The sucky customer/co-worker/employer trifecta!

[Monterey Jack]

Jesus, what an irritating final 90 minutes of my shift today...and I was only witnessing it.

Sucktomer

First off, my cashier had finished with one lady, and had rung in the first item of the next order while the lady's extra reusable bags were still on the belt. Said "lady" then roughly shoved the item back towards the scanner with a curt, "That's rude!" Then she walked over to the service desk to make a complaint.

Co-Worker

A fairly new cashier, she then started to FREAK OUT when she saw the lady heading to the desk to snitch on her, constantly throwing nervous looks over her shoulder and going on and on to the current customer about how rude the first woman was, how she was sorry, etc., etc...

Sucktomer #2

Maybe ten minutes later, another "lady" got REALLY irate when my cashier needed to take a second look at some toilet tissue to make sure it was the right brand/size for the coupon she was using, essentially berating her with the usual "I don't have time for this, just move the line along and make the coupon go through!" bullying.

Co-Worker

Cashier gets even MORE upset, is wiping away tears and looking around frantically for a manager to send her on her break so she could compose herself...

Employer

...and, of course, whenever you really need a front-end manager, one can never be found, so I had to listen to my cashier getting increasingly flustered and agitated for nearly an HOUR before my shift was up and I left to clock out...at which point there was STILL no manager on the front end! I felt a little bad for the poor cashier, as she's yet another co-worker who clearly has "issues" (much like the OCD carriage lady who's consistently 45 minutes late for shifts and does a shit job whenever she is there), and she had the bad luck to get two bad customers right on top of each other, but my empathy wore REALLY thin listening to her constantly freaking out, and the lack of ANYONE monitoring the front end for the better part of an hour was just the cherry on the turd sundae.

[Pixelated]

If she's "fairly new" I can understand why she got flustered and was freaking out. Hopefully she will grow a hide like a rhino after a while and will be able to give asshats like those a nice flat dead stare while dealing with their purchases ... especially since that type of SC really gets off on reducing a hapless employee to babbling incoherency and/or tears.

I remember my brief stint as a grocery store cashier -- it was the same thing: the managers appeared to have floated off into another dimension. Never could find one when you wanted one.

[Monterey Jack]

Considering this woman is at least in her forties or older, she should have conducted herself more appropriately, especially to the customers. Hey, I get flustered all the time, but you have to keep it to yourself and not go begging for a break whenever it happens.

[snugglegirl05]

I remember my brief stint as a grocery store cashier -- it was the same thing: the managers appeared to have floated off into another dimension. Never could find one when you wanted one.

I had a situation with a customer earlier this week when I needed to speak to a manager at the front end, but none were to be found.

At the grocery store I work at as a cashier, there is a sale going on for an 18 count container of eggs.

Those eggs are 99 cents each with your member card.

A family came to my line with 10 cartons of those eggs plus other groceries.

The father sacked the groceries instead of the courtesy clerk/sacker because according to his wife, he is OCD about that, and if the courtesy clerk/sacker does it wrong in any way, there are problems.

So he sacked the groceries in paper bags.

But he made a mistake...

He accidentally cracked one of the eggs in one of the cartons of eggs he was putting in the paper bag.

The wife asked him if the egg was cracked. He opened up the carton, and placed the cracked egg, yolk and all, on the part of the counter where the credit card/debit card reader is.

Great...

So I took a roll of paper towels and cleaned off the mess.

Then the wife mentioned that I should clean off the counter. So I grabbed some spray cleaner and cleaned the counter.

She then asked the youngest daughter to go back to the dairy dept. and get one egg.

Yes...

She told her daughter to get one egg.

When she told her daughter that, I looked around for a Manager because I wanted a Manager to deal with the situation.

No Manager is sight.

The daughter came back carrying one egg in her hand.

So there is a carton of eggs missing one egg in the dairy dept.

[wolfie]

WTF? Customer damages merchandise, so they get a free replacement?

[EricKei]

Sucktomer #2

...berating her with the usual "I don't have time for this, just move the line along and make the coupon go through!" bullying.

Which, for a more experienced cashier, would scream "I know the coupon is probably invalid or expired, put it through anyway!"

Customers rushing and bullying you == dead giveaway that they're pulling something.

[Pixelated]

Considering this woman is at least in her forties or older, she should have conducted herself more appropriately, especially to the customers. Hey, I get flustered all the time, but you have to keep it to yourself and not go begging for a break whenever it happens.

I remember when I was a newbie reporter -- in my mid-30s -- and I got a harsh criticism of an article by a reader. I was really distraught. My editor took me out to lunch and gently advised me that if I was going to stay in the field, I needed to toughen up. I did. By the time I left that newspaper, nearly a decade later, that sort of thing rolled off me like water off the proverbial duck's back (of course, if I had made an actual error, that was a totally different matter). I could easily deal with unreasonable asshats by laughing at them -- because I knew that pissed them off even more. It just took time and experience.

At my grocery store, I watched a supervisor dissolve into tears over a mistake I'd made. I no longer remember what the error was, but I know it wasn't anything particularly catastrophic. Nevertheless, she was sobbing that it would get her fired (her? not me? WTF?) and so on. That was the point where I decided I didn't need this crap and on my next shift handed in my notice.