I live a double life. By day, I am a successful career woman but by night I am a shop girl. I am the one you come to when your jeans, which you bought a size too small and then laundered in hot water, somehow are too tight. You want to return them smelling like Tide, with the tags off and no receipt. I am the one you come to when you buy $18 of makeup and then want the gift that comes with a $22 purchase. I am the one you bring the cashmere sweater back to -- the sweater that somehow got lost in the back seat of your car for three months and now smells like cigarette smoke. I am the one you buy the expensive dress from, and two days later, you return it, missing tags, smelling of perfume and with deodorant stains under the arms. You tell me it was never worn. I am the one you bring 30 items to to price check from another department, and then you argue with me about every price... but you don't want to take the items back to the department where you found them to let the appropriate person ring you up.
And... if I question you about any of it, or try to explain the store policy, or that I don't know the sales from another department, you demand to see my manager. If I don't keep a humble, apologetic look on my face, you declare I am rude, mean or spiteful. You might even imply that if you were of a different age, a different race, a different sex, you would have been treated differently.
Don't get me wrong. I have worked a second job at retail for more years than I care to recall. I understand "the customer is always right" and that you deserve to be treated politely and professionally. And I acknowledge that there are times a clerk doesn't know the right price, doesn't ask the right questions, and doesn't act exceptionally friendly. But let's face it; sometimes the customer is WRONG.
While most customers follow the Golden Rule and treat clerks with the polite respect they want to receive, unfortunately many customers have learned how to get their way by demanding to see a manager. They have learned to manipulate the system. In many department stores, the managers will back the customer instead of the employee who is going by the rules. The manager will take back the laundered jeans, the smelly sweater, the stained dress and apologize for the clerk who was just doing his or her job. To make this ploy ironclad, the customer must also make the employee look bad, so this is where the terms "rude, mean and spiteful" are tossed in. In many cases, the clerk's intelligence is also impugned.
Case in point: Tonight my brother came in to make a plan for my day off. He had to hunt me down because we have been short handed and I was in a different department. As a woman approached the register, I asked my brother to step aside while I asked her if she needed any help. Yes, she said as she pitched the dress on the counter, she had a dress to return. She didn't have her receipt. I pointed out the register for dresses was the next one over and that without the receipt it would be better to take it over to the dress register. I never had a chance to explain I didn't work in that area, because she immediately started yelling at me loudly enough that people in the general area turned to see what the ruckus was about. "I bought this dress at THIS register and I am not walking ANYWHERE" she shouted. "You WILL take this dress back or you will call a manger. Now what's it gonna be?" she hollered. I calmly said I would call a manger which I promptly did. With that accomplished, I turned to my brother and said I would see him tomorrow, we set the time, and he left.
When the manager arrived, the customer told her I had been too busy flirting and making dates to wait on her and that I had refused to wait on her while I carried on with some man. I laughed and said I might be from Tennessee but that I didn't date my brother. That made her even angrier. She again raised her voice and said, "You can date your brother; you can date your daughter, you can date a woman or a man these days. We are past the days when a woman just dates a man. I hope you have enough class to realize that. Surely you have enough class to know THAT!"
Then she began to tell me that she spends thousands of dollars in this store, that she pays my salary, and that I work for her. With that she turned to that manager and laughed and said, "You may not even have to get onto with her, because I'm doing it for you. I took care of her." She laughed again with the obvious relish of "putting me in my place."
Then she stalked off, but apparently she decided I didn't look chastised enough, because she came back and said, "Miss manager, would you come with me?" She took the manager across the floor into another department where they could not be seen or heard, and there she fabricated some new concoction of what had transpired... and insisted the manager write it up as a formal complaint. The manager did just that, even though she had witnessed first hand some of the woman's loud, erratic behavior and even though company pollicy is that without a receipt, a return MUST go back to the department where it is sold. The customer is always right. The customer's perception is more important than the truth or company policy.
I was not the only one reported today. A young woman in our cosmetics department was written up twice, once for refusing to give a gift to someone who paid less than the promotion but demanded a gift anyway and once for telling a customer she would need a manager's approval before she could take back $100 worth of returned cosmetics. In both cases she was following company or departmental policy. In both cases the customer was backed up and the employee was reported.
I have to ask those managers who work in companies that chant the mantra "the customer is always right," who treat your employees like expendable commodities while you kowtow to customers who are OBVIOUSLY abusing both your policies and your employees -- what kind of message are you sending? If you take the time to publish manuals on how returns should be handled and then rebuke employees for following the manual (and angering customers who wants to bypass the rules), what kind of support are you giving your staff? Should the reward for following the rules be a rebuke? Do you think your rules will carry much weight if you indirectly or directly punish your employees for following them?
Those of you who are customers who pull these stunts of bypassing the rules by clamoring for a manger and dumping your ill temper on the clerk - SHAME ON YOU. You are literally stealing from the company with your returned worn clothing, and your abuse of the clerk is as bad as a man who emotionally abuses his wife or a boss who browbeats his staff.
The Bible says the meek shall inherit the earth. I guess one day shop girls will rule the planet. I would settle for a little more respect while I'm behind the cash register.
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