Sometimes you get to tell the customer they are wrong... and it is Good
Following on from The Mysterious X, whose wealth of material I shall find hard to beat, here are a few incidents from my five months as a General Assistant:

There was a customer thereafter referred to as the Soup Woman who took up half an hour of my and a supervisor's time complaining about a special offer on Covent Garden soup. It was a BOGOF or two for two quid or something, I can't remember, but it was only on certain flavours, which were listed on the POS (point of sale). Somehow an errant flavour had found its way into the rotunda, most likely placed there by another customer. The Soup Woman had bought this along with one of the others and got out of the store when she realised she hadn't had her special offer. She marched up to the kiosk and got angry with me, an innocent till monkey at the time, and I grew tired of trying to pacify her and called the supervisor. She patiently explained that the offer was only on certain flavours and that they were marked clearly, and refrained from pointing out, correctly, that the woman was an idiot. She even gave her a refund. The woman practically dragged her through the entire store to the rotunda to prove her point. There was no point to prove. But that didn't stop her from spending another fifteen minutes writing a complaint (on both sides of the customer comment card, with underlining, and multiple exclamation marks, and we all know what they mean), accusing us of "defrauding the public" and practising "deliberately deceptive trading" to steal people's money. I mean, she got her 50p back, honestly, some people...

Haha, just remembered this one... There was a girl, a regular customer, who was heavily pregnant. Not the brightest of chavs. She came to my till with her purchases, a punnet of grapes, a punnet of strawberries and a bottle of wine. There followed a series of spackery so convoluted that I am having trouble remembering it in detail... She wanted to pay partly with a voucher and partly in cash. She had a £3 voucher for milk and fruit and vegetables for kiddies. The grapes were marked "save £1" or something, and she had mistaken it for the price. So when she handed over the voucher, which I defaced in the proper manner, and then counted out her measly cash, she didn't have enough. So she said she'd put the remaining pound or so on her card. It was declined. Several times. 'What can I do?' she said. 'Um', said I, 'put something back?' 'OK', she said, 'I'll put some fruit back'. 'Er', said I, 'you can't buy wine with this voucher. It's for your kiddies.' 'Oh', she said, crestfallen and clearly defeated, 'oh... well I'll just leave it all then.' And she made to move off. Didn't occur to her just to put the wine back... must have all been getting too much for her. 'But wait,' I said, 'what about your voucher? I've defaced it so you won't be able to use it again now.' 'Oh, it doesn't matter', she said. 'Well wait a minute,' I said, and called my supervisor. She came and I explained that the card was declined, the customer had changed her mind about her purchases, and the voucher was defaced. 'Do you want to go and get something for £3, you might as well get the use of it', said my supervisor. 'Ok,' she said half-heartedly, and off she waddled. She came back with a larger punnet of strawberries which was more expensive, but still 1p short of the voucher. 'Um,' I said again... We all looked at each other. My supervisor asked her when she was due, starting to worry we might have more to deal with than a punnet of fruit... 'Next week' she said. We looked at each other again. 'Thing is,' my supervisor explained, 'it has to be the amount on the voucher or more. It can't be less.' 'Overtender on this payment type is not allowed,' I helpfully added. 'But it's only one pee,' the girl said. 'Doesn't matter how much it is, it won't go through the system,' I said. 'Computer says no.' There was a long uncomfortable pause while she processed this. Suddenly she brightened up. 'Oh, I've got another card,' she beamed. She went over to the cash machine, drew out a tenner and paid for the lot with it...

My favourite was the woman who actually stamped her foot at me. The carpark is pay and display, it's not ours, it's the council's, but we refund your first hours parking if you spend over £5. It's the most frequent cause of customer/staff standoffs. Anyway, I was on the kiosk with a huge queue and the woman told me, rather rudely, to put her laminated lottery card through for two weeks. I explained that I was pretty sure it would only process the information on the card, and if it said one week that was all she would get. She was didn't have time, she said, for this. She was going away and she needed it for two weeks. I, stupidly, but I was still new and unsure of myself, put it through anyway. The ticket came out for one week. 'Well what am I supposed to do then?' she scowled. 'That's no good to me'. I wasn't sure how to cancel tickets then so I got my supervisor, an amiable chap who deserves far more than he gets paid. I asked him if I was right in supposing that the customer would have to fill out a slip for her ticket. He confirmed that she would. 'Well then', she demanded, 'do it'. Four lines of numbers he copied out. All the while, the queue growing longer... So I put it through and she handed me ten pounds and her car park voucher, growling at me, 'I want that back in cash'. (What was I going to give her? spaghetti hoops? frogs?) Her ticket was £8. I handed £3 back to her. Off she went. I continued to serve. Few moments later she stormed up to the kiosk, pushing in front of the other customers, and shouted 'you didn't give me my car park money back! AND I asked for it in cash!" 'Yes I did' I said, absolutely sure of myself. 'No you didn't!' she shrieked. 'Look, I've still got the money in my hand!' and she held it out for all to see, three of your shiny pounds. Someone once said what joy it would be if you could press a moment and put it in a big book and take it out again for future enjoyment... this would be one of my moments. Everyone was looking.'Yes' I said, speaking slowly and clearly, in fact downright condescendingly and loving it, 'your lottery ticket was £8, you gave me a ten pound note and there you have the three pounds that I gave you which includes the pound back for your car park voucher.' You could see the penny drop, or rather the pound. The man stood next to her burst out laughing. I met his eye and sent him silent gratitude for doing that which I could not while on duty. She stamped her foot, snarled at me and left the building, to approval all round and customers shaking their heads, muttering "some people"... I pitied her. I mean, how miserable must your life be for a pound to be worth so much?

Shortly after this I became a customer service supervisor myself... If a customer wasn't happy with my invariable solution to any problem - giving a refund - I just passed them up to my line manager, a miserable old cowbag who (as much as I hated working for her) never let the customers get away with any such ridiculousness. She would take quite a long time sometimes, explaining just how they were wrong, and being patronising to them while they got frustrated with her. It was a win/win.

One customer came and put two loaves of bread on the kiosk counter, telling me in a conspiratorial way that she was just going to look at something in the foyer. 'Er, ok' I said. She came back and said 'I didn't want to set off the alarms.' I looked at her, mystified. 'You have alarms?' she said. I kept a straight face while I explained that alarms would only go off if our stock was electronically tagged, and we don't actually tag bread. Apparently some people think that everything's chipped, it's in the barcode, and scanning it somehow 'unlocks' it. Christ on a bike...

Then there are the little things... the ways of getting through the day... There is a long list of petty annoyances which, when frequent enough, become enough to make you lose the will to live. One of my colleagues, Matt, developed techniques which I also adopted and found that they actually made live worth living. Take baskets for instance. People leave them on the counter at the kiosk, assuming perhaps that we have a special place to put them. We don't, we just have to put them on the floor and fall over them until the trolleyman takes pity on us and puts them away. I started to push the baskets meaningfully towards the rack (a mere two yards from the customer, but a long trek round for us) and if the customer didn't get the hint I would just leave them there cluttering up the counter, just to make a point. Matt and I had spent a constructive afternoon discussing the coping strategies we'd evolved for such occasions. His were better than mine. On walking past the kiosk if he happened to notice a basket left there he would say loudly to me "WHO'S left that there!" then shake his head and say to me "would you like me to put this away for you?" to which I would reply "thankyou Matt, that would be so very helpful, that's very good of you to do that, when you have such a busy schedule". And he would take two exaggerated strides to the rack and drop it in emphatically. Also people leave their baskets on the conveyor. Again, we have nowhere to put them behind the till. Matt would leave them until they reached the monitor which they would crash into, and then he would make a meal out of pretending they were stuck and trying to disentangle them. He would tut and shake his head and say things like "it's no good, it's totally jammed in the workings, I'll have to call the manager"...
Yes of course it would be easier just to ask the customers to put their baskets away... but simple things and all that... Until you have worked in a supermarket you have no idea how important a part of your life these small victories can become.

I lost my job last week. I think I may have just landed a new one which will pay me £5 grand a year more... which is a damn good job because it's still in Customer Service, as it's the only transferrable skill I have... Yes, the extra money might just give me the will to live again...

No apologies for length, it's my first proper post after years of lurking, so consider this to be all the typing I didn't do then and pretend you've been reading small ongoing installments instead.
( warmfuzzies Isn't here, Sat 6 Sep 2008, 12:34, 5 replies)

I should add,
before someone else does, that I didn't lose my job for being mean to or about the customers. I got on well with most of them and worked harder than anyone in that place to make the customers' experience a pleasant one. I got full marks from the mystery shopper for a perfect transaction including acknowledgement, smile, greeting, smalltalk, etc. I had regular customers who made a point of coming to me.
No, I lost my job because I put two bunches of flowers to one side to pay for later. Because, obviously, that's more important than being a damn good employee in every other way. Actually, I think I lost my job because when called down to speak to the manager I told him everyone does it, including members of the management... in retrospect perhaps it was not a good idea to tell the boss he has no control over his staff, especially when I wasn't prepared to mention names... So he made a shining example to all out of me.
( warmfuzzies Isn't here, Sat 6 Sep 2008, 13:46, closed)

There's A Possibility
That what you've written, an epic, might be *really good*.

But, the impossibility, of trying to read it, makes me just fly by and ignore it.


Epics are good. But split it up into (paragraphs) and people will really read it.


Cheers
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Sat 6 Sep 2008, 16:15, closed)

I appreciate that.
I do the same thing.

Dunno what I was thinking. Just a stream of 4am consciousness.

Still, getting it all out had a certain therapeutic value, worth all the typing in itself.
( warmfuzzies Isn't here, Sat 6 Sep 2008, 17:24, closed)

do you...
...work for a small North West chain, perchance?
(The Incredible Sulk Finally remembered his password on, Mon 8 Sep 2008, 19:33, closed)

Well, before I commit myself to an answer...
It rather depends whose asking...? :-/
If you are my cowbag line manager, then no.
If you are the shouty woman then yes, and I hope you're sorry.

Anyway, the answer is no. I used to though...
( warmfuzzies Isn't here, Tue 9 Sep 2008, 1:19, closed)