Black Friday Debriefing Thread 2008

[CrazedClerkthe2nd]

Not much suck to talk about today considering the number of customers we have, except for one lady who bitched me out because I wouldn't accept her DS for a trade in because it had NO SERIAL NUMBER. She thought we were being "completely unreasonable" by not taking it in. Yeah sure, because NO ONE tries to trade us stolen goods anymore...really.

And of course the IDIOTS get UPSET that our DOOR BUSTER specials are sold out when they call at FREAKING 4 PM! If you can't get here early, YOU WILL MISS OUT. Our best deals were gone within the first hour.

And the usual non-listening customers.

Me: Thank you for calling <company>, we have wiis in stock. How may I help you?
SC: Uh yeah. is this <company>?

GRRRRR

Me: Thank you for calling <company>, we have wiis in stock. How may I help you?
SC: Hey, you got any Wiis in??

(Ok, what the fuck did I just say you dumb twit?!)

[katie kaboom]

I just got done watching the World's Dumbest Shoppers on TruTV. I sincerely hope that isn't a preview of coming attractions.

dammit, i forgot to watch that! and i so wanted to see customers acting stupid on national tv.

[One-Fang]

Me: Thank you for calling <company>, we have wiis in stock. How may I help you?

O.M.G.

They make you say "We have wees in stock"? I know I'm being childish, but .... you know .... poos and wees, and they make you SAY "we have wees in stock"?

Or is the plural of wii pronounced differently to the childish name for urination?

Oh, and to be fair to Black Friday, the store and police said the two at Toys R Us was not related to shopping on Black Friday. That makes it sound like gangs or something - two guys who were having it out anyway and happened to kill each other on Black Friday.

[KellyHabersham]

I did some Christmas shopping at one of the malls near my apartment today......some of the stores were more crowded than usual, a few had extended their doorbuster sales past the original ending time, but other than that, it wasn't all that different from shopping on an ordinary day.

[xcaptainhowdyx]

They won't get the wal mart douches...the video quality of wal mart is low...they'd rather lower their prices than protect customers or catch wrongdoers...a lot of stores have no LP and the tape is changed by the store manager every day...if it was target they'd most likely have it on high quality digital color and have it burned to DVD and sent to the authorities that day.

[RetailWorkhorse]

I had a surprisingly easy day.

Last year was hell.

This year = Boring.

I did go into my Local Wally-World while on my lunch break, though. It was a madhouse.

Yes, I bought something. An electric kettle, a small food processor (I'm making MEATLOAF!) and a bottle cork thing to keep my juice in the wine bottle fresh.

No, I did not buy gifts.

[Bramblerose]

from another list:

Please - this is written with eyes rolling and tongue firmly planted in cheek. But still.

If you go to a yarn shop on Black Friday

1: Do you know how to knit (or crochet)? This MAY not be the time to learn before you make the size XL Aran sweater for your boyfriend's Christmas gift.

2: Do you want the cheapest yarn you kind find and still have it look like cashmere? When you find it, can you tell the workers too? We would like to know also.

3: Do you want your yarn put into balls for you? Could you please tell us BEFORE you have to leave in two minutes or your husband "will lose his cool if I don't leave this shop!"

4. Do you want to make a scarf in your child's, grandchild's, nieces, next door neighbor's kid's school colors? Could you please know what those colors are before you come to the shop? None of us have gone to all the schools on the East Coast, not even COUNTING those in the mid-west. I do know UNLV, but I wasn't asked.

5. Do you want to see a yarn shop worker go nuts? Show up as we are closing up and say you'll be "just a minute." And then you aren't. And don't buy anything.

[RetailSlave]

Thursday there was a shootout at the KMart close to our store...no injuries as far as I know.

One of our greeters was assaulted by a customer today. LP had said that they suspected that someone had a TV that they hadn't paid for so the greeters were instructed to check all receipts. Well, Billy stopped this black woman and asked to see her receipt. She started beating on his arms, screaming at him to let go of her cart. He told her that he needed to see her receipt before she could leave. She just kept hitting him and screaming and finally stopped.

Here is the kicker...according to one of my co-workers who was there at the time, the bitch then called the police to the store and was claiming that they weren't checking everyone's receipt...that it was racially motivated. She also claimed that Charlene (our Service Team Leader) had grabbed her by the neck and thrown her to the floor. Suure...Charlene has two herniated discs in her back and is in pain most of the time....she is gonna wrestle some crazy bitch to the floor.
They are going to turn the security tapes over to the police and let them decide. If the woman is at fault the store will press charges against her for assaulting the greeter.
Today's ad featured a piece of jewelry..the ad said the sale was good till midnight. Only trouble is we close the jewelry counter at 10 and lock the keys in the cash office. Customer comes up at 11:50pm and wants the piece of jewelry. I'm off the clock shopping and trying to get out to get home. She stops me and asks for assistance. I call the night manager and tell her a customer wants assistance in jewelry...she tells me that we can't open the jewelry case (not true, we have gotten the keys out before and helped a customer after hours). I tell the customer and she asks if she could speak to a manager...I tell her that was who I just spoke to. She says she doesn't understand why they would put in the ad that it was good til midnight if jewelry closed at 10. I say I don't know, grab the drink I was after and move on. As I am checking out I see her at the UScan berating the manager. I don't know if she got her jewelry or not.

[bainsidhe]

Thank gord my Friday was pretty uneventful. I got up at 6:30am, realized I was already missing out on all the doorbusters and went, "Meh, I'm tired" then went back to sleep. I made it to the local anime store to snatch up their buy two get the third free deal on manga, but didn't have to deal with crowds. Interestingly, apparently this year and years previous (when I'm usually the first through the door at this store), I bring in the "sheeple" behind me. So the store was completely quiet until 11 am

After getting my manga fix, I thought how nice it'd be to eat in the mall food court, since they have some chinese that's terrific. Oy, that was a mistake. People were skulking through the food court practically diving towards table as they became open. I used my mad ninja-like skills to procure a table and even shared with this sweet old lady who asked if she could share.

I worked my evening shift at ~big box retail~ but we were pretty slow at that point. In the morning, I heard people were jumping OVER shopping carts and a little boy was injured in the mad rush. Wow people take their shopping seriously.

[PossJB]

My shift was from 12:30 pm til 12:30 am today. I've been short on sleep for about three days running (a combination of insomnia and Persona 3:FES). I went to bed at midnight and set my alarm for 10:30 am. I woke up at 5 am and couldn't fall back to sleep until 9. At 10:30, my alarm goes off. I turn it off and lie down for "just a minute" before getting up and getting ready. When I opened my eyes it was 1:30 pm. I went into panic mode, called in to let them know I would shower and get my ass in there, and then did it. I had to park on the opposite end of the mall, but I got there being just short of two hours late for my shift. Thankfully, I wasn't missed that much.

Store was busy in bursts while I was there. Nothing too bad. Only one instance of suck. Set up: We are a two-story store attached to a mall. Our upstairs mall entrance is right next to the food court. Our down escalator is on the opposite side of the floor. At some point, someone came in, walked around to the escalator and went down. This is only of note because they dripped something I assume to be from Orange Julius onto our tile the entire way. So something pink and sticky is dripped halfway around our store. I'm not doing anything important, so I decide to help housekeeping by grabbing a mop and bucket and speeding up the process.

I have a yellow bucket of water on wheels. I have a wet floor sign. Even so, I'm warning people as I see tham that I'm mopping, and the floor is wet. Most people decide to walk on the carpet through the children's clothes. This is good. This is wise. One woman (probably in her 50s), steps onto the tile, and I let her know the floor is wet. She goes back onto the carpet and says something about us not waiting until we close before making it dangerous for customers. Now, I'm wearing slacks, a nice shirt and a tie. I'm obviously not housekeeping. I think she giving me shit (a common practice in my family), so I chuckly. She says, "Don't laugh. I'm serious about this. It's dangerous." I just look at her and say, "Well, we had someone spill a strawberry milkshake out here, and at that point, we had a decision to make." The whole time she just kept walking.

The cleaning staff and I were about ten feet apart at that point, so we just looked at each other and shook our heads.

Seriously, I don't bust out mops while in my good clothes for no reason.

[Teysa]

While I've gone through some pretty bad Black Fridays in the past, this year was not bad at all. Of course the fact I work at a grocery store might have something to do with that.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

I.P. Freleigh's Black Friday WTFs

Okay, now that The Day is officially over, thought I'd share some of the Black Friday WTFs from my store.

Black Friday=Shangri-La for Slackers

I'm serious. You'd think every employee would be running around like a decapitated chicken, but I personally witnessed five employees standing in a group by the reed diffusers, which were selling like nuts for no particular reason, and talking about how fast they were selling.

Meanwhile, there were two big boxes of the damn things still in the backroom, but it never occurred to any of them to go bring them out. They did know they were there, because before the store opened the managers told everybody what departments/items they were going to be responsible for, where those products were staged in the backroom, and to go to the backroom and bring more out if they noticed those products selling.

So guess who had to schlep a big box of reed diffusers through the crowd and stock them all by his lonesome?

The lines, the lines!

I mentioned before we had people form a line zig-zagging through HBA, with an employee holding a bunch of red balloons indicating the end of the line, and when you got to the front of the line another employee would direct you to an open checklane.

Well spank my ass and call me Charlie, some people just couldn't figure it out. I'm sorry, but these people are stupid. I mean, we had people complaining and asking "Where's the end of the line? Where am I supposed to go? Where the hell is the end of the line?"

Ummm, where you paying any attention to the constant PA announcements telling shoppers to find the person with the red balloons? Hmmmm? No, because you were pushing and shoving and pissing the coffee we so generously provided you right down your leg.

And then once you found the red balloons, you complained you didn't know where to go. To navigate the line, you only had to do the following:

• Find the person with the red balloons, which took you long enough anyway, and
• Pay attention to which direction everybody was walking, where they were turning corners. The line was long indeed, but it was moving.

I mean, seriously, the alternative would be to just have a free-for-all as we did in years past, with lines all over the place, and nobody knows where the front or the end of the line is, and arguments and pushing and shoving and fights breaking out over line-jumping.

What's that you say? Wally World would be more orderly? You're talking about Wally World, a place where shopping on an ordinary day is akin to a grade school cafeteria food fight, only less orderly and less organized? The place where failures of humanity bust the doors off the hinges and trample the employees to death to save 50 cents on hot toys like Baby Puke-On-U? That Wally World? Go right ahead. If you survive I'd like to hear all about it.

There were quite a few people complementing us on the line queuing, saying that we were much more orderly than the other places they'd been to. These people get it.

Rebate Rectal-Cranial Inversion

We were selling certain Milton Bradley board games like Chutes and Ladders, Yahtzee, Memory, Candy Land and so forth, for $1.99 after a mail-in rebate. Sounds good until somebody let slip that Wally World was selling those same games for $1.99 without the rebate, so as a result we sold pitifully few of those games and had to take them off the floor tonight and re-backstock them.

Hey, maybe those games were what the dickwits on Long Island were stampeding for. If so, humanity is well and truly fucked.

Ah-wuh?

Customer: Where's the card table set you have on sale for $39.99
Me: (handing her one of the special color-coded pull tags for the card table set) You just take this to the cashier, and they will tell you to drive around to the west side of the store, where--
Customer: Fuck it! I'm not screwing around with that!

Let me get this straight: You, being a somewhat rotund, sewer-mouthed old cootess would rather struggle to get the big, wide, unwieldy box the set comes in into your shopping cart, and struggle with it again to load it into your car, than sit in your warm, cozy car and have somebody put it in your car for you?

Good Gord you're stupid. Don't gimme this shit about not wanting to "screw around." You obviously decided to screw around enough when you came here at 5 in the morning with everybody else wanting bargains. If you don't want to screw around today, maybe next year you should just live the dream of retail peons hither and yon and stay in bed and sleep until noon.

Whew. I need to lie down. At least I'm done with this overnight business until Christmas Day.

[Mike Taylor]

I got lucky. By the time my shift started, the morning rush was over.

[Dave1982]

Black Friday for me was - as usual - not too bad. In fact, if anything it was easier than last year - even though I had more work to do - because the Box Art Nazi didn't show up during my shift.

Anyway, my area of responsibility was the Copy & Print Center, which was where we staged all the hot guy GPS nav systems, all of which were ticketed items, and the tickets were handed out to those in line before the store opened.

Similarly, all the doorbuster Laptops were staged at our Technology Services counter on the other side of the store. Anyone not buying a laptop or GPS could head into the main register lines, or venture into one of the side lines.

Anyway, as soon as the doors opened, I was surprised. People actually WALKED into the building, rather than stampede into it as has always happened before.

Then my register decided to stop accepting input from my barcode scanner on the FIRST transaction. I had to finish that transaction by typing the barcodes manually, then reboot the register, as that's the ONLY way to reset the connection to the barcode scanner. Rebooting takes a full five minutes, during which time only one register was servicing the Copy Center line.

Thankfully, that was the only major hiccup I experienced, and once my register was back up, the GPS line started moving VERY fast. In fact, one person complimented us on that, saying she only had to wait in line for 10 minutes, and the line was VERY long. Now, onto the Stupid and Sucky Customers:

What'd You Expect, Seriously?

We had an employee - Chrissy - nearby whose job was ONLY managing the line for the Copy Center. She would queue people to the registers, but mainly she was standing near the far end of the counter to prevent people from trying to jump the line from that side.

Almost immediately this butthole approaches from the exit side of the line and asked her

SC: Can we check out here.

Chrissy: Yessir, the line starts back there *gestures towards the line stretching all the way to the back of the store*

SC: SCREW THIS!!!!!

He left his carriage full of stuff where it was and stormed out. Chrissy and I exchanged baffled looks. Honestly, this guy came in early on Black Friday, and was either stupid or entitlement-minded enough that he thought he wouldn't have to wait in line?


Ticket Suckage

Had a couple of people who came in just after we opened who either hadn't been among those who started lining up at 8PM the night before (or maybe were at the very end of that line) who waited in line for a GPS without a ticket for one, then got indignant when told they were already gone/spoken for.

Luckily, only a few did that.

However, a few other idiots had tickets for laptops and had gotten in the wrong line. These tickets said right on them which line to go to, and the guys who'd worked the line handing these tickets out also told them where they'd need to go.

Of course, those idiots who came to my line had to be told - again - that they needed to go to technology services and wait in line again. OR they could stand around and wait for an employee to take their ticket, fight their way over to Tech Services, grab the laptop, then make their way back to the Copy Center with it.

Either way, it meant waiting more, because that other line was also long, and there was very few employees available for running around, and they were being stopped left and right by other customers.

"But this line was moving faster!"

Yeah, because GPSs are a quicker sell than laptops are, but do you SEE a laptop here?

At least one of these idiots had the temerity to complain to the General Manager about it, as if their own stupidity was somehow OUR fault.

What is "After Rebate?"

Right during the middle of the Main Rush, this low watt couple got to my register and started complaining to me that none of their stuff was ringing up right. The wife did all of the arguing with me; the husband only spoke to his wife in a language i couldn't identify. This led to an infuriating situation where she'd argue with me, then TRANSLATE for her husband, then they'd argue amongst themselves, and the cycle would repeat.

The heart of the matter was they simply could not grasp the concept of a rebate (the more cynical side of me thinks they knew full well, but were attempting to scam their way from rebate to instant savings in the vain hope that I'd do that for them rather than hold up the line). They insisted that the signs and the flyer said nothing about rebates and that the posted after rebate prices were the prices they were to pay at the register.

Adding to the difficulty was their similar inability (or refusal) to understand the concept of "LIMIT ONE PER CUSTOMER."

SC: The sign says $19.99 (for a shredder that rang up $69.99, but had a $50 rebate)

Me: After rebate, ma'am.

SC: The FLYER says $19.99!! It doesn't say rebate!

Me: *pointing to the line in the flyer* AFTER REBATE!!

Finally (and considering how busy this was, it didnt' take long) I told them

Me: Folks, I have a VERY long line to get to here. I need a decision NOW. DO you want these items or not?

*SCs continue to argue between themselves*

Me: OK, your total is $XX.xx.

*SCs continue to argue between themselves*

Me: $XX.xx please!

*SCs continue to argue between themselves*

Finally, just as I was about to cancel their transaction outright, the wife handed over her credit card and I was able to finish the transaction and get back to the line.

The whole episode took about 5 painful, anxious minutes to play out.

Rebates, Part Deux

Shortly after dealing with the above obnoxious couple, another group came through my register. They bought their rebate items, I gave them the rebate forms, then turned around (literally; the way this register was oriented required me to turn completely around to see the line) to call the next customer over.

When I turned back to face the register, they were still standing there, looking at me!

Me: You're all set. Happy holidays.

SC: So......can I get my money here or do I need to go to customer service?

Me: What?

SC: For these *holds up rebate forms*



Me: You need to mail those in, or submit them online, and a check will be mailed to you.

SC: *cat butt face*

Me: Have a good day.

*They leave*

Holy Jeebus.....if you could redeem your rebate in-store like that, we'd just make it an Instant Savings and save both of us the trouble. But it's not an instant savings. It's a REBATE. REEEEEEEEEEBAAAAAAAAATEEEEEE!!!!!

That pretty much sums up all the noteworthy events from may Black Friday.

[bainsidhe]

Ah yes, I did have another minor incident yesterday. A girl about 9 or 10 wanted to purchase some gum. Or some candy. Or something else that would be less than a dollar. She had no idea what prices meant and really, I weep. I tell her she needs to get something for less than 92 cents so that with tax it won't be more than a doller. So she spent the next five minutes asking prices for all the candy lining my register, but in this way: "Can I get this? It says it's One hundred and ninety-seven?" Erm, no. That's $1.97 so it's more than a dollar, I explain. "Darn, I just can't make a decision" and she goes back to looking. "What about this? It says 4 for 300?" Err, that's 4 for $3.00 and yes you can. "Oh, I just can't decide!"

Meanwhile, a line was patiently forming behind her and each person had to shuffle past the girl who was climbing atop my belt so she could see the candy. I kept asking, "Is it all right if I help the next person here?" and she'd be all surprised and move out of the way. Thank goodness she finally decided on some gum, only to be completely surprised she got change back. Fortunately, she didn't try to see what she could buy with her eleven cents. Really, she had no concept of money. I found that very troubling. That along with how I had to remind her climbing on top of my belt was dangerous.