Sway
Posts: 8882
Joined: 30/9/2005
From: Albuquerque
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quote:
ORIGINAL: moontheloon
Because I work in retail and it is Christmas.
A customer is almost certainly going to complain about me tomorrow for asking him very politely not to be rude after he made a wise assed remark about how the company I work for is having financial trouble at the moment. Whilst I know I shouldn't have said it, I also find it very distasteful to make light of the fact that someone could be made redundant, indeed to pretty much rub it in the face of that person with glee and sarcasm.
I am pissed off not so much because he was rude to me, because I get that every day, but more that I responded, because I usually save my responses for my own mutterings on the way home or in the staff room. I guess with the constant media reports that we're fucked and the stuff going on internally that makes me think that the bosses are panicked I was more touchy than usual.
I've had enough of Christmas though. People this time of the year seem to get a little crazy and seem to think that they have the right to treat the staff like twats, to treat the shops like they have every right to be there, even when they're closing, to complain about every little thing.
Moon, I empathise with you more than you can ever know.
I worked at the book shop Borders for over a year before it went into administration. At Christmas time. Our official redundancy date was 24th December.
So not only was it bad enough we were all losing our jobs (it included couples who's entire income for their family was from working there) but we had these massive closing down sales at what is already the busiest time of the year for retail. It was one of the most awful working experiences I've ever had. So utterly miserable.
People have this strange mentality when it comes to sale items - it's as if an otherwise decent and pristine item is automatically less precious because money has been taken off it, so the way they manhandled the remaining stock was hideous. Their attitudes were even worse. One woman argued with me because the discounts don't show up on the til display screen until I'd rang through every item and hit 'total'. She argued that the money wasn't coming off, I had to explain it was. And then she complained that it still wasn't the right amount. Bearing in mind she was getting around 70-90% discount off items that she probably wouldn't even have bought otherwise. So after about 3 times of ringing it up for her, and having to explain various things I was obviously quite frustrated because she was being an arse about it all. And then she had the cheek to tell me that I had an attitude problem. I actually still get riled up thinking about this.
I had another incident with an old lady. She wanted a book on pirates. Not a kid's book, but an adult's one. We'd actually kept one or two in the world history section, however at this point in the administration process we'd already had to close 2 of our floors to the public and the books were condensed into lower floors. I say 'condensed' but I use that term loosely since our books were obviously disappearing at a rate of knots because of the discounts. They were arranged roughly by general section by the end. I.e instead of having specific categories such as world history, european history, WWI, WWII, miltary history and so on, what was left was all just jumbled together under the term 'history'. Effectively making our search system completely redundant. So this old lady asks for a book on pirates. And we explain it's possible there could be some left within the history section but it was now a case of just having a look on the shelves to see for yourself. She then asked why we weren't looking it up for her on the computer. We explained again that due to being in administration everything was all jumbled up (no matter how hard we tried to tidy the sections up) and all we could do would be to help her look at the shelves. She was being a total dick about it all, no matter how polite we were and then said, 'See it's exactly for this reason you're closing down'. What a cunt. There were three of us there at the time and all three of us started to say something back in indignation, but a couple of other customers turned round, and being completely oblivious to how this cunt had acted towards us, it would have just looked like 3 young staff having a go at a dear old lady, so we all stopped within a second of opening our mouths. As you can tell, this still sticks in my head, despite that being 4 years since this happened now.
So I feel your pain Moon, I really do. I sincerely hope you have a nice Christmas despite the awful working conditions just now, and I also hope you find something else pretty soon.
< Message edited by Sway -- 19/12/2012 2:55:23 PM >
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RE: I am pissed off because... - 
I know it's no consolation but he's at peace now.
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