The Retail Horror Thread 2: More Tales to Chill your Bones

Fuck any ancient decrepit fuck who still uses checks in stores, and who the fuck expects someone else to fill it out for her? What a cunt.
I flub through it as an adult because it's so fucking infrequent I have checks from my early 20's still in their checkbook from my bank. I just used one up two months ago for a voided check for some nonsense with my company's new direct deposit. I loathe old people who use checks. Just fucking die already.
 
Back when I worked in a grocery store, someone died in the parking lot. I didn't see much except the police covering up the car's windows and a ton of emergency vehicles crowded around. I think it was a heart attack, though the story varied depending on who I asked. A coworker of mine was hit by a car and died on the same day. So that was pretty fucked up.
 
Ranting about coworkers, corporate and how shit the store is.

So the ASM is just, a fucking ass. He loves the fabric department, and a few weeks ago, he was moving fabric. One of the managers asked if he needed help, as she had time to kill, and he said no and would snap at workers for trying to help him. Then, when our DM comes in to see how the stores doing, he whines about how no one helped him with fabric and that he hurt hes wrist. Our DM told him to never do fabric and had the same manager who asked if he needed help, to move and organize the fabric. So in a passive aggressive response, he moved all of the differently labeled cotton prints (ex: floral/Asian inspired/etc) and got them so condensed, that theres roughly 6 panels total of blank space where customers like to put the bolt of fabric that they didnt want on the shelves, sometimes from the fleece section, which is a good 6 isles down. No one knows wtf to do with those panels. Hes also very condescending when it comes to certain things. He excerpts new employees to know the closing announcements by memory, and it took me a few closing shifts to get it down, how does anyone except a complete newbie to memorise it in one sitting? Theres also a piece of paper meant for the cut counter so when you have a piece of fabric, say, fleece, that's roughly more than a yard and half you're not supposed to REM it, you're supposed to put it back on the bolt. Yet newbies dont know that and they get their ass chewed because of a small mistake. Anyways, when trump was elected he threw a shitstorm and basically told a coworker, who's husband is in the military, that he hopes her husband dies because of Trump. And hes gotten several HR complaints from both workers and customers and yet nothing's done because hes gay. And that's what everyone thinks. If he got fired because of the shot he pulled, he'd cry discrimination and get corporate on the hot spot. Not like corporation does anything in the first place. All they care about is money. Right now, our phones barely work. A banana works as a better phone than what we got and we cant do shit about it. Our bathrooms are falling apart, our registers are basically on their last legs. Ones down permanently, ones slow as shit, ones scanner doesnt like to work half the time, one randomly shuts down and does a restart, and one, one time refused to talk to the card reader we ended up charging a customer 3 fucking times. And what she bought wasnt cheap. Our printers like to fail more than they work. Only the even # handhelds produce scannable fabric tickets with the exception of one odd #. ALSO, we're going paperless!!!! And annihilating more than 75% of our customers, cause they're all old. Old people rarely have smartphones let alone emails, and half of them cant see and/or remember how to operate our app. Not that its confusing to work with but its cause they're old. And they're taking it out on us, because yes Barbara I single handedly convinced corporate to make everything paperless. Even the teachers are getting upset cause we stopped doing physical teacher discount cards.

Sorry for the textwall but tl;dr: stores falling apart, ASM's a condensing ass, and corporate is a giant asshole annihilating more than half our customers by going paperless.
 
At my theater you can call ahead and request a reserved seat, sometimes for VIPs, but mostly so people in wheelchairs and walkers can see the movie too. Our theater also has the right to move people in order to accommodate reserveds. Depending on how full a given theater is, I either have to field incredibly dumb questions ("Are the reserved seats really reserved?") or deal with people throwing tantrums because they don't want to sit in the front row or move two seats to the left, such as the old man who said to me with a straight face: "Oh, I guess we're not crippled enough to see the movie!"

Outside of that, there's also a lot of people who have no clue where their movie is even after I point them to it, and when they step out of the theater for popcorn/the bathroom.
 
I worked with a lady who seemed totally normal. She worked part-time at the hardware store as a cashier where I worked and part-time as a hair dresser. My first clue that she was kind of a strange one was she would always bring in bleach to clean her register - every day and every time she had to move registers. She said she liked the smell and that she loved the smell of hair bleach and that was why she wanted to work in a salon. And then the really weird stuff started to happen.

It came up in a conversation that I enjoy video games. She said her son liked them, too. She asked me if I'd ever played any of the Tony Hawk games and I said I had but didn't own any of them. Her face became gravely serious and she was like, "That game is evil" and I really thought she was kidding but then she explained, "there was an evil symbol spray-painted on one of the walls in the game. My son showed it to me. I told him not to skate past it, even though he says he has to to get past it" meaning that he had to skate past the symbol to get to the next level in the game. I was hoping to drop the subject but she talked about how one day he skated past it and had a seizure the same day and she said he was "possessed" by getting too close to the symbol so they took the video game out into their yard and burned it. Of course, she wouldn't talk about what the symbol was or draw it so I never found out what it was.

I tried not to talk to her after that.
 
So a while ago I mentioned that some idiot threw a patio chair through our window that required it to be boarded up for a bit. The window got replaced but we kept the plywood in the kitchen for the longest time. About a month or two ago the store manager was in and I asked him why we hadn’t tossed it out yet.

“Because [store owner] paid $400 for it.”

Now I take classes for theatre set design and I know how much ply costs. There was no way a couple of boards cost that much.

“That’s not even $40 worth in materials.”
“Yup.”
“Someone got ripped off.”
“Yup.”

The boards vanished only recently. But only because a sister store got broken into.
 
I worked with a guy at the hardware store, generally came in about an hour before closing time to do stock. His job was to reorder what the store was out of and it helped to know what sold really well and what barely moved off the shelf. This guy regularly came to work drunk, one time telling his manager "I have to go home, I'm too drunk tonight." The good things about working with him was he was friendly and usually funny but the managers hated him for obvious reasons.

One day he ordered four of an industrial size hot water heater, and usually the store only sold one per year. They were extremely expensive and he got in a lot of trouble. His manager explained his mistake and told him he'd better pray that someone came in and bought them. The guy panicked, went home, drank a lot...and got an idea.

He called the store and asked to speak to his manager and disguised his voice, saying he owned several bowling alleys and would need four industrial size water heaters. The manager said that yes, they did have four of them in stock and if he came to the store they would be ready for pickup.

The manager never brought it up again and the guy's job was safe, even though no one ever showed up to pick up the heaters.
 
I worked in a gym and there was a mentally challenged guy who used to call 20+ times a day and tell me and the other staff that he was tied up/kidnapped/make noises like he was gagged/etc. and needed us to call the cops for him and it always scared the new people. We had to explain it when someone got hired and tell them how to handle it. We actually knew for a fact who was doing it but the manager wouldn't ban him. He did this for at least a year. We'd hang up but he'd always call back. The only time he ever stopped was when one of the ladies' husbands picked up and told him he was calling the cops on him and since he didn't work there he couldn't get in trouble for it.
 
Old ladies used to come in to the gift card shop I worked at years ago, asking for English translations for some cards they'd like to purchase. Considering I was the only employee fluent in the national language; the task was always handed to me.

There was also a helium tank for filling balloons in the checkout area.

*huffs helium slyly from the tank*
"That'll be 1.99, pleeeeaaassseeee".

Poor old dears thought they'd lost it. Yes, I'm aware of the dangerous surrounding ingesting helium. Don't huff balloon guts, kids!
 
Another story from working at the gym - it was a Sunday and the gym closed at 6. It was after 5 and this Asian woman calls and asks far a tour. I told her she could come in for a tour anytime before 6. She called a few times, her English was okay but she was new to the area so every time I tried to give directions she couldn't figure out the street names I was saying. The final time she calls she asks for the address for her GPS and gets there about 10 minutes later. The woman and her husband come in and her husband says he doesn't need to see anything on the tour except for the pool. I was thrilled because this meant I was going to get to leave on time.

I take them to the pool and the man checks the temperature with his hand, saying it's too warm. He then scoops up and handful of pool water and TASTES IT. It was my first reaction to freak out but I didn't want to offend them so I didn't say anything. They took membership apps and left.
 
Just had some drunk fuck-bucket stumble into my lobby. He ended up snapping my picture to take to my boss in the morning. He didn't like that I told him to back off of our (closed) bar while he was waiting for his literal mom to come pick him up. In reality I think he's going to wake up in eight hours with no memory of the event, wondering why there's a picture of a fatass trying to dodge the frame on his phone.

I'll let you know if I get fired. Or if I become the face of twitter's next racial controversy since the guy was black.
 
Just had some drunk fuck-bucket stumble into my lobby. He ended up snapping my picture to take to my boss in the morning. He didn't like that I told him to back off of our (closed) bar while he was waiting for his literal mom to come pick him up. In reality I think he's going to wake up in eight hours with no memory of the event, wondering why there's a picture of a fatass trying to dodge the frame on his phone.

I'll let you know if I get fired. Or if I become the face of twitter's next racial controversy since the guy was black.
This might seem like a strange question, but doesn't your boss already know what you look like? How would a random picture get you into trouble? I would have given a big smile and a wink when the lush was taking my picture... perhaps even a wave hello.
 
This might seem like a strange question, but doesn't your boss already know what you look like? How would a random picture get you into trouble? I would have given a big smile and a wink when the lush was taking my picture... perhaps even a wave hello.

He was going to complain about my perceived unprofessionalism and use the picture as an identifier. It wouldn't really matter since I'm the only employee in the building between midnight and six so my boss would automatically know who he's talking about just by the time of night it happened, but it's not like he knew that. As for smiling and such, he didn't really announce he was going to take a picture so I didn't have much time to think and react. I should've seen that shit coming after I refused to give him my name, but hindsight is 20/20.

For the record I texted my boss on the off-chance he actually does try getting me in trouble. She replied "let him come." The old lady can be abrasive but she looks out for us peon-level employees.
 
@Shitassdeaddude Bosses hate customers too, I guarantee you if some asshole came in with just a pic and said you were being unprofessional at most your boss would've asked you wtf happened and after hearing an explanation just shrugged it off. The person didn't have a video of you being a dick to them, and with their phone in your face they could've unless they were lying.

I got a mega bad review on the store website once, it was actually kind of hilarious. I wouldn't give a lady something that was on hold and we didn't have any more on the floor so she went on a tirade about how she went to another store in ANOTHER STATE and expected me to pity her and hand it over. The hold tag had fallen off but it wasn't far away, all she had to do was look down. She was LIVID when I didn't give it to her, but I wasn't wearing a name tag so she didn't get my name. Looked at her other reviews and she gave a makeup store 1 star for no one saying hello to her as she walked in. Either way nothing happened to me, my managers asked what happened and I told them, even the asshole ones sided with me.
 
Right, I knew I wouldn't actually get in trouble I was just being a shit with that last bit.

EDIT: Apparently he did remember last night but all he did was bitch about me to our bartender while buying a drink from the very establishment that was so viciously harrasing him.
 
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I work a ticket booth for a tourist attraction which is a great way to earn insight into the depths of just how terribly stupid people can act over the smallest things.

My hourly wage is fair and I have a lot of freedom. My tickets are also dirt cheap so I never feel truly bad if someone has complaints. Tourists are great at saying funny shit in broken English and coming up with incredible inquiries.
Ok place to work, but we do have the constant problems with failing equipment and understaffing of course.
The boss frequently accuse employees of stealing or is in a bad mood so there are a number of questionable terminations each year of fully competent staff.

We keep a running tally score of how many times we get the joke where a grown adult asks to get a childrens ticket for themselves or their friends.
We got 200 of them last July. By September we were down to 50 and by December only a handful. So far, March has beaten the past three months tally so I guess the season is picking up.

Actual horrors might be that the area yearly gets bomb scares and the whole neighborghood gets evacuated for an hour or so until they find that it was just a tourist that forgot a bag at a corner or in a restroom. This is great for having a paid break while observing police trying to deal with tourists. It's been more than a year since last time it happened though.
 
The reason I do most of my shopping online and hate to try on clothes at the store is because I used to work in a dressing room. Mostly it was just answering the phone and forwarding calls to people who worked there. As long as someone was "watching" no one usually tried to steal anything so I never had to report theft. However, due to the following, it was one of the most uncomfortable places I ever had to work. The dressing rooms were tiny but anytime a guy wanted to try something on his girlfriend would always walk in with him and no, not to have sex. The women all literally were there to tell their men how to dress. It was disgusting and awful. This was during a particularly horrendous time in both men and women's fashion, too. But it always bothered me that the girls felt they had a right to do that. And on the same level were the mom's who went in the dressing rooms with their daughters during swim suit season and body shame them. It was very common to hear the mom's go "You look fat, I'll get you something else" or "Oh my goodness, you've gained a lot of weight." It was never thin moms who complained about them, either.
 
Management wonders why I hate customers.

Some fat blue haired bitch grabbed my arse tonight. I turned around with a look of disgust, and she just laughed and said to the guy she came in with 'Did you pinch his arse?'

I could have smacked her there and then, I'm looking to leave this shit hole anyway, but sadly with no new job yet I had to hold back. Instead I went straight to the till and told them not to serve her and why, a manager then came up to me and wanted to confirm what happened and said 'Yeah, don't serve the bitch' to the till jockeys.

Of course the groper kicked off, smashing her pink gin on the floor and screaming at the manager and till workers.

After being coaxed out by the guard the manager informed her that she's now barred from this store and he will be pushing to have her banned from every branch in the country.

Friday fuckin' night on alcohol aisle...
 
Management wonders why I hate customers.

Some fat blue haired bitch grabbed my arse tonight. I turned around with a look of disgust, and she just laughed and said to the guy she came in with 'Did you pinch his arse?'

I could have smacked her there and then, I'm looking to leave this shit hole anyway, but sadly with no new job yet I had to hold back. Instead I went straight to the till and told them not to serve her and why, a manager then came up to me and wanted to confirm what happened and said 'Yeah, don't serve the bitch' to the till jockeys.

Of course the groper kicked off, smashing her pink gin on the floor and screaming at the manager and till workers.

After being coaxed out by the guard the manager informed her that she's now barred from this store and he will be pushing to have her banned from every branch in the country.

Friday fuckin' night on alcohol aisle...
goddamn @bearycool control yourself
 
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