A lot of the time, if I'm on shift and whoever's working the customer service counter can't understand someone on the phone, I get called up to take the call. I'm no Professor Henry Higgins, but I seem to have a knack for understanding people on the phone when the connection is bad or they've got a really thick accent. I attribute it to having grown up in a city with a very large and diverse immigrant population, along with having spent the first decade of my working life in drive-thru restaurants where I had to make sense of people with all kinds of accents and in all sorts of stages of inebriation.
I got called up to take one of those calls tonight. The name on the caller ID was a very common Arab Muslim name (I only mention this because it's important to the story). I answer and I hear a woman's voice with an accent matching the name. She tells me that she and her husband came to the store on Saturday to do some shopping, and she was looking over the receipt today, and she saw something they paid for that she didn't think they bought.
A lot of the time, situations like this are just confusion on the part of the customer. It's rare that someone gets rung up for something that wasn't theirs, although it can happen - maybe an item is leaning over the divider on the conveyor belt and the cashier scans it onto the wrong order, something like that. Most of the time, though, it's because the way the product name is abbreviated on the receipt is unfamiliar to the customer. I ask her what the product is that she's concerned about. She tells me that she doesn't know what it is or how to pronounce it, so I ask her to spell it out for me.
She spells it out; B-U-S-C-H S-H-O-C-K T-O-P, for $14.88.
Maybe it's because I've done much too much drinking in my years, but I didn't need to pause a second to identify the product. Shock Top is a brand of wheat beer produced by Anheuser-Coors under the Busch label, and at the price she quoted me, it was probably a 12-pack. I tell her that that's a 12-pack of beer and ask her if they bought any beer during their visit.
With a combination of surprise and indignation, she tells me "ABSOLUTELY NOT!"
At this point I'm not really sure what to do with my limited authority, so I tell her to bring her receipt in tomorrow during the hours when the Store Manager will be in, so he can decide what he wants to do about it. She agrees and we hang up.
Now, I know this isn't universally true and it varies from country to country and culture to culture (and I'm trying my best not to say anything prejudicial here), but many Muslims have strong beliefs about abstaining from alcohol. The best assessment I could come to from this call was that this woman was from such a culture, her husband had been somehow slipping beer into the shopping cart and buying it without her knowledge, and she was just now finding out over the phone from me that he might not be as devout as she thought he was.
Best case scenario: He's sleeping on the couch tonight.
I got called up to take one of those calls tonight. The name on the caller ID was a very common Arab Muslim name (I only mention this because it's important to the story). I answer and I hear a woman's voice with an accent matching the name. She tells me that she and her husband came to the store on Saturday to do some shopping, and she was looking over the receipt today, and she saw something they paid for that she didn't think they bought.
A lot of the time, situations like this are just confusion on the part of the customer. It's rare that someone gets rung up for something that wasn't theirs, although it can happen - maybe an item is leaning over the divider on the conveyor belt and the cashier scans it onto the wrong order, something like that. Most of the time, though, it's because the way the product name is abbreviated on the receipt is unfamiliar to the customer. I ask her what the product is that she's concerned about. She tells me that she doesn't know what it is or how to pronounce it, so I ask her to spell it out for me.
She spells it out; B-U-S-C-H S-H-O-C-K T-O-P, for $14.88.
Maybe it's because I've done much too much drinking in my years, but I didn't need to pause a second to identify the product. Shock Top is a brand of wheat beer produced by Anheuser-Coors under the Busch label, and at the price she quoted me, it was probably a 12-pack. I tell her that that's a 12-pack of beer and ask her if they bought any beer during their visit.
With a combination of surprise and indignation, she tells me "ABSOLUTELY NOT!"
At this point I'm not really sure what to do with my limited authority, so I tell her to bring her receipt in tomorrow during the hours when the Store Manager will be in, so he can decide what he wants to do about it. She agrees and we hang up.
Now, I know this isn't universally true and it varies from country to country and culture to culture (and I'm trying my best not to say anything prejudicial here), but many Muslims have strong beliefs about abstaining from alcohol. The best assessment I could come to from this call was that this woman was from such a culture, her husband had been somehow slipping beer into the shopping cart and buying it without her knowledge, and she was just now finding out over the phone from me that he might not be as devout as she thought he was.
Best case scenario: He's sleeping on the couch tonight.
Comment