I’ve worked retail a few times, and I always just went and stood in the back for awhile, maybe took a shit, had a smoke, and then came back to tell them we still don’t have it. The best were the fucking clowns at home depot. My guy, you are in the fucking warehouse, there is no other storage. Luckily, at that home depot, there was an unsecured security door on the receiving area you could just pop out back and have smoke at.
I worked in a department store when I was a teenager. My favorite was when people came in looking for a video game console days after it released and ask you to look in the back because maybe one fell between some skids or something. Like Buddy, if we had one to sell we’d have sold it. Those things go right into a cage once their received. Ain’t no one losing track of them, they literally print money for the store. A lot of people just assume retail workers are all incompetent.
Adding in edit: although sometimes it ended up with the customer screaming at us, it was always great to ask them if they really thought they were the first person today to come up with that idea. For a moment before they yell again they look dumbfounded. Worth it!
Lol that was the best. “My dude you are the 40th person to ask me to check today, I checked the first two just in case, they’re sold out everywhere and we both know it.”
Then the next question, ‘can you call the other stores and check if they have any?’ and it’s like they won’t believe you that they’re sold out everywhere. Like, “Buddy, I’ve called the other stores several times, they’ve called me several times. We’re all calling each other asking for the same thing, they’re sold out everywhere.” Even then some people still didn’t believe us, like if they yell and scream loud enough and long enough we’ll bring one out from a secret supply we keep hidden just because.
I used to do that too! “Do you have this?” “Oh, the most popular item three days before Christmas which I’ve been asked about thirty times a day for the last month and a half? No sorry, it’s out of stock until at least after the holidays.” “Well can you go look in the back?”
Then I’d just go back there and dick around on my phone for five minutes, the manager would come out and ask what I was doing, I’d say pretending to look for something we don’t have and she’d go “oh, okay” and go back to playing solitaire in her office lol.
- Omega_Haxors ( @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml ) 34•11 months ago
There are people who genuinely think the only reason they’re not getting what they want is because they’re not being enough of a hassle. It’s never that what they were asking for was incomprehensible or physically impossible, it’s that they didn’t kick and scream loud enough.
I used to work in an electronics place, and we had a guy who came in once who wanted a specific camera at a very specific price. As in, he came in and flat-out said “I want this and I will give you exactly this amount for it.” The price he had in mind was about $10 below our cost, which we told him, and he absolutely refused to budge on it, and also wouldn’t just leave. Me and the manager literally had to show him the thing on the cashier screen that showed our cost and stuff and the managers was like “If we sell you this, it’s like we’re paying you $10 to take this camera from us.”
He eventually left without it, but it took forever.
- Omega_Haxors ( @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml ) 2•11 months ago
What a coward. He should have urinated himself on the spot.
As a customer, if I wanted to know if you have something at a counter, even if I said “are you sure?”, if you clicked 3 times randomly on your computer screen then I’d be sufficiently convinced.
Why do you need to ask if you’re sure? When I worked retail the quicker I got you what you wanted the quicker you would leave me alone so why wouldn’t I be sure? It’s not like I would pretend to check.
If I asked if you had X and you immediately replied No… I would ask to be sure. If you did any token move, pretend or otherwise to check if you have it then I’m fine with it.
Positive intent my friend. I always assume people are doing the right thing and being honest until proven otherwise.
If you asked me and I immediately said no, it’s very likely I’ve already been asked numerous time for the same product.
The last place I worked retail was using an inventory tracking program in command prompt that polled and updated once per day at closing. You could sell through standing inventory and the system would still show how many you had started the day with. If you really had to know how many of something you had on hand, it required either polling each register’s sales data individually or temporarily closing them to fake daily closure to run a report on a SKU. It was not unheard of to waste an hour checking to see if the store or any others nearby had a single item for a single customer at a national chain.
I feel like this would’ve been a great opportunity to specify what the customer was looking for. You know, so the employee can actually speak to him.