Sunday, November 08, 2009

irritating customers

Christmas and the whole holiday season stress me out. Not because I won't get all the presents I want, or be able to buy everything I want for everyone else, or because I don't see my family. No, I'm stressed out because I work in retail. As the store gets busier, people seem to get more inconsiderate. Some examples:

When I'm pushing an obviously heavy cart full of merchandise, 4 out of 5 people don't get out of my way. Only when I manage to somehow manuever around them and I say "excuse me" then 1 out of those 4 people will move over an inch and grunt something that I can only assume is supposed to be "Oh, excuse me! I'm so sorry to get in your way!" The rest of the people either completely ignore me, or give me a dirty look for disturbing their shopping. I actually had someone the other day give me a dirty look, then got in my way not once, but twice. (She went around the aisle s she could do it again.) Then had the gall to ask me for help. Maybe I wasn't as nice to her as I am to other customers. Oopsie.

People treat the store like it's their house. I realize that it is part of my job to follow people around and clean up after them, but why do they leave their empty coffee cups on the shelves? We do provide trash cans like every 20 feet or so. Or if they drop some merchandise or somehow else make a mess (hey, that stuff happens) why do they not tell a worker?

-Example: The other day I spent a good half an hour cleaning up a bottle of baby oil. I thnk someone opened it to smell it or something, and then it slipped out of their hands because it was baby oil. I ust happened to walk by and see a mess on the floor. Have you ever tried cleaning up a liter or so of oil with paper towels on tile flooring? Not as easy as it sounds.

Related, I can understand taking stuff of the shelves to look at it, like shoes or rug. But why would you leave them on the floor afterwards?

-Example 1: I was working in a certain rug aisle with my cart, putting stuff away. I left for a minute to help a customer, and came back to find two large rugs splayed out on the floor. Seriously, I was gone like 30 seconds and when I left, nobody else was on the aisle.

-Example 2: I was tidying up the shoe section. This woman (well, late teens - early 20s) was taking out shoes and leaving them on the floor. My passive agressive "cleaning up the same aisle she was on, right in front of her" wasn't working, so I said "Oh, are you still looking at all of these?" Her boyfriend was embarrassed, but she was like "oh no, I'm done." I gave her a minute to clean up after herself and went to another aisle. When I came back, the part of the aisle that I had just cleaned right in front of her, was a mess again. Apparently she ddn't find what she was looking for the first time, so she had to go through them all again. Honestly, that's when I gave up and went home a few minutes early.

Ok, that's enough bitching for now. I was more riled up earlier, but videogames fixed that. :D

4 comments:

LittlePea said...

oh! This brought me some flashbacks from when I worked at the mall one Christmas. It only gets worse my friend.

super des said...

Oh I know it does. I'm not looing forward to it

SUEB0B said...

I worked at Kmart one Christmas. Oy. I used to love people who would bring in multiple children and say "Go play in the toy section while I shop."

super des said...

At least then the children would be contained in one spot.As it is this way, there are carts (buggies) full of them everywhere in the store.

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