She came in at like 12 in the afternoon, walks up to the manager, and tells her she works for our HR department. Manager instantly knows she's lying but plays along. The woman has been known to constantly lie that she works for us or is married to our store manager (he doesn't even know her), so she should get a 30% discount. Either way, she's a weirdo, but nothing out of the ordinary. Until she decides to continue shopping until 5 PM. She has three full shopping carts she's lined in a row against the jewelry counter and the fitting room and now she wants to look at jewelry.
Why is tonight special? According to her story, her husband died literally last night, so her online boyfriend is flying in to buy stuff with her. She also told me she had three kids, then that they got run over by a train, but then that she had to get home tonight because they wanted to watch some Disney movie. I am assigned to helping her and her boyfriend with the jewelry to keep an eye on them and make sure they don't steal anything. We had these little bags, smaller than a grocery bag, for people to put jewelry in and take up to the main register to purchase so they can't just run off with it. These bags are meant to only hold like a large handful of jewelry. It's been almost three hours and she has three overfilled bags I have to haul back to the register. The reason her looking at jewelry took so long is because she wants her boyfriend to see if he likes everything so I had to pull out every single bracelet, watch and necklace so he could give his opinion on it, then either put it back in the bags or back in the jewelry cases.
My manager in the meantime is trying to help run the registers because we were understaffed that night and this woman is talking 200 words a minute and randomly running off to grab things. I would be in mid-conversation with her before she'd gasp, run away, grab about three jackets, and toss them on the floor beside her in a giant pile, or her boyfriend would stuff them in her shopping cart armada.
Finally she's done with jewelry and we're closing in ten minutes. Throughout the day (from 12 AM to 9 PM), she had amassed: six overfilled shopping carts, an entire RACK of clothes she put on hold (the racks we take to the aisles to organize clothes or pull them behind our registers to organize and label), three jewelry bags, two entire jewelry case counters covered in a pile of clothes higher than my head (I'm short but still), and two little baskets you can pull behind you. The manager checked them out at her register specifically. While the manager is checking her out, we close the doors when me and the other employee check everyone out, then go and help organize the stuff $700 Lady bought. She has to look through EVERY item of clothing before the manager can scan it, and during the scanning, she RUNS BACK into the very back of the fucking store to look at dresses and shouts for her boyfriend to come look at them with her. She keeps coming back every ten minutes with more clothes she grabbed, talking all casual and how great it is that they have this sort of money and ask if the Best Buy down the street is open (it's fucking 10 at night, now).
Finally, after an hour and a half, they get their receipt: it is over one thousand dollars, but we have some weird deal that if people ever were even ABLE to spend that much, we give them the 30% discount, so it comes down to seven hundred dollars. The woman is delighted and they pay for what they got, which is four entire carts, leaving more than half of the stuff they found on the register counter behind the manager (it is literally a pile made of more than one hundred clothing items), three piles on the jewelry counters, and then around two hundred clothes in the fitting room she tried, covering the entire floor, walls, and bench. They leave and promise they'll be back for our great exciting deals. They didn't steal a single item. It takes all of night shift (us three) and morning shift, plus back workers to re-rack the clothes and organize them, so all in all, ten people for around six hours in total.
I later found out she frequently goes to the Best Buy she mentioned because my fiance used to work there at the time and mentioned a crazy lady who talked to their iphones and tablets trying to make friends with Siri for six hours and she had the same exact name as her and the same purple hot pants and neon yellow rubber duck tank top.
