I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, but I doubt my doubt

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

The announcement doesn't invite people to dawdle around for another half-hour, it encourages people to leave.

*snort!* Yeah, the nice people who follow rules and obey closing announcements.

The sucky ones, and there are more and more of them every day, just continue to browse leisurely, because they know you're not going to lock them in the store and they assume you're probably not going to get too forceful with them when you ask them to leave, because they don't want customer complaints.

[RootedPhoenix]

Why do people DO that?

The announcement doesn't invite people to dawdle around for another half-hour, it encourages people to leave.

Argh. *hands over cookies*

[Food Lady]

It was 10 minutes to closing and I saw this woman with a full cart and arguing kids. Supervisor did the first closing announcement. She continued to casually shop for bathroom furnishings while getting irritated at her kids. I was thinking, "Here we go." I was going to do the 5-minute announcement, because I'm loud, but supervisor beat me to it, and he is just not obnoxious enough. So the store closed and she went up, saying to her kids that she didn't know we were closing. Here's the thing: she's in there all the time. She's regular enough that I recognize her. Well, the next thing I knew, supervisor was asking me to come up and ring because cashier was going home, and there was one more customer. We all know who that was.

Well, I didn't want to deal with her. I didn't remember what stuff she'd pulled in the past, but I knew she'd done annoying stuff. Like I said, she's a regular. First, she picked the wrong items, so it didn't prompt me to give her a giftcard. MOD told me to override it. I had to mark them down, too. At this point I remembered something my boss had said about at least getting a credit card sign-up out of an irritating customer. So I went for it. She wanted the debit card, but didn't have a blank check. At this point she apologized for being in so long, and it seemed somewhat sincere, and she expressed frustration at her bickering kids, who had picked up right where they'd left off before one had to go to the hospital, so my heart softened. I thought, OK, single mom, sick kid; maybe she really didn't notice the announcements, I don't know....

But then she complained her bottled soda was flat, so I let her swap it out to speed things up and get her out of there. I was annoyed to hear her say that she was so thirsty that she had been "mean to the girl over there [in the cafe]." Y'all know I work over there, too, and people get mad at us when they have to wait, even though we're running it alone and sometimes racing to get out on time. My coworker had told her it would be one minute, and she had gotten mad that it would "really be a whole minute?" and had then gone to get a bottled soda. And then she had gone shopping, only to leave 20 minutes after closing. *sigh*