With Black Friday and Cyber Monday having just passed, I figured I would give everyone insight to the views of the retail worker. I have worked retail for my entire teenage and young adult life and the one thing you learn is that there are MANY types of good (and bad) customers. I decided I would do a “How To” on what NOT to do while shopping. I have probably done some of these myself when I was younger, but it is all about character development right?
- When an associate welcomes you to the store and/or asks how you are, DON’T just walk by and ignore them. We are told to greet customers but most of the time we just really want to be nice and ask how you are and if you need help with anything.
- Emails. WE ARENT ASKING FOR YOUR EMAIL TO BE ANNOYING. We get it. You get 94350270 emails a day. We do too. Stores have associates get emails because it is a marketing technique and most of the time we are graded on it or the store is at least monitored on percentages.
- When we an item doesn’t have a tag, DO NOT make the “Oh so it's free? Haha.” Joke because we have heard it a thousand times and it is still not funny. We still have to laugh, though.
- DO NOT be rude and huffy when we are bagging your items, even if it seems too slow. If we are taking a long time to bag items, it is because we have a method to it. When you start a retail job you have to learn if there is an order to unhanging, decensoring, and folding the clothes at the register.
- People….please….if you need a size large in a folded item, I BEG of you not to just pull it out like a magician does with a tablecloth. Kindly place the other sweaters to the side, take out the shirt you need, and place it back. It's not hard!
- Another crappy thing we have to deal with as salespeople is DRESSING ROOMS. Now we have a rack in there for a reason; it’s not hard to take the clothes out of the room and hang them on it! We even have a table for sweaters. Leaving piles and piles of clothes in the rooms just adds to our frustration.
- Asking for the prices of every single item is honestly the most annoying thing ever. Yes, we love to help people. No, we do not want to spend 10 minutes calculating every item with tax because you don’t want to pull out your phone yourself.
- Complaining to associates about things we cannot change. Sorry I am not the one who decides how many emails the company sends or what sizes we get in stores or what is put on the mannequins.
