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I work for a cute little five and ten. The majority of our customers are sweet, kind, patient, and understand our limitations due to the time of the year.
Sorry, there are STRICT rules about this.
Being a small business with little leeway for challenged charges, we have an extremely strict policy for ID requirements with your unsigned credit cards. If you have a credit card that has not been signed and the transaction amount is over 25 dollars, you MUST have a valid photo ID or we cannot ring in your sale. Sorry but thems the breaks. You want to go out to your car to get it, that's fine, but you better be quick 'cause the huge line behind you tends to get antsy with an empty and unusable register right in front of them.
The other day I had a young woman hand me a card that clearly had the name "James" on it. I asked her if "we" had an ID for it. (I often use "we" to promote the idea of solidarity and camaraderie. It didn't work this time.) She flipped her lid. She said it was her fiance's card, she couldn't get her own bank account (my boyfriend has literally the lowest of the low credit score and he has one, what's her deal???) and this wasn't fair and she does this everywhere and nobody else gives her a problem and blah blah blah.
I had a woman who had simply signed her initials on the back of her card instead of her actual name. Incidentally, she had been the same woman who had yelled at my coworker because CW had told her in no uncertain terms that she could not use her own shopping bags to shop and needed to use the store's provided baskets. This was for loss prevention purposes and Sassy SC didn't want to hear any of it and accused CW of accusing her of being a thief. When I asked her for her ID for her card that only had her initials on it, her response was a snotty: "WELL THAT'S HOW I SIGN MY NAME!" Now, had this been the gas station, I could probably have gotten away with a witty little "And that's how anybody else could sign your name too" but I've been trying to be nicer now that I work for a tiny local business. Not having a corporate has been great for my attitude, to be honest. So I just ignored her and kept smiling.
"Is it always this busy?"
1. It's December.
2. You're in one of the more famous of the old 5 and 10s which is essentially a knick knack store.
3. It's Saturday.
Yes. I'd say this is pretty typical for all those things being in play. Sorry you only had to come in for a nut cracker but this is the way the cookie crumbles when it comes to Christmas in the Disneyland of Knick Knacks.
Pet Peeve
We have four rooms downstairs. 3 are for crafts and one is for housewares. I hate hate hate when people come upstairs, ask me where something is and when I say crafts they tell me that someone downstairs said that it might be upstairs. Okay. Did you talk to someone in CRAFTS or did you talk to someone in HOUSEWARES? Because housewares isn't gonna know that the very specific brand of tape you wanted is going to be in CRAFTS and not in OFFICE SUPPLIES. You probably didn't even tell them what kind of tape you wanted, you probably just said "tape" and they pointed up the stairs because they're busy and customers can't be arsed to actually say what they want the first time. So when I call down to Crafts for you and they say that yes, they do have that, I'll look like an idiot to my CWs and you can finally have proof that I'm not lying to you.
20 Questions
Most of my job talking to customers has been about asking the right questions. Customers will come up to me and literally say "I'm looking for uh...uh...uh..." and they make a hand motion. A vague, weird, totally unidentifiable hand motion. So I have to say things like:
"What is it used for?"
"Is it a food item?"
"What does it look like?"
"Do you write with it?"
"Does it go in the kitchen?"
Then they try to describe to me what it looks like and they say things like "It's round." or "You put a potato in it."
Rule number one when you want to ask an employee for something: Know what the thing is.
"Do you have a box for this?"
Okay. I get it. You bought something glass and breakable and it didn't have a box on it when you bought it. You want me to put it in a box, ideally the box it came in. However: You got that from the gift department (where, incidentally there are boxes under in the basement) and you're now checking out in the candy department. No. I don't have boxes. I don't even have enough room to turn around behind this counter. I don't have wrapping, I don't have tissue paper, and I most certainly do not have boxes. If you needed a box for it, you could have asked the lady in Gifts to get you a box and she could have marked the box with how much the darn thing was so I could ring it in. But as it is, you're now trapped her by 100 people trying to get candy and I don't have a phone back here to even call to see if I could get a box for you. This is called "planning" and you didn't do any of it when you picked up the breakable thing and brought it to literally the smallest and most out of the way counter in the entire store which, logically, doesn't have any room for packaging materials other than bags. Most of the things in the store do not come with boxes anyway as we would have to literally double our storage space in order to make room for the overstock, the online inventory, AND all the boxes.
Stop. Touching. My. Shit.
Okay. It's not my shit. It's the store's shit. But I will be flipping my shit if these kids who are old enough to know better don't stop ripping boxes open and taking the stuff out of them. Namely: We have old fashioned bike horns. If another kid rips open that stupid box and honks that bike horn with every step they take, I might have to rip some arms off. Same goes for the bike bell that someone (blessedly) broke the other day. All the pop guns are broken from people fussing with them. The kids sized brooms are all missing their tags and their protective plastic. There are bent and broken boxes of dominos. People step on dropped or abandoned toy cars, I found a bent cookie cutter the other day...one of the sock monkey hats was missing his button eye for a while... All of this just because people can't seem to keep their hands off of crap they don't actually want to buy.
Ahem. And last but not least:
STOP LETTING YOUR CHILDREN CHEW ON THINGS AND THEN PUT THEM BACK.
Sorry, there are STRICT rules about this.
Being a small business with little leeway for challenged charges, we have an extremely strict policy for ID requirements with your unsigned credit cards. If you have a credit card that has not been signed and the transaction amount is over 25 dollars, you MUST have a valid photo ID or we cannot ring in your sale. Sorry but thems the breaks. You want to go out to your car to get it, that's fine, but you better be quick 'cause the huge line behind you tends to get antsy with an empty and unusable register right in front of them.
The other day I had a young woman hand me a card that clearly had the name "James" on it. I asked her if "we" had an ID for it. (I often use "we" to promote the idea of solidarity and camaraderie. It didn't work this time.) She flipped her lid. She said it was her fiance's card, she couldn't get her own bank account (my boyfriend has literally the lowest of the low credit score and he has one, what's her deal???) and this wasn't fair and she does this everywhere and nobody else gives her a problem and blah blah blah.
I had a woman who had simply signed her initials on the back of her card instead of her actual name. Incidentally, she had been the same woman who had yelled at my coworker because CW had told her in no uncertain terms that she could not use her own shopping bags to shop and needed to use the store's provided baskets. This was for loss prevention purposes and Sassy SC didn't want to hear any of it and accused CW of accusing her of being a thief. When I asked her for her ID for her card that only had her initials on it, her response was a snotty: "WELL THAT'S HOW I SIGN MY NAME!" Now, had this been the gas station, I could probably have gotten away with a witty little "And that's how anybody else could sign your name too" but I've been trying to be nicer now that I work for a tiny local business. Not having a corporate has been great for my attitude, to be honest. So I just ignored her and kept smiling.
"Is it always this busy?"
1. It's December.
2. You're in one of the more famous of the old 5 and 10s which is essentially a knick knack store.
3. It's Saturday.
Yes. I'd say this is pretty typical for all those things being in play. Sorry you only had to come in for a nut cracker but this is the way the cookie crumbles when it comes to Christmas in the Disneyland of Knick Knacks.
Pet Peeve
We have four rooms downstairs. 3 are for crafts and one is for housewares. I hate hate hate when people come upstairs, ask me where something is and when I say crafts they tell me that someone downstairs said that it might be upstairs. Okay. Did you talk to someone in CRAFTS or did you talk to someone in HOUSEWARES? Because housewares isn't gonna know that the very specific brand of tape you wanted is going to be in CRAFTS and not in OFFICE SUPPLIES. You probably didn't even tell them what kind of tape you wanted, you probably just said "tape" and they pointed up the stairs because they're busy and customers can't be arsed to actually say what they want the first time. So when I call down to Crafts for you and they say that yes, they do have that, I'll look like an idiot to my CWs and you can finally have proof that I'm not lying to you.
20 Questions
Most of my job talking to customers has been about asking the right questions. Customers will come up to me and literally say "I'm looking for uh...uh...uh..." and they make a hand motion. A vague, weird, totally unidentifiable hand motion. So I have to say things like:
"What is it used for?"
"Is it a food item?"
"What does it look like?"
"Do you write with it?"
"Does it go in the kitchen?"
Then they try to describe to me what it looks like and they say things like "It's round." or "You put a potato in it."
Rule number one when you want to ask an employee for something: Know what the thing is.
"Do you have a box for this?"
Okay. I get it. You bought something glass and breakable and it didn't have a box on it when you bought it. You want me to put it in a box, ideally the box it came in. However: You got that from the gift department (where, incidentally there are boxes under in the basement) and you're now checking out in the candy department. No. I don't have boxes. I don't even have enough room to turn around behind this counter. I don't have wrapping, I don't have tissue paper, and I most certainly do not have boxes. If you needed a box for it, you could have asked the lady in Gifts to get you a box and she could have marked the box with how much the darn thing was so I could ring it in. But as it is, you're now trapped her by 100 people trying to get candy and I don't have a phone back here to even call to see if I could get a box for you. This is called "planning" and you didn't do any of it when you picked up the breakable thing and brought it to literally the smallest and most out of the way counter in the entire store which, logically, doesn't have any room for packaging materials other than bags. Most of the things in the store do not come with boxes anyway as we would have to literally double our storage space in order to make room for the overstock, the online inventory, AND all the boxes.
Stop. Touching. My. Shit.
Okay. It's not my shit. It's the store's shit. But I will be flipping my shit if these kids who are old enough to know better don't stop ripping boxes open and taking the stuff out of them. Namely: We have old fashioned bike horns. If another kid rips open that stupid box and honks that bike horn with every step they take, I might have to rip some arms off. Same goes for the bike bell that someone (blessedly) broke the other day. All the pop guns are broken from people fussing with them. The kids sized brooms are all missing their tags and their protective plastic. There are bent and broken boxes of dominos. People step on dropped or abandoned toy cars, I found a bent cookie cutter the other day...one of the sock monkey hats was missing his button eye for a while... All of this just because people can't seem to keep their hands off of crap they don't actually want to buy.
Ahem. And last but not least:
STOP LETTING YOUR CHILDREN CHEW ON THINGS AND THEN PUT THEM BACK.
So many items have to be damaged out every day because some ass had to mess with it. We've got these stupid Disney Princess caps with fake hair attached, and someone just had to unbraid all of the Elsa ones. 
Not to mention opening and tearing apart the no-sew blanket kits (as NAR mentioned), fabric remnants, Christmas decorations, scrapbooking items, the list goes on. 
Oh well. C'est la vie, I guess. Maybe it wasn't even her fault (although from her attitude, it probably was...)
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