Brought to you by my discovery that some people think that “the customer is always right” isn’t the slogan of a long-dead department store, but rather it’s an actual call the cops law.
I used to work in CS for a cell phone provider. The most memorable call I had from that experience was a woman who spent over an hour yelling at me because her daughter had ordered a $1200 phone upgrade without permission. She was absolutely sure that it was illegal for us to charge her for that, because her daughter was not authorized to use her card, and because her daughter was under 18.
She didn’t want to return the phone, because she didn’t want her daughter to hate her. She just didn’t want us to charge her for it.
I see where the daughter got her intelligence from.
Was working retail in an area that had a local bag ordinance that required businesses to charge customers for bags. A man came up to the register and when I asked him if he wanted a bag for a few cents extra, he looked at me like I was crazy and was like, “You charge for bags?” I explained that it was required by the government and he just kinda scoffed. I thought that was it, but as he opened his wallet to pay, he flashed what turned out to be a police badge at me from another city some ways away, gave me a look, and said something along the lines of “I think I know what the law is.” I just finished up the transaction and got him going asap, blown away at the insecurity displayed. It was such a bizarre powermove over what was only a few cents extra for something completely optional.
I work in law enforcement and this is called “tinning” when you show your badge unnecessarily. My personal rule of thumb is if I’m dealing with you and you tin me then I am 100% giving you a ticket now.
I appreciate that there’s a word for it.
American police: they think they know what the law is.
- PorkRollWobbly ( @ComradePorkRoll@lemmy.ml ) English2•2 years ago
If cops had to pass the bar to be a cop, there wouldn’t be any cops.
Had a guy tell me he was going to sue me, personally not the store, and financially ruin me because I told him to put on a mask in like April 2020. He didnt do either. I’m sure anyone who worked with the public during that time has some story lol.
I still can’t wrap my head around why certain political factions latched onto not wearing a mask as a political rallying cry. Like…why do you want to kill the people you need to vote for you? I can’t understand.
The government isn’t supposed to tell them what to do, they are good people.
Yay! I have one. We had a customer grab a product from a spot on the shelf next to where it was normally stocked. The spots have labels indicating the price of the item. This person argued that because the product was in the wrong spot they should only have to pay the price of the item that should have been there. The prices also include the name of the product. The reason the the product was taking up space in the next spot was because we had sold out due to the item being deeply discounted because we were discontinuing it. When we explained that they began accusing us of false advertising and threatened to call the better business bureau. They admitted that they knew it was the wrong product but insisted that because it wasn’t shelved in the right spot that was some kind of loophole. I gave a firm no and then they asked to speak to a manager. I fucked off it was taken care of.
I also work front end, I’ve had sooo many people give me this shit.
#1 Not advertising. Advertising is what you see before you enter the building. Some stores don’t even have shelf labels.
#2 Do you think someone can walk up to your garage sale and slap their own sticker that says $1 and demand you sell them a TV for $1? No, you can refuse to sell your own shit whenever you want. It’s YOUR shit. You can burn it in front of them if you felt like it.
Not really the case in most of the EU.
It doesn’t count obviously if it’s a misplaced item and the price is clearly labelled for another item. However, if a store leaves discount stickers on some product late, or mislabels some price, they are obligated to sell at that price. There is caveat that it only works if the price is believable, but I managed to get a ton of shrimp that just arrived at a Lidl 90% off one time. Family was eating shrimp for weeks.
My dad and I were shopping at Home Depot one December and found a small Christmas decoration I wanted. When we got it to the register the cashier couldn’t find a tag or sticker on it. Normally I’d go get another one with a tag but this was the only one they had. The cashier tried looking it up through the computer system but still couldn’t figure it out. She handed it to us and told us it was free because it was the store’s fault that she couldn’t find the price.
We’ve been enjoying that decoration for years, my mom still puts it in the middle of her kitchen display. And we always remember how nice that cashier was to us.
Where in the EU would that be the case?
AFAIK a legally binding contract only happens once you actually exchange money for a product. That should be true pretty much all over the world as long as there’s actual laws/customs regulating this process.
Any prices/offers or whatever else you might see in or around a store are in no way legally binding no matter how believable the prices are.
Otherwise anyone can just run around with a 10/20/50% off sticker and force any store to sell them whatever they want for much cheaper.
Otherwise anyone can just run around with a 10/20/50% off sticker and force any store to sell them whatever they want for much cheaper.
Or they can just steal it, it’s just as legal. In my experience this is law in a lot of the EU, including Germany and a bunch of Eastern European places.
In my case, it wasn’t a misplaced 90% off sticker, it was just that the normal price tag on the shelf was printed with one zero less. It was also a “premium” item at the time, so the price wasn’t that much off, just cheap. It wasn’t just a bunch of shrimp, it was ready made, cleaned, arranged into a neat circle with dipping sauces in the middle.
On the other hand, I had a thing where Microsoft was introducing Skype to a country where the local currency was around 200:1 to the dollar. They messed up the currency conversion, and it defaulted back to 1:1, giving everyone a 99.5% discount on consumer electronics. It was obviously not honoured, and the law was clear, so no lawsuits either.
At least in Germany that’s the case.
Every contract is legally binding in Germany, even verbal contracts or in this case price tags (to some degree). Obviously other laws may invalidate them and verbally is hard to prove. For example if you advertise onetime off prices for a week to lure people in the store you have to have a reasonable amount of these items to be available through the week, otherwise people are eligible to get the offer or compensation.
Adding your own sticker would probably be fraud and easy to prove for the store (not matching sticker, no plans to reduce prices, …).
Worked in bars as a supervisor for 3 years, almost everytime I decided to cut a patron off (usually for being too drunk, or for being an arsehole) I would be met with “you can’t do that, it’s illegal, you HAVE to serve me”
No, I don’t. Service is at my discretion, and it wouldn often be unethical for me to continue to provide you with more alcohol, endangering yours and others around you further.
Funny because it’s really quite the opposite in most places. You’re legally required not to serve intoxicated patrons. If you overserve people and they go off and kill someone, you could be liable in my state. I think that’s pretty bullshit but it surprises me that folks would argue to the exact opposite. Of course, why should that surprise me?
No, I don’t have to accept a digital photo of your license as ID. No, your birth certificate is not proof of identity; it doesn’t have your picture.
But the absolute worst one: Not only is this a beat-up photocopy of a foreign ID card with no photo; it also clearly states that you are 19 and even if I accepted this document as valid identification, which I can’t, I still could not legally serve you alcohol.
Not exactly to the title but I was alone with a coworker and explaining my precancerous cells I was being checked up on and a customer walked up as I was explaining.
He said, “that sounds like bullshit and I would know because I have a PHD.”
he was an idiot.
I know lots of very stupid people with PhDs
I have a PhD, for one
I have a buddy who’s about to get his PhD in math. He’s probably one of the dumbest guys I know. Don’t get me wrong, he’s incredibly smart and a very hard working. But also the guy can’t open a baby gate, even if show show him 3 times. We play a lot of non-voice acted video games together where you need to read stuff, and he mispronounces pretty much every word. Like, he isn’t even close on most of them.
As a PhD student you pretty quickly learn that everyone is barely holding it together. It’s the kind of work where you learn and discover the edges of knowledge and then forget how to eat
Gotta make sacrifices to be able to know shit when you’re under 30
What does being under 30 have to do with it
I have a BSC… Bronze Swimming Certificate.
Obligatory Red Dwarf love!
I would know because I have a PHD
Also “I’m an engineer”. People with specific vocational training (EE, MD, whatever) think because they know one thing well enough to get a professional license they know all things well.
Does working as a security guard and having the company that contracted your company trying to get you to basically be their own personal police force count? I worked for a security company hired by Longs and the loss prevention manager of the Longs kept trying to get us to do things that, in California anyway, are illegal as a security guard. Such as digging through someone’s personal belongings. We can ask to look inside, but not touch, and we really can’t force them to comply. We could not arrest people. We couldn’t have weapons (not even allowed to carry a pocket knife while on duty with our guard cards). Little Napoleonic complex motherfucker didn’t care. He would insist that it was legal and we would just tell him to talk to our boss because he isn’t our supervisor, manager or even part of our company.
"Actually, in the terms of service you signed with DirecTV, your NFL Sunday Ticket was set to auto renew after the first free year.
Also.
We’ve billed you for it for two months, and is now past the point where we can remove it. You have 5 additional payments.
This is in fact also not illegal apparently. Since it’s in the terms of service.
If you’d like to sue DirecTV please have your lawyer contact our TEAM of lawyers and we’ll be happy to address it."
Worked that soul sucking job for five long years while going to college. Sucked.
Could be a UDAAP violation if they didn’t know what they were signing up for.
Former hotel front desk agent here: Some people still believe that when we say we’re sold out, that we’re legally required to keep an empty room set aside in case the Prime Minister (or President?) shows up, and that we should rent it to them instead.
Which is just all kinds of weird. One: Why would we purposely forego revenue by keeping a room vacant? Two: if we were legally required to keep a room for the Prime Minister, if you’re not the PM I wouldn’t rent it to you.
This one wins the prize for me. They believe it’s legally required to keep the room, so they don’t think it would be legal to give the room to anyone else, but they presumably think it’s legal to give the room to them! Impressive doublethink.
Reminds me, I hope /r/talesfromthefrontdesk finds a home on Lemmy or Kbin or somewhere.
Yes, I would subscribe!
I once had a b2b customer (store owner) tell me that having different pricing for wholesale and retail customers was racist.
I’m pretty sure meant discriminatory but even that doesn’t make much sense.
Working in a financial call centre, a certain type of person considered us to have stolen their money if they sent us an funds for an investment and refused to send anti-money laundering documents with it, because we also couldn’t return the money without them. Sorry, buddy.
I have a kind of related story. In the area I work, we have a government program that provides assistance to single mothers with young children to buy basic food necessities like baby formula, milk, bread, etc. Because of this program we can’t do returns for any of these basic items without a receipt, as it would allow people to convert funds from the program into store credit to buy things that aren’t covered, which is considered fraud. This sucks for a customer not in the program who just lost their receipt, but we have other ways to look up a receipt in the store if they paid with a card or used our loyalty program. Or if they know the time date and location of their purchase we can search for it the hard way.
We had one customer who wanted to return one of these items with no receipt, and none of the other options to look it up were possible. She paid cash, wasn’t a member, and didn’t know when she purchased it. Now, I don’t think she was trying to commit fraud, but without proof we literally can’t do the return, the register won’t allow it. She got very upset and demanded to speak with a manager, who came up and explained the problem the same way I did and she started yelling at him that because our store wasn’t “a government agency or legal entity” that we had no right to “enforce” the law. No amount of explaining that we were only following the law seemed to get through to her as she kept screaming “you’re not the police, you can’t do this!”
And it was all over less than 2 dollars. I’m pretty sure my manager was going to give her an apology gift card anyway before she started screaming at him.
They told me I had to honor an expired coupon for 5 cents off their gas.
I worked at a book store, and the card readers processed everything as credit. Which is generally fine, since most folks’ debit cards can be run either way.
I had an old dude come up and pay with his debit card. When it didn’t ask for a pin, he started screaming at me about how I’d just illegally charged his credit card. I politely explained that it didn’t work that way and he just kept yelling. So I rudely explained that it didn’t work that way.
Dude, you think you inserted your debit card and that magically, our system somehow found out your credit card information and charged that instead?
Dude would probably be better iff it it made his debit a credit card.
Debit cards can be run as credit, but they don’t have anywhere near the protections of a credit card.
Debit cards can be run as credit
Does it cost the merchant more?
In Australia, debit cards are dual-network, and credit transactions cost far more than debit transactions. Debit uses a local system called EFTPOS that has low fees, whereas credit uses the card issuer’s network (Mastercard, Visa, etc) and they take a far larger percentage.
I have no idea, Do debit cards have better protections in australia?
Cause in America, if you run a debit card, you get no protections (edit, banks will generally give you your money back if the card is stolen, after an investigation, nothing else really). I literally have been told by a bank that “If you wanted to make charge backs and have protections, you should have used your credit card”
A lot of people only have debit cards in Australia, and consumer protection is a lot stronger than the USA. Most credit cards in Australia have an annual fee, and the only rewards are usually frequent flyer points, so they’re nowhere near as common as in the USA.
I’m Aussie but I’ve been living in the USA for 10 years. American credit cards are something else. So many good cards with no annual fee, great perks (like extended warranty), and great rewards (like cash back, or points that are worth way more than in Australia).