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  • Terrible Tourist Tales - language/kinda gross

    Hi all,

    This is my first post about customer suckage! There is some language and NSFW/gross stuff.
    A long time ago (the 90's) in a far off large city next to a lake I worked retail in the tourism sector. Picture all those sucky customers you typically have, except they're off in another city where no one knows them and they will likely be held even less accountable for their actions than usual because the city needs their grubby tourist dollars! Thankfully we had one good sympathetic manager (Sweets) out of the two, and the second one was just gruff and didn't take crap from anyone (Grumps).

    Behaving Badly Behind Glass
    My first souvenir store was located in the basement level of a famous huge building people like to visit the 95th floor of for the view. Everyone wanting to go up top had to pass by this tourist trap store to get to the elevators up. The store was fairly small and three of the walls were glass, all the better to display all the tempting cheap crappy souvenirs inside to passing tourists. That glass wall was a constant source of irritation for workers and management because people just seemed to think that because it was a wall, they were somehow invisible behind it.

    - We had regular instances of nose pickers looking in and even making eye contact with staff while digging for gold, and the (thankfully) less regular booger-wipers who left a disgusting present on the glass.
    - There were the inevitable little kids who left hand and nose prints and tongue marks all over it.

    - We had scantily clad people leaning on the glass and leaving greasy full-body imprints of themselves.

    -There were a few perverted weenie-wagglers who’d open up their pants against the glass to give the teenage female cashiers a show. Little did they know that Sweets and Grumps were both gay and would often give them a sarcastic standing ovation to make them uncomfortable before calling security.

    - We even had one impossibly drunk woman who ran straight into a glass wall, broke it, and kept going barely noticing so great was her need for a souvenir shot glass. Sweets gave her one for free after the police arrested and trespassed her, saying " Christ Honey, after that you've earned it."

    But the worst was this really grungy old homeless guy we'd nicknamed Hambone who came by every few weeks, pulled his pants partway down, plopped his cheeks against the glass and just farted voluminously. Really rumbled the glass with the force that it came out. Then Hambone would pull up and trot away before security could get him. I heard once it wasn’t just gas, but thankfully I never witnessed that episode, but apparently Grumps was there to witness the defilement and almost lost his mind.

    We were forever cleaning handprints and worse off of those stupid windows until management finally contracted a cleaning service after figuring out they were paying on average 15 man-hours a week to their workers trying to keep up with human grossness.


    Oh (Beanie) Baby!
    Those Ty bean bag plushes were still in full popularity craze, so in addition to the typical souvenir shoppers, we always had a line of wild-eyed beanie hunters waiting outside the door in the morning. As soon as we opened they would stampede in, tear up the display looking for their coveted bears, kittens and mistake-tag beanies, hassle the staff to "go look in the back" for whatever was their obsession of the day and complain to the long-suffering managers about the lack of selection change since yesterday. But there was one woman who tried THE LIMIT of all of our patience.

    THE LIMIT or TM was mid-40s, smelled heavily of cat ownership and BO, and was always unkempt …and moist. Her forehead was always dripping with sweat, she spit/slobbered when she talked, her arms were sopping and soaked any surface she brushed against, any money she handed you was soggy and basically anything she touched became disgustingly wet. TM liked to come to the store right as it opened and scoop up a big armful of beanies to hug/hold. Then she would walk around the store and look at all of the souvenirs while holding the beanies. Every day TM would do this, nothing much of the stock changed in a souvenir store because people usually only ever visit once, but she would walk around and inspect everything like it was the first time she'd seen it. After she'd finished her rounds, TM would wander back to the now-destroyed beanie display and put all but one of the beanies she'd been holding back on top of the heap. Then she’d buy the (un)lucky survivor of this bizarre beanie Bachelorette show ritual.

    The problem was, during TM's trip around the store, whatever it was she was oozing had inevitably soaked into the beanies and left them moist and smelly afterward. The tags were even water damaged! We tried drying them out in back, febreezing, nothing worked. Grumps the manager ended up having to damage out 3-4 toys every day until he got fed up and banned her after a couple of weeks. Even Sweets got irritated after she tried to hug him and got him wet. After her ban, TM’d come in the mornings and stand outside the store and stare in at the beanies. She’d stop people coming in and out of the store and tell them she was here to visit her “friends” until security finally ran her off. Kind of sad, but seriously gross.

    School Trips Suck
    Very few groups would send all of us workers running to the back room to hide/draw straws/yell “not it” faster than an 8th grade graduation trip from out of town set loose to buy souvenirs. These kids believed they were on top of the world and had $20 bills from Mommy to prove it, so by god we would sell them the finest cheap crap we had or suffer their wrath!
    There are hundreds of terrible instances coming out of these, but here are some highlights:

    - They always wanted to buy lighters and shot glasses, the 2 things they were not allowed to buy as they were under 18 and 21 respectively. Cue many a whine/weep session and pompous speeches about this being ‘Murica and their freedoms being infringed on. One girl fell to the floor and had herself a full body-convulsing tantrum about it, then reported the cashiers watching in mute bewildered horror as "rude" to Sweets the manager. He just shrugged and told her she had dust all over her butt from her "roll around."

    - The girls were forever trying to cram themselves into childrens t-shirts to wear as babydoll shirts, often leaving them stretched out and even ripped. But the cake was taken when we caught two girls standing in their underwear trying to fit themselves into two 12-18 month souvenir baby onesies! Grumps turned purple and roared at them to get out.

    - For 14-yr-olds graduating grade school, they sure didn’t seem too good at counting. Kids would come up with an arm load of expensive stuff, dump it on the counter, wait until I’d rung it and then sheepishly tell me they only had $5.

    - Theft was rampant, to the point where we would refuse school groups unless they came in 5 at a time with at least one chaperone. The adults would get sniffy at this and often demand a manger to complain we were ruining their children’s special day by not letting all 30 in at once to steal us blind.

    - Speaking of theft, I had one kid come up and flat out tell me that I either needed to help him find something cool for under $5 or he was just going to steal something. He seemed surprised when security arrived and turned out his pockets.

    - We had one group of 4 farm boys come in acting tough and starting breaking souvenir mugs and glasses, saying they could do what they wanted and we cashiers had to “clean up [their] shit and smile like [we] like it.” When security arrived to take them into custody for vandalism and theft, they started crying like babies, with one begging to use his birthday money to pay for the damage as long as we didn’t tell him mom on him. Grumps surprised everyone by agreeing to let him pay for the damage, but Sweets showed his cutthroat side saying the kids should buy the cashiers all lunch in return for being such jerks.


    I have way more hell stories from tourism retail to share in the future. People on vacation really are the worst.

  • #2
    I'm a huge skyscraper enthusiast, and I think I know which building you're talking about!

    Some of those people deserve to be tossed off of said building, or at least threatened with such!

    Comment


    • #3
      That is quite an opening tale, Foxbite - thanks for sharing and hope to hear more!

      Comment


      • #4
        An empire of suck!
        AkaiKitsune
        Sarcasm dear, sarcasm. I’m well aware that dealing with civilians in any capacity will skin your faith in humanity alive, then pickle anything that remains so as to watch it shrivel up into an immortal husk thus reminding you of how dead inside you now are.

        Comment


        • #5
          Quoth Amanita View Post
          I'm a huge skyscraper enthusiast, and I think I know which building you're talking about!
          I refuse to call it the "whatcha talkin bout" tower. It is still the WLS tower.
          Life is too short to not eat popcorn.
          Save the Ales!
          Toys for Tots at Rooster's Cafe

          Comment


          • #6
            Good lord that's a lot of horrible!!

            Also welcome! Cookies to the left, liquor to the right, brain bleach is EVERYWHERE.
            When you start at zero, everything's progress.

            Comment


            • #7
              Is this a variation of "It isn't our home, so we can trash it," based on, "We're on vacation/a trip/don't live in this town so we'll never be caught"?
              Customers should always be served . . . to the nearest great white.

              Comment


              • #8
                I thought it might be the other tall and dark tower with antennae, actually- Chicago has two of the big handsome brutes, designed by the same architects no less
                Either way, shame on those nasty tourists! I'm always super nice to the staff of any skyscraper I visit, I wouldn't be caught dead abusing or mistreating a building I claim to like. (That and my general policy of not being an awful customer)

                Comment


                • #9
                  Quoth Foxbite View Post
                  - We had one group of 4 farm boys come in acting tough and starting breaking souvenir mugs and glasses, saying they could do what they wanted and we cashiers had to “clean up [their] shit and smile like [we] like it.”
                  Yet another example of the entitlement-minded culture that "the customer is always right" has brought about.
                  Quoth Foxbite View Post
                  When security arrived to take them into custody for vandalism and theft, they started crying like babies, with one begging to use his birthday money to pay for the damage as long as we didn’t tell him mom on him.
                  Not so full of yourselves now, are you?
                  Quoth Foxbite View Post
                  Grumps surprised everyone by agreeing to let him pay for the damage, but Sweets showed his cutthroat side saying the kids should buy the cashiers all lunch in return for being such jerks.
                  I hope you all got a really nice meal out of that; it's the least you deserved. I'm really surprised that Grumps didn't have them arrested; a bit of time in the slammer would really drive the message home.
                  I don't have an attitude problem. You have a perception problem.
                  My LiveJournal
                  A page we can all agree with!

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                  • #10
                    If I'd have done something like break things and cuss at the cashiers I'd have died young. I don't care if my mother was 4,000 miles away, she had a network that made the CIA look like rank amateurs and I'd have heard about it the instant I walked in the door. When we'd go on band trips back when I was in high school my mother would often go as a chaperone, so I knew better than to misbehave.

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                    • #11
                      Wow. And I thought working in the French Quarter during Mardi Gras was bad.

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                      • #12
                        If its tourist season, why can't we shoot them?
                        "I try to be curious about everything, even things that don't interest me." -Alex Trebek

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