I’m writing this on 6 hours of sleep and a throbbing headache so you’ll have to bear with me here.
Ah, yes, another retail story. I’m starting to realize that my pain brings happiness to others so when life gives you lemons…
I’ll start this off by reminding everyone that I’ve been in retail for 7 years. 7 long years. Therefore, I’ve earned the right to complain about people and how mutated we have become as a society. I was reminded of that fact this past week.
Last month I started at my new job (my old store closing will be a future blog post because that story is a doozy on its own). I’ve been adjusting fairly well as someone who went from being a manager to a sales associate because now all I have to do is sell with no added stress (for the most part but I digress).
This past week, a gentleman, who for the sake of the story we’re going to call ‘Mike’, entered the store. I do my job as I normally would and greet the man. He seems fairly normal and asks me for a specific size in a dress shoe that he wants. I go into my backroom, grab the shoe and present it to the man.
As a bit of background information, I work at a shoe store now and at this store we have a clearance section. Here, there are a bunch of right-sided shoes on display where customers grab them freely. Most of the time, they’ll try on the shoe that they got from the display, even if it’s not their size. Why is that? Let me ask you a question. Let’s say your shoe size is a 10 and the display is a 9 or 8.5, why is there always someone that needs to squeeze their foot into a shoe that’s not their size? I digress yet again.
So I bring Mike the shoes he wanted, and he notices that they’re scratched up with a bunch of crease marks. I decided to play stupid at first and tell the guy “some dress shoes have this design to make them more casual and ‘worn in’. Mike did not like that answer and gave a very unkind side-eye.
He requested new ones, so back into the backroom I go again. Just for the record, my store has two floors in the backroom and the shoes he wanted were always on the top floor.
I come back with a ‘new’ pair only to find that these shoes had the same markings. Mike, who is growing more hostile by the minute, tells me that he “doesn’t like this” and that he’s “very disappointed in the quality of our shoes”. He then asks for 3 different shoes plus the original damaged dress shoes and wants them all to be new. Back up the stairs I go again.
My manager catches wind of what’s going on, either that or she could see my soul slowly trying to escape from my body, which is when she decided to step in. She’s trying to de-escalate the situation with Mike as I run up and down the stairs like a jackass with 5 different pairs of shoes.
But the more I bring out, the more Mike asks me to go and get. By this point, my hair gel has completely melted from the heat of going up and down the stairs and not knowing whether or not Mike was getting ready to tell me off. Each time I brought him his shoes, his face got more sour.
Flash forward an hour and a half later (literally, not figuratively), Mike ends up heading to the cash with some shoes. As I start to put some shoes away, all I hear is Mike yelling: “HEY! WHAT’S THAT GUY’S NAME, MAN?”.
Oh fuck.
I started to hide in the back. He probably picked up on how fed up I was and was about to talk shit to my manager. I almost let that hot-headed Italian side come out a few times and he could probably see I was over his shit. So as I’m hiding between the shelves, I’m trying to get my story straight for my eventual reprimanding.
“Vito!”, My manager calls, “Can you come out here please?”. That’s never good.
As I walk outside with my tail between my legs, Mike is standing at the cash desk. This was going to be a massacre of extreme proportions.
“Hey Vito! Listen buddy, I just wanted to tell you how happy I was with your service! You’re a really patient guy, we need more people like you in retail. Your manager told me you’re new to the team and I just wanted to say you’re doing great and keep up the good work!”.
…
What in the Norman Bates personality change is going on here?
I honestly think I blacked out because I do not remember what I responded with.
All I remember afterwards was questioning what in the flying fuck just happened with my manager. All she could say was:
“Did you get the sale?”
“uh…yeah?”
“How much was it”
“A little over $400”
“Did he get shoe care”
“Yeah”
“Don’t question it”.
…
0______0
What’s funny is that he has no idea just how much I was cussing his ass out when I was in the backroom grabbing his shoes.
I guess the moral of the story is that no matter how much you might want to give someone a Rey Mysterio-style flying dropkick from the top rope when they’re being a dick, keep yourself calm, cool, and collected. Be as good of a person as you can because you never know how you can impact their life.
Maybe Mike had some shit going on that he couldn’t express. I don’t know, but what I do know is that it costs nothing to be a good person, so don’t sink to the level of being a flake just because someone else is.
To end this blog, however, I would like to sign off with a Larry David quote that speaks to this post along with posting a song about the joys of customer service.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgfwKmZc9nE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hX8iQvs2mw
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