Thank the Lord I don't work in retail anymore, it's been quite a while and all my former coworkers have pretty much moved on from that store (a mall Ratshack). It's a little hard for me to recall the details or some of the ol stories but "punches in the face" as we used to call them, were pretty common.
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I can't count the number of times where I'm cleaning or organizing underneath the Verizon Wireless display, which happens to have a big ol sign over it that says VERIZON WIRELESS, and I'm asked by a customer "Do you sell Verizon?" or "Where are your Verizon phones?"
Depending on my mood, sometimes I wouldn't say a word and just point directly upward and wait until they look up. First you see a dumbfounded look as they try to decipher why I'm pointing up (DURRRRR), then you watch their eyes move upward and DING! It's like you see the light bulb in their tiny little heads turn on. Rare but when you have that much mall traffic, you get a lot of brainless people or people that are just brainfarting.
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I think my all-time classic customer encounter was with an old lady that I had sold a corded telephone to. Spend a heck of a lot of time with her for a simple emergency button corded phone. Explained to her how to work it and even plugged it in to show her it worked. Some people are just a tad paranoid so I do as she asks because I'm a nice guy.
Fast forward a couple of months and I'm behind the counter cleaning up and she storms in, heads straight for me and does the angry, "This is a POS, it doesn't work right, I want my money back!" routine. Of course, I don't care other than the fact that she's a good 3 months past the 30 day return date.
So I pop open the box anywho and take the phone out to see if it's really defective or whatnot. So I take the phone out of the box and wrapping and I see all this browish disgusting crud around the earpiece, receiver, pretty much all over the phone. Eww gross, so she's still bitching about how it came like that and it doesn't sound right and it makes an annoying clicking sound when she makes phone calls on it. So I proceed to clean the phone off and Lysol it underneath the counter, plug it into my stores phone line to see if what she said was true.
She says she uses it to call her son all the time and it always has an annoying clicking sound intermittently when she makes phone calls. So I try it out, call another store nearby and ask the associate over there if they hear anything funny. The phone is crystal clear and the associate says he can hear the lady bitching in the background.
So I go it's OK to me, she insists it definitely has problems when she calls her son. So I ask her if she could dial her son and try it then. So she dials him, and she goes "There it is! I hear it now!" So I get on the phone and I talk to her son. I ask him, "do you hear anything funny?" because I definitely can't hear a thing odd. He tells me no and then tells me that his mom is a bit of a crazy old kook and that I should just humor her and get her out of the store. So I thank him for his time and hang up and try to give the lady a store credit and ask to clear it with my manager, who's been in the back room the whole time listening and watching this whole thing.
EDIT: I noticed when my manager gave her the phone a second time, that her earring was lightly tapping the earpiece possibly causing the clicking and she insisted it wasn't that.
He tells me to come back there and give him the heads up before he heads out there to talk to her. So I tell him about what her son said and so he heads out there. He tells her that unfortunately it's out of his power to give store credit past 90 days and he takes another look at the phone, calls on it, etc. Works again just fine. So he tells her that he can't take it back for a return and doesn't have the same phone in stock for an exchange (I had already checked and we had none).
So she starts to go with the poor tired old lady sympathy routine... she's got to ride the bus to get to the mall, it's out of her way, she can't come here at night (It's friggin white suburbia in north NJ!!), she doesn't think she can come back needs a ride to the bus station, etc. The best excuse was that she couldn't drive because she said she was legally blind.
Now I'm still at the counter and my manager goes to the back to see if there's a nearby store with one to exchange... there isn't. This was after the legally blind comment. First another coworker of similar height and build, hair and clothing, etc walks out of the back room in front of my manager. She smells that the sympathy routine isn't working when she sees my manager shaking his head. Now she's "legally blind" yet she points DIRECTLY at my manager and yells his name and starts again with name-calling "incompetent" "stupid" "unprofessional" etc. Note that our name tags are fairly small and the lettering isn't that big especially when we're at least 5 feet away from you when stand behind the counter.
I could definitely tell that my manager was fed up and he decides enough is enough, give me the code for "call mall security if she doesn't leave." He tells her to leave or else he's calling security as she's still cursing him out. So after a few more minutes she leaves... and proceeds to go across to the EBGames and bitch to them about it! I know the guys that work there since the mall can get dead at times and they did the ol' "cuckoo" gesture to me as soon as she left. She did one more pitstop at the wireless booth in the middle between our stores and bugged him. I talk to that guy too and he was trying pretty hard to get rid of her fast! I saw the "deer in headlights" look on him as soon as she walked up to his booth.
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