askchapo

Worked in a grocery store for a long time. People don't like being told "no" or corrected in any way.

If I worked in the bulk foods section and told somebody's kid, politely, to stop sticking their naked hands into the food bins or smearing peanut butter all over the place, I almost always got the stink eye.

Told a customer once that we've never carried that item they insist they've bought here before and it really felt like it was going to end in a fist fight between me and him until his wife appeared and told him that, "No, we didn't get that here."

I once mistakenly told a customer who looked barely old enough to have started college, that it'd be helpful for us employees to not put things on the floor when you didn't want them, just find somebody who works here to hand it off to or leave it at the register when you check out. The amount of offense that this young person took at being asked for the bare minimum was astounding.

The I couldn't even guess at the number of times that I told a customer "no," only to spend the next half an hour being drug back to them by other employees who where asked the same question by the same customer who was just shopping around for an employee to tell them "yes." Only to be disappointed that I was brought back out to tell them "no, we can't give you that for free. no we don't have any in the back. no, we don't carry that flavor. no, we've never carried that brand/size/flavor. no, we can't mail you things. no, we can't just get anything at any time we are limited to what is in the catalogs from the distributors we have contracts with. no, us buying stuff from amazon.com and selling it to you will not be cheaper than you buying it from amazon.com and having it shipped to you."