As Mother's Day weekend came to a close I realized there's been a lot of repetitive occurrences at my job. This weekend has helped me shed more light on many absurd things that have seemed to become the norm.
First are customer's comments and complaints about not finding what they need or not having as many fitting rooms or registers open. The reason there are limited fitting rooms and registers is because we currently have a limited amount of associates to fill what needs to be filled. We understand the frustration of this but you need to realize that we associates don't control the schedules. We don't have a place where we can say "Hey open more fitting rooms or registers." We are told what to do and have to do it. We'd gladly appreciate if you don't continue to blame us for the inconveniences you come across. There's a reason why there's a store survey.
That being said, having limited fitting rooms means we have customers (who are usually the foreign ones) that try on clothes in the middle of the sales floor, and I don't mean as in trying clothes on top of their clothes. Anytime I come across one customer who does this I'm taken aback by how they don't care about changing in public. I've told them they need to go to a fitting room that's close by and sometimes I've had to stay put until they left because many of these customers are super stubborn.
Next would be the very messy customers, and ten out of ten times they are most disgusting ones. These customers come into the fitting room with what looks like the whole entire store. Once they go in they come out with no more than ten items or less. Once you get inside the fitting room you are stuck with the highest mountain of clothes piled up with the hanger right next to them. As you start grabbing everything you start second guessing what's under the mountain. Why are we getting a little scared at this point? Because customers have a habit of peeing, pooping, or throwing up on the floor or merchandise. I can't tell you how many times I've had to close down a fitting room because of it, or the many other times I was stuck cleaning it all up and throwing merchandise away.
Third would be the coupons. I HATE COUPONS!! Especially the dollar off coupons. Store policy states all customers must present coupon upon check out. My company department store has given the idea to these customers that the coupon comes off automatically from their whole purchase. We've probably spent a good amount of time going back and forth with the customer on why they thought it's supposed to come off automatically because even our TV advertisement states COUPON REQUIRED! Once the customer figures out that the dollar off coupons are only a one time dollar off, they want to do about 100 transactions just so they'll still get money off each one. When we have to apologize and let them know we can't do more than certain amount of transactions it's a whole different ball game.
We also have the customers that are a huge fan of changing the price tag or clearance tags on merchandise. They think just because we seem to know just one area that we won't know what is on sale everywhere else or if the tags don't belong with the attached merchandise. I work in the online department at my store so I am extremely familiar with almost every single item in the store. So doing things like that would never slide by me. Sometimes these exact customers come back with merchandise that doesn't match the unattached tickets or merchandise on the receipt. Before we make the return we have to look up every item and match them together and this process usually takes more than 30 minutes depending on how many items they're trying to return.
Finally are my favorite types of customers: those that want to exchange or return items and they don't have a receipt. In our store, if you've paid with debit/credit card or are signed up for our rewards program we can look up your receipt with those methods. Though if they paid in a cash and aren't on our rewards program we have to inform the customers that we will be giving them store credit and the computer system is going give them back the lowest price in the store for that item so they won't be getting back what they originally paid for.
Some customers don't care and they'll gladly take the store credit for $5 but there's other customers that will fight you on it, and oh boy do they cause a scene. They start taking out all their credit cards to make sure they didn't purchase it on there. When nothing shows up and they keep insisting I usual call a lead at this point. When the lead ends up coming over to help me out with the customer, they too can't seem to find their receipt with any of the methods and gives the customer the option to keep the merchandise or get store credit for it.
At this point, the customer either walks away with the merchandise or gets store credit. Though sometimes we even have customers that don't want store credit or the merchandise that they are trying to return so they leave it on the counter, say a few profane words and walk away.
Retail may look easy to some and it probably is, but every day something, like I've listed above, happens and it makes our job that much harder. Plus when we get visits from the district we have to do 3x the job to make everything presentable while also providing the best customer service possible. We have a lot on our plates with the limited amount of hours we get every day. We all wish that customers would show a little bit more respect to those working to provide them with what they need.
