Why Customers Cannot Always Be Right

   What happened to 'The customer is always right?' I had a customer ask me this recently after I was unable to comply with his request. The problem was, however, that he wanted an item that had gone up in price to be charged at the price is was last week, when it was on sale. I had to respectfully decline doing that, then I had to call a supervisor on his insistence, and then after the supervisor had left - after again declining his request - I was treated to a lecture about how I should be able to change the price on a product without needing supervisor permission, which slowly downgraded to just plain out-and-out insults.
   Personally, I can see the reason why cashiers cannot just change prices on merchandise. The store - any store - has to make a profit. They have to make enough money to buy more merchandise, pay employees, pay for things like building rent (or purchase) electricity, advertising, and a whole slew of other things, which include covering the cost of the item being purchased itself. And if cashiers could just change the prices of things of their own free will, well, I'm sorry, but I've worked with the public enough to know that there would be plenty of people abusing that - cashiers and customers alike. Cashiers would be making things as cheap as possible for friends and family, and customers would be demanding 2 cent products, or even free. I'm sorry, but if you don't think that is true, then you have NOT worked in retail. And as much as you may hate the fact, the company you are buying from does need to make a profit to keep on running a business. They can't if all their employees and customers and running amok with the prices - rules are often made for a reason.
   Then there can be the heaps of abuse that can be smothered on the people who work in places such as mine. I've had a woman tell me, "Shouldn't you let a teenager do this job?" Seriously? My company has a policy that cashiers need to be eighteen or older to run the register. Or they used to; it's been seven years since I started working there, and I don't tend to run around asking people their ages. When I was hired on at my company, however, they required cashiers to be eighteen or older and to have a high school diploma or a GED.
   But even if that were not the case, if you are going up to someone - anyone - and saying garbage like this, then you are wrong; customer or not. It is never okay to be an asshole and this type of comment is assholery at it's finest. Not that anyone needs to know my business, but this job is how I support myself and my daughter, and no, I am not ashamed of this. I refuse to be ashamed. But whether you think I should be or not, you still have no right to come up to a stranger and start trying to force your life views on said person. No one likes that, not even the people who do it.
    Common decency and commonsense need to be the keys to dealing with everything, and this does not change when you go into your local grocery store. Just because you are the customer, that does not give you the inherent right to become a giant ass-hat. Asking us to do things that are against company policy can get us fired, and that makes you wrong. No cliche saying changes this. You are wrong. Also, being a jerk is not a right either. Everyone deserves common courtesy. And saying that 'I chose to become a cashier' also does not justify being an asshole to me while I am working. It's not okay.
   The point of the matter is just this: no matter what we do, we are all people, and we deserve respect. Everything would go a lot more smoothly if all of us remember this fact. And you can't be right when you are doing things that will get other people into trouble (like getting them fired) or being rude, at least, you can't when you're coming through my line. Which may be one of the reasons that my store doesn't hire teenagers to run the registers; an adult with life and work experience can be much harder to push around then a kid who's working their first job and has only high school experience.  

Maybe Marie's Not In A Good Mood (The Maybe Post)

   I dislike corn season. I mean, I like fresh corn as much as anyone, but I dislike being a checker during corn season. People don't like you to count corn. They have a cart full of the shit (and sometimes, this is literal) and they want to tell you something like, "I have one hundred", and they don't want you to count it. They get PISSED. Don't even think about the fact that counting out what you're buying is part of a cashier's job - just automatically jump to the conclusion that the cashier is accusing you of being dishonest. If I ran a business that sold items in quantity, I would want my employees to verify the quantity the customer had. But maybe that's just me; maybe the rest of the world wouldn't care if their employees were not doing their job to the fullest of their capabilities and the entire extent of their job description. Maybe a half-assed work ethic has become the new hot commodity in retail. 

   I also dislike customers who are douche bags. Full on, rude, I-have-no-respect-for-anyone-but-myself douchery. Fantastic. There is nothing like telling a customer that you're sorry, but you don't have any tape at your checkstand, and having that customer respond, "Do you even know what tape is?" Hmmmmmm. Maybe I don't know what tape is. Maybe, somehow, in my thirty-two years of life, I have managed to completely avoid all contact with tape. Or maybe you need to realize that this is a checkstand, and not the package counter at the post office, and that even if we did have tape, it would probably just be plain old scotch tape and not the packaging tape required to hold your freaking big-ass box shut. That's not exactly a donut box, dude. Or maybe I just don't know what tape is, and really, I have a full drawer full of packing tape.

  Banana peels; you do realize that when you hand me a banana peel at the point of checkout, you are now digesting the heaviest part of that fruit, and I can't correctly charge you. Same with apple cores, peach pits, and so-on and so-forth. I really dislike this. What am I supposed to do? Heimlich the rest of the fruit out of you and try to get the weight? Really, what am I supposed to do here? Just be like, oh well, you just stole from my company, and let it go? No big deal. It's just fruit. Maybe, if you were the only person doing that garbage. Do you really think you are the only person? Why is it, that when people want a snack, and they just can't wait until the shopping is done, why do they tend to choose the items that are sold by weight?

    To add to this list of things that I dislike; let's go with not being able to breath. Men! You don't need the whole bottle of Axe poured over your body. That's not sexy. Women are not passing out because of your inconceivable hotness; they are passing out because your cologne has defeated all the area's oxygen. And your poor, poor checker; that person can't even run away. That person has to try and hold their breath until you've moved on. Seriously, can't breath here. Maybe you don't need so much. Maybe, if you are buying cologne in bulk, that's a sign. Maybe, if you come through my line with five bottles of the shit, I'm going to grace you with Marie's-Ultra-Special-Glare-Of-Death - you know, on behalf of all of the people who have suffered. Maybe too much cologne should be considered chemical warfare.

   Maybe I'm kinda grumpy today. I dislike being grumpy, but hey, I'm human. Grumpiness comes to all of us. Probably, I shouldn't have gotten out of bed this morning, but I have responsibilities. I have things that need to get done. But maybe, after I'm done baking this box of Betty Crocker's cookie brownie that I just happened to find in the cabinet (how did that get there, I wonder?), maybe I should manage to refrain from eating the whole damn thing, because even though I like to eat my feelings, I know it isn't healthy. Or maybe I should eat the whole thing. We only live once, and maybe this brownie is the only thing standing between me and happiness. 

Pregnant Redheaded Waitresses Named Pepper

   A long, long time ago, one of my first jobs I help was as a server. I worked at a bar and grill, which will remain nameless, and I was eighteen. This job was brought to mind because I recently shared a post on my facebook page about the need to raise servers' wages. Many of them do not even make minimum wage; their employers pay them less then minimum wage (I was paid around $2.13/hr if memory serves), and tips are expected to make up the difference. Except then you run into the issues such as slow operation hours, when there are not enough customers to make the difference unless they ALL tip heavily, which isn't fair to expect, and there are bad tippers, and then there are the places that require servers to tip out to bus boys and hostesses, regardless of what they made in tips. All these things add up, and some places are so packed that maybe the servers still walk away with good money, but not every place is like that. But really, I digress, because my story today is not about the need for a living wage for all jobs. All this rallying for servers brought to mind a story that took place when I was in training at the bar and grill that I served for.
   I had several different trainers during my training period, but the particular story that I have in mind took place with a redheaded, pregnant server, who was named, I kid you not, Pepper. You can't make this stuff up. My trainers were showing some concern over my shyness, because though some of you will not believe it, I was shy. Well, maybe not so much shy as I didn't really want to talk to these people. I didn't mind taking orders and refilling drinks, ect., but this was the South, and everybody wants to talk to everybody, and I didn't want to talk to any of them. So, not super friendly. You wouldn't be waiting for you food forever, but if you wanted to talk about the virtues of the various nightclubs or casinos in the area, I was not the server for you.
   So they worried about that, most of them. Not Pepper. She was a very blunt person, and she didn't really mess around. She told me what tables to take, and then just got on with watching me. She was heavily pregnant, and probably appreciated the break. She didn't care if I was pissing people of left and right; she just wanted to rest her feet a bit. I can't blame her for that. But there came this point when we were slammed and we got seated all eight of her tables at once. One of the tables was a large party; I can't remember how many, only that we had to put a few tables together just to seat them. Now, Pepper took this order because she didn't think I could handle a large party yet, and I took the smaller orders, but at one point, after their main courses had been served, one of the men in the party grabbed my arm as I was passing, and pulled me to the table.
   "This is unacceptable!" he complained, pointing at his half-eaten steak.
   I was confused; I hadn't taken this table, so I wasn't sure what the problem was, but I made a go at it, "Is it cold? Or not cooked right?" I asked.
   "This steak is the blandest steak I have ever tasted! Did you even put any seasoning at all on it?!?"
   Well, no, I didn't. Servers don't cook the food, they just bring the food to the table. I didn't know if the cook had put the seasonings on the steak or not, this wasn't my job. And I didn't know how to handle this. Today, I would have been more aggressive, especially after being grabbed and pulled on because in no way do I tolerate being touched, and probably I would have been fired as a result, but remember, this is back in the day, before I was a mom: one of my first jobs. But I wasn't left hanging, because Pepper had been keeping an eye on me even though we had been working independently for a short while. So in a flash, she was over at the table saying, "This is my trainee, and she may not know how to help you. How can I help you?"
   The man at this point, thrust the whole plate into Pepper's middle. Pepper's occupied-with-a-baby middle. Bad move with any woman, but when you are talking about a redhead named Pepper, who also happens to be pregnant, bad, baaaaaad move. Before I knew what was happening, she smashed the whole plate to the floor, had the manager over at the table, and was screaming, "This asshole just threw his fucking plate into my stomach!"
   I have never seen a more frightened manager. Normally, a manager might have comped the meal and gave a bullshit apology, because even though this man was in no way right, managers tend to try to keep people coming back to bring in that revenue. Sometimes they take this too far, but that wasn't going to be an issue in this case. I think that the manager was scared of Pepper; I certainly was. Don't mess with pregnant redheaded waitresses named Pepper.
   I can't really remember what happened with that family. I do know that several of the women were stammering embarrassed apologies to me; I think they were also too afraid of Pepper to apologize to her directly. I didn't hold that job a year. I wasn't fired, but I quit. I couldn't work there; serving is so much more difficult that people think. Putting in an order is not all there is to the job. Like many jobs, there are issues and problems that people don't even see or think of until they actually have to do the job themselves. I didn't last, that's all I know. Serving remains my worst work experience ever. 

Holidays And The Public

   If there is one truth that you learn as a cashier then I have to say that this is that truth: Nothing brings out the worst in people like holidays and natural disasters. Oh, I know some of you are flapping your hands and 'pshhhh -awing' the screen, unable to believe my truth, because we are talking about holidays here, and aren't natural disasters things that bring people together? Well, as a former Southern citizen, I can tell you that I have worked retail up to the last possible minute during a hurricane. And you have never seen anything until you have seen two eighty year old women beating the crap out of each other over a 24 pack of bottled water. I mean, that was PRICELESS. And extremely stupid, but at least during a natural disaster, people are being stupid because they fear impending death. Hardship, at least, is some kind of explanation for idiocy and meanness. I am not saying that this behavior is right; I'm just saying at least this behavior is more understandable during a natural disaster than during the holidays.
   Because holidays, those are supposed to be about thankfulness, about being grateful, about friends and family and fellowship. Not about getting the best deal and nabbing the biggest turkey. Not about harassing your poor customer service representative to the breaking point. But many of you do seem to think that holidays are some kind of excuse for this type of behavior. I mean, good grief.  Yelling, screaming at other customers, screaming at workers just trying to do their jobs: holidays can really suck for someone in customer service. And yeah, we do chose to work there, because we have bills to pay and families to support, but just because we chose to work in a place does not give the patrons of that establishment the right to treat the workers like the crap they scraped off the bottom of their shoes.
   And of course, not all people are like that. So if you don't behave badly, if you treat people with respect, and deal with real problems that arise with common sense, then you aren't really part of this problem. But there are so many people that want to treat others badly. So for this holiday season, what I ask is that people think about others' feelings before they fly off the handle, that they treat people with the respect that all people deserve, and that they remember that this season is about fellowship, thankfulness, and rejoicing; not getting all that you can get and knocking down whoever you need to in order to get it.

Conversations With Customers

  We get all types working in customer service, and when you work in a grocery environment, that is no joke or exaggeration. Everybody needs to eat, and at some point or another, everybody comes shopping for food. This means that we cashiers/checkers get into some of the most crazy, zany conversations. I know that I have, and there are certainly some that have stuck in my mind. As I like to share, I am going to record some of them in this blog post. If you are cashier/checker you'll have some of your own, but these are some of the memorable ones that I have had.

Conversation 1: Not Human

   This one was a double act. I had two separate customers talking to each other at first.

   "Everything is going up. I guess that's how it is," she said, "Nothing's free."

   "Oh, I don't know about that," the man behind her chimed in, "A man bought me a free tank of gas once because he had just won the lottery. I was at the gas station and he just offered."

   "Things like that really show you that some people are just still human and not, well, whatever they are." the woman exclaims. 

   The man gets all sly-faced and looks at me and says,"Maybe this nice lady will show us that she's really human and give us our groceries free."

   "That'd be great!" the woman exclaims.

   "Nope," I say. "I'm not human; I'm whatever they are."

  You should have seen the looks that I got. Well, whatever, I thought I was funny.  

Conversation 2: Grandpa-faced

   For some reason, when I first started working at the place that I work now, I got a lot of people who thought that I was Russian. We have a high Russian customer base, and I do have a lot of Russian coworkers, but I am not Russian. Since I was a military brat, I started out my life being raised all over the place, but when my dad retired, we permanently moved to Mississippi. I was nine at the time, and Mississippi is the place that I identify as my childhood home. But I had a lot of customers who would come up to me and just start speaking Russian at me. This was the case with two young woman, probably early 20's. They came up and just started talking away to me in their language. I looked at them, baffled, and told them that I did not speak any Russian.

   "You don't speak Russian? You aren't from Russia?" one of the girls asked.

   "Nope."

   "That's so strange," she replied."You have the face of our grandfathers."

   Well, I have a sense of humor, so I about died laughing at that one. Good to know that I'm grandpa-faced. I'm sure this was an example of a misunderstanding due to language barriers, but it was pretty funny and never let it be said that I can't laugh at myself. 

Conversation 3: The Sheep Spy

   I have this man come through my line on a fairly regular basis and though  I can't be sure, I am pretty certain that he is homeless. He is also crazy, but when he is in a good mood, he can be a pretty fun guy. The first conversation that I had with him cemented the image of the nice guy in my mind. He was carrying the huge backpack that he always have, and he looked pretty gruff and wasn't clean, so I do admit that he did make me nervous. Especially when he leaned over my counter, with a dead-serious expression.

   "Can I tell you a secret?" he asked.  

   Being the verbal genius that I am, I responded with "Uhhhhhhhh......"

   Despite my lack of enthusiasm, he gleefully responded, "I'm a sheep spy!"

   "A what?" I asked, befuddled.

   "I'm a sheep shy. Because I'm not a vegetarian!"

   "Okay," I laughed, "Me too." 

   I finished ringing him up and he paid with coins and crumpled dollars and then he exclaimed "Hey, watch this!" And he began to juggle the oranges that he had just bought. 

    He does come in really grumpy and mean, but I try to remember that he can be really fun too. It can't be a sheep-spying, orange juggling day everyday. 

    There you go: a small but colorful peek into the working life of the cashier. 

I Don't Do Bubbly

   I recently had a customer who came through my line and insisted that I was in a bad mood. I smiled at the man, and asked him how his day was, but my smile must not have been big enough, because the first thing out of his mouth was "Oh, it's been one of those days hasn't it? It's okay, you don't have to act happy for me."
  Now, I do admit, that due to the fact that we are required to smile at people when we greet them, that I do smile a lot more than normal while I am at work. And probably, that smile can seem a bit forced, especially at the end of a shift when I have been grinning like a lunatic for eight fricken hours at people who can't even
read my name tag, and insist on calling me Mary or Maria instead of Marie, but that actually doesn't mean that I am having a bad day. It just means my face hurts. Smiling may not take as much muscle movement as frowning, but try smiling for a long period of time and tell me what makes your face feel more sore. It's not going to be frowning.
   Anyway, I explained to this customer that I was fine and nothing was wrong, but he continued to insist that I was unhappy,  and I began to feel that pissy feeling: anger on a slow burn. I don't like people telling me how I feel. I am not one of those chicks who say they are fine but really, they are hoping you will press the issue. If I say I'm fine, I mean I'm fine. Don't continue to ask me twenty more times, "What's really wrong? You can tell me." No. If sometime was really wrong, and I didn't tell you the first time you asked, then I don't want you to know. It's not your business; it's my business.
   But there truly was nothing wrong this day, and I do believe that I had given this man a decent smile. But he argued that I just didn't seem 'happy enough'. Well, what is happy enough? That's what I want to know.
    This, of course, flashed me back to another time, with another company, when I was getting my yearly review. This company reviewed you on a point system. Getting a one would probably mean that you needed to start looking for another job, and fast, and getting a five meant that you were a company superstar. As I sat there getting my review, I was pretty damn pleased to get a four, until I heard the manager's reason for not giving me a five. "You need to be more bubbly, Marie," he said, "You need to smile and laugh a lot more. Customers like you, but you would be more approachable if you have a little more bounce to your step."
   Are you kidding me? I don't bubble. And it isn't like I am running around holding a bloody axe, waiting for my next victim. I am, by nature, a quiet person. I wouldn't know how to bubble if my life depended on it. My favorite color is black, the music I listen to is mostly comprised of metal and angry women, I hate pink and little yippie purse dogs, and I don't like people touching me. This doesn't mean that I give bad customer service. This means that the person representing your company doesn't look and act like Bimbo Barbie. This is a good thing. I may not bubble, but no short-change conman is gonna pull shit with me. Who would you prefer handling the company's money?

The Gremlins in Register 6

   I thought that today would be an average day at work. Go in, talk to some customers, get annoyed at others, yak at my coworkers, and then go home to my daughter. I was not counting on the stress and aggravation that the check reader in register 6 would cause me. But when I went to take my first check of the day....
   We have old stuff. I know that some of you are used to the machines that read your check and then your checker hands the check back to you and the amount comes out of your bank account as fast as a debit charge. Ours are not those. Ours has to read the check info (routing number, account number, and check number) and then the reader checks this information against the bad checks in our system, and then if there are no matches to bad checks, the reader prints our deposit info on the back of the check. (At least, that is my assumption of how the reader works, but no one has really explained it, so I could be off). Well, the first check I tried to put through jammed, so I had to enter all the information manually. Then the reader printed the deposit info correctly, but took about two minutes to process that it had printed and to let my cash drawer open.
   So in the meantime, the customer was looking at me, and I was looking at the customer, and we were looking at each other, and since this was not a romantic interlude, all this looking at each other was really awkward. Then the check reader messed up on the second and the third, and all this looking at people, waiting so I can give them their receipt and send them on their way is really bugging me. Looking at all these people for these lengthy periods of time is making my skin itch, and I'm jamming on buttons and opening shit and repressing the urge to bang on the thing, but I'm losing my cool. So I call my manager, and he comes over and wiggles some wires and tells me I need to be patient. Patient!!! An indication of how little he really knows me; or else a nod to my acting skills.
   And so the next check comes along, and his tinkering with the wires has done nothing, so my customer is looking  at me, and I'm looking at her, and we are looking at each other, and I'm wishing that I had a sledge hammer, and see if I wouldn't show that printer at thing or two.
   And then I realize, I really do need a hammer, because the only explanation is that my register is infested with gremlins. Not those weird ones from the movies, but the ones that were rumored to mess with the engines in the airplanes during one of the World Wars (I am not good with all that history). They have left the planes and infested my freakin' register.  I know that this seems far-fetched, but that makes even more sense. No one expects them to be in the grocery stores infesting the old equipment. Fey little bastards.

No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service: What About No Pants???

   This is a tale from my retail past; a field that I have been in for many, many years. Though I currently live up North, I lived in the South for most of my childhood. At first, Mississippi, but after I caught the preggers bug, I moved to Florida. Now, I know you are thinking, "Florida! Why did you move from the sunshine state to rainy, rainy Washington???" Well, before you go off thinking I am crazy, I did not live in the nice parts of Florida, like Miami or Tampa or Orlando. I lived in a rural ghetto. Yup. Rednecks as far as the eye could see, and not the nice ones that you see on TV. Not the funny ones that get their own shows and are clean, no. I mean the dirty, unwashed mean ones that smelled like liquor and weed, with feral dogs that wanted nothing more than to chew on your face. The urban ghetto gets gangsters and turf wars; the rural ghetto gets angry burly bear-men who own shotguns and face-chewing dogs. Neither is a good place to live, but I digress.

   In my old home in Florida, we were a cut off people. The closest store was about a 25 to 30 minute drive, but  I could do it in 15 minutes on a good day, and I could have driven it blindfolded if I had too. Now why was I so familiar with this drive? Because I worked at that closest store, that small oasis of food that you didn't have to grow or hunt. I mean, you could drive out another 15 to 20 minutes, depending on traffic, to get to the nearest Walmart, but most people just didn't have the gas, even back then, when gas wasn't $4 a gallon. 

   There is this sign that small, country stores tend to post, and we all laugh at that sign  posted on  windows and  front doors. Ya'know, the one that states: No shoes, no shirt, no service. Many of you think that this sign is unnecessary, but us workers in the retail field, we can tell you different. We can tell you of all the people who come in barefoot, bare chested, with a complete disregard for a sanitary environment and a total lack of dignity. I understand that in Florida, the weather does get a tad bit toasty, but come on! Flip-flops and tank-tops are completely acceptable, people!

   Well, I had thought no shirts were the worst I was going to have to deal with. But one day I was working the customer service desk, and in this store customer service was right smack-dab at the entrance, so on top of all the other typical customer service duties, we had to monitor the customers coming in (and those going out. Theft is a common problem in retail.) I was working the desk, as I had said, and in came this man, no shirt, all his chest hair and man boobs proudly and shamelessly on display for the entire store to admire.  I made motions to the supervisor, because I didn't want to deal with him. I could tell he was trouble.

   "No shirt! No shirt!" he yelled when confronted by said supervisor, "Well guess what?! Your sign don't say no pants!" And he stormed out. The supervisor and I looked at each other in horror, and she called all the managers to the front of the store, because they were guys, and us little girly-girls did not want to deal with Mr. Winky.  Uh-uh. No way. Of course, all those manly protectors didn't want to deal with Mr. Winky either, until my supervisor (a true kick-ass Southern lady) stated that if they didn't want to deal with him she had a gun in her car and she was more than capable of shooting the snake. Yeah, they couldn't really let her do that, as tempting as this offer was. He did come in, with Mr. Winky flapping in the breeze, and was promptly thrown out again, with much cursing and yelling on his part, exclaiming vehemently that we were infringing on his rights. Whatever you say, but I think that my rights are that I don't have to see your neither regions. And all I'm saying, is while we might think that those signs are common sense: the truth is that they need to be upgraded.