Tales from Retail: SSO Edition

[will_shred]

Retail workers, share your weird/funny/dumb customer interactions. I work in a music store and have my fair share of stories. I can't really share these stories to my public social media, but I feel like I can here lol.

When I first started I had a customer bring me an Ibanez S Prestige for a setup, he left a note that said "don't touch the bridge". I'm like ok, I kinda have to do that in order to do set it up. So I basically just clean it and change the strings, don't adjust the action or anything like he asked. One thing I did do was remove the trem arm and put it in the storage compartment in the case so it wouldn't but stress on the bridge when I closed the case. When the customer gets the guitar he opens it up and says

"WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO?"

me: "oh i just took the trem arm off, its in the case"

him: "YOU MOTHERFUCKER YOU BROKE IT. ITS BROKEN."

"Sir, if you'd let me show you, you just screw the trem arm on like this"

"DONT TOUCH MY GUITAR. IM TELLING YOUR BOSS YOU BROKE MY GUITAR"

"ok"

My boss laughed in his face, haven't seen him again.

 

[will_shred]

Had a customer come in the door about 5 minutes to close, and he was just kicking tires, didn't seem like he was buying anything. But we're nice, we ask him if he needs help and let him hang til about 5 minutes after close at which point we start closing the store. My coworker turns off one of the lights and this dude turns around and yells across the store "AYE, IS THAT THE GTFO LIGHT? YOU'RE TRYING TO CLOSE ON ME, A PAYING CUSTOMER?" (he hadn't bought anything, we've never seen this dude before). My coworker and boss tried to smooth things over by apologizing and saying if he wanted to, he could hang for a few minutes but we are past closing time. He said "FUCK YOU GUYS, IM TAKING MY BUSINESS TO GUITAR CENTER" fwiw I used to work at GC, you try to pull that shit there you're getting perma banned. A few weeks later the same dude came in to buy some picks, and as soon as he saw my coworker who turned off the light he started flipping out, shouting, cursing him out, and stormed out the door. Haven't seen him since. Thank god.

I've got more, i'll post em as they come to me lol.

 

[will_shred]

Guy brought in a brand new PRS for a setup, he asked for lighter strings so I put some .09s on there, and when he got the guitar back he complained to my boss that I never changed the strings. My boss asks me
"hey, just checking, did you change the strings on this?"
"yeah, why?"
"Customer says you didn't"
"I think the fact that he can't tell that I went down a whole string size says everything we need to know"
"lol yeah"

 

[SalsaWood]

Music stores, gun stores, and pawn shops. I'll eat out of trash can before I ever work at any of those places simply because the clientele are constantly pissed/excited about the absolute dumbest stuff. No disrespect to folks who do work there, lord knows you earn the money more than fairly.

 

[will_shred]

Music stores, gun stores, and pawn shops. I'll eat out of trash can before I ever work at any of those places simply because the clientele are constantly pissed/excited about the absolute dumbest stuff. No disrespect to folks who do work there, lord knows you earn the money more than fairly.

I love my job and my workplace, the vast majority of our customers are really cool people. I'm just sharing some stories that stick out over the years.

Here's a happy one, usually every year around November Bill Kelleher pays our store a visit and buys a pedal or something small. He's a super nice guy, and he usually will tell me some cool stuff about what he's working on or how the latest tour went.

 

[budda]

Brief music store gig: showing teenagers a tele with high gain can in fact chug.

 

[Moongrum]

I worked at a foreign import stuff (candles, furniture, candy) and a wholesale restaurant store when I was younger, and it was all pretty chill. I had people bitch to me about the store and how things should be done, but idk what they were expecting as I was just a kid getting paid minimum wage, not like I had any sway on company policies lol.
Anytime a customer questioned return policies or price adjustments, I never argued and would just dump them on whatever manager was working that day

 

[MFB]

Back when I worked at Walgreens we had:

A woman use the restroom and literally use her own shit to write the word "FUCK" in capital letters on the wall, that was a fun night.
Our head cosmetics rep got arrested during work for selling drugs (like, actual hard drugs).
One customer who would frequently bring in film to be developed with explicit amateur "photography" on it which we told them numerous times we won't print (spoiler alert: the photo clerks see every photo you have for this very reason)
Someone once took a shit in the middle of an aisle, and our way too hot but incredibly dense manager, had to clean it up.
Saw a drug raid on one of our regular's house behind the building for also dealing drugs (looking back on it, it's quite obvious the dude was on gear since he was always looking like he just pumped and was red as shit)
Someone lost $400 in a wallet and never claimed it, so I turned it in (because I'm on camera everywhere, remember) and then another coworker of ours ended up stealing it so none of us got to use it for free lunches for however long it lasted (fuck that guy, he got fired not long after anyways)
I got randomly drug tested after hot-boxing to/during/from a Judas Priest/Whitesnake concert and still somehow didn't test positive, although I did start saying goodbye to coworkers

Those are the big ones I remember

 

[High Plains Drifter]

Mom never told me that one day I might bathe in vaginal discharge, spittoon juice, baby vomit, animal feces, fermented man urine, and thousands of kids phlegm cocktails but then I got a job in retail and all my dreams came true. The customer's BO, halitosis, drunken rants/ physical threats/ rudeness, along with the religious fanatics, paranoid conspiracy theorists, family thieving, verbally abused and neglected children, and atrocious management practices did me in. Eleven years took it's mental and physical toll on me and I finally had to hang it up.

 

[l1ll1]

Mom never told me that one day I might bathe in vaginal discharge, spittoon juice, baby vomit, animal feces, fermented man urine, and thousands of kids phlegm cocktails but then I got a job in retail and all my dreams came true. The customer's BO, halitosis, drunken rants/ physical threats/ rudeness, along with the religious fanatics, paranoid conspiracy theorists, family thieving, verbally abused and neglected children, and atrocious management practices did me in. Eleven years took it's mental and physical toll on me and I finally had to hang it up.

Sir. This is a Wendy's.

 

[wheresthefbomb]

So many. Here are some of my favorites.

I used to work at a campus textbook store. I very often had people mad at me that their books hadn't arrived, or demanding to know where they were, as though I had control of the mail. My go-to response (which always made them more mad) was "your book is somewhere in the void between [point of origin] and here."

One time a lady called our customer service line, and when I picked up she said (in a very thick accent) "OH THANK GOD A WHITE PERSON."

One time a guy bought some snacks and his total was $6.66. He went into panic mode, his eyes darting around the counter, and he grabbed the first piece of candy he laid eyes on to make his total anything but that.

One time I saw a guy with his backpack open, shoving expensive textbooks into it. I turned around and pretended not to see it. Godspeed, brother.


Before that I worked on a tour boat selling food and drinks. Once an old lady paid me with a dollar that had "FOR DRUGS" written in thick sharpie. She swore up and down she didn't write it. Uh-huh.

Another time I had an individual with down syndrome buy a Bud Light from me. I mis-gendered them and said "thank you ma'am!" I almost died of embarrassment when they said "I am not a woman!" but then they thought it was hilarious and started laughing and I started laughing we both had a big ol laugh. God bless that person, I think of them regularly.

The next few stories come from a very angry, depressed, alcoholic time in my life that I am very glad to have left behind me.

I used to work in a pizza place, and I got bored and started writing "SATAN LOVES YOU" with smiley faces, upside down crosses, pentagrams etc under the lids of the pizza boxes. Someone called my manager about it, and he tried to tell me to stop but he was laughing so hard he had a really hard time getting the words out.

At that same pizza place, they kept the single-serve bottles of wine in the same room as the broom and dust pan. One of my jobs was to sweep the ants and centipedes out from under the pizza oven a couple times a shift. Each time I put the broom back, I'd pocket a few bottles of wine and go read, take a dump, and drink wine for 20 minutes.


I worked in a shitty burger bar for a while, and a table was being super mean to their waitress and she kept coming back to cry/complain about them. It was late, and I was really drunk because I'd gotten in the habit of stealing a six-pack from the walk-in at the beginning of every shift. One of her shitty customers had ordered the last cut of prime rib, and my drunk ass dropped it on the floor when I was going to plate it. Normally I would've thrown it in the trash and delivered the bad news, but I grabbed that filthy puppy with the tongs and plated it up. They ate the whole thing. I told her about it after they left and we all had a good laugh. I also pissed on the carpeted floor in the corner of their filthy storage room multiple times. Only God can judge me.


In a different shitty burger bar, and they pre-made their house margarita in 5-gallon batches with a spigot on the bottom of the bucket. Somehow they thought it was a good idea to leave these in the walk-in. Like any reasonable person, I would put my head under it, open my mouth, and chug from the fountain of drunk every time I went in there (no lips on the spigot, I'm not an animal). One time my manager asked me if I'd seen anyone drinking from it and proceeded to tell me that the servers had a habit of going in there and helping themselves and it was costing him money. I gave him my very best sarcastically surprised Kirk.

 

[CanserDYI]

I have a ton of them but one of my favorites was actually from the other week working at Guitar Center, had a kid playing extremely out of tune, so I go grab a tuner and walk over to him, "Hey, man! Sounds great but I think you're in need of a tuner!". This kid turned to me and says, "No thanks, I already have one." And turned around and continued playing.

 

[crushingpetal]

One time a guy bought some snacks and his total was $6.66. He went into panic mode, his eyes darting around the counter, and he grabbed the first piece of candy he laid eyes on to make his total anything but that.

When I was a kid I'd try really hard to pump exactly $6.66 of gas. Gas was cheaper. And I didn't have money.

 

[TedEH]

Threads like this always make me glad that I cook my own food at home most of the time.

 

[Emperoff]

This thread is a good example of why I refuse to do face-to-face sales. I have more than enough dealing with stupid customers via message already.

Just today:
"Man, I was really going to buy those tubes, but your negative to meet in person got me suspicious. I wanted to know you in person and I would have only stolen 5 minutes of your time".

Me: "It's not 5 minutes, is having to stay at home to meet with you instead of spending the sunday afternoon outside with my wife (because you prefer to save on shipping and waste my free time)."

 

[will_shred]

Come to think of it, we had a couple customers shit on the floor when I was at guitar center. Couple times in the bathroom and once on the sales floor. I once had a customer shit his pants at my current job.

 

[TedEH]

Not retail, but I went to pick something up off of an internet add this past weekend, and when we showed up, they were renovating the place. Someone with us asked for a washroom, so they showed us to a room with no door. No thanks. Then they tried to sell us the flooring they just removed from this apartment, which had been sitting out in the rain for who knows how long. Also, no thanks.

 

[BlackMastodon]

I'm always shocked at the frequency of people just shitting on the floor of a public place, or shitting their own pants.

I count my #blessings that I never had to work retail or any job in the service industry.

 

[MFB]

I'm always shocked at the frequency of people just shitting on the floor of a public place, or shitting their own pants.

I count my #blessings that I never had to work retail or any job in the service industry.

As a teen, I straight up refused to work in food services, people were bad enough in retail that I couldn't imagine them if I were dealing with something as temperamental as meal orders

 

[Furtive Glance]

It wasn’t really retail but I still dealt with the general public at a library for my high school job. I will never get over how apoplectic some people became over their late fines. Literally losing their shit over 20 cents. “I RETURNED THAT. I’M NOT PAYING.”