do that much.
I feel your pain, too, johnnyk. I also work as a CSR for a cell phone company in Oklahoma (hey, maybe we work at the same place!) and I spend most of my time between calls (when there is a “between calls”) fantasizing about what I’m going to do to the really nasty customers on my last day. I don’t know if, when that day comes, I’ll have the guts to actually go through with any of the stuff I’m considering, but daydreaming about it helps me cope.
And before anyone gets all bent out of shape, even if I really go through with the things I’m fantasizing about, I won’t do anything stupid or illegal, like identity theft. But I would just love to tell the person on the other end who’s being a real shithead, “Ma’am (or Sir), I think I’ve got a solution to your problem.”
“Oh, yeah?”, they’ll ask, “what are you going to do?”
“Well, actually, I’m going to need you to perform this particular troubleshooting step yourself”.
“You mean I call you people for help and I have to do all the work? What are you people there for, anyway?”
“Now don’t worry, it’s not that hard to do. I just need you to get down on your knees and
suck the shit out of my asshole!” Click!
Again, though, I have to wonder if I’ll have the guts to go through with it when the moment of truth comes. Sorry if I’ve offended anyone here with what I’ve written.
I’d also like to second something johnnyk said. It’s not that I’m justifying my feelings towards customers (and I should specify it’s just some customers that make me feel this way, some of them are really wonderful), I’m not saying things like identity theft are right or acceptable, and I would never in a million years do something like that, but if you don’t want it to happen to you, if you don’t want your account “accidentally” cancelled or altered, if you don’t want your food spit in (or worse), you ought to treat CSR’s and people in other service professions with the dignity and respect that all people deserve to be treated with. Believe me, folks, it’ll get you a lot further than screaming and cursing. I’m willing to go the extra mile to help a customer who’s nice, but I’ll only do the bare minimum for a jerk. You know, it amazes me that even some of the nicer customers will interrupt me when I’m speaking (and trying to help them) and will hang up on me at the end of the call when I’m doing my little “Thank you for calling [company name], have a great day” bit. Someone said earlier in this thread that the anonymity of the phone gives people (perceived) license to behave anyway they want (or something like that). I agree. It’s like they don’t even think they’re talking to a human being. Jesus, people, grow a heart.
Wow. This post turned out way longer than I expected it to be. Sorry if I’ve pissed anyone off or bored anyone to death.
When you come in the door of the store where I used to work, there is a desk on each side of the entryway. The desk to the right is labeled COPY CENTER in very large, high-contrast letters. There are copy machines all around it. The desk to the left is the cashier. Behind the cashier’s desk is a wall with a huge sign labelling it INK CARTRIDGES. The wall is covered in pegboard full of ink cartridges.
So of course four out of five people entering the store would walk in, look around, and ask the cashier either:
A. Where’s the copy center?
B. Where are the ink cartridges?
Observation skills are sadly lacking nowadays, apparently.