Petty Little Thing

Alright, so I'm currently employed as a Customer Service Representative (I'm a cashier, corporate, call it what it is) at X retail chain in the state of Georgia in the United States. This is relevant to the story only because the law was brought up at multiple points, and the United States does not have a single overarching, or federal, set of laws/regulations regarding pricing. We do have a government agency known as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) which broadly covers a lot of consumer protection regulations, but there are a lot of things that are determined by state governments and not all states have the same regulations in those cases.

Today while I was working, a customer brought two products to me. When I rang up the first one, she told me to wait and that the price was wrong. She went back to the aisle she got it from, then came back again and said nevermind, it rang up correctly, but since it was higher than she thought she didn't want it. Alright, that's fine. I removed the item from the ticket and scanned the other one.

This item she also said rang up incorrectly. She went down the aisle again, then told me that it was supposed to be ringing up for $3, but the register says $5.

Here's the issue: Previously, our store had a policy of honoring the shelf price. This policy, in the state of Georgia, is voluntary - we are not legally required to do this (I have been digging for clear information on this but the law simply does not exist here), and according to my research a pricing discrepancy between the shelf and the register does not count - at the federal level - as false advertising or "bait and switch" tactics, which many people have tried to tell me it is. Unfortunately, that's not the case, and if it was my life would be so much easier. Why?

Because a few months ago, two of our Assistant Managers were fired. While there were several reasons for this, a major reason (and one that resulted in our store policy being changed) is that customers would frequently claim that the register price did not match the shelf price, and rather than follow policy (check the shelf, confirm the items matched, adjust the price for that customer and immediately update the shelf price) these managers would just override the price and mark it way, way down.

They did this so often that by the time they were fired, I overheard a corporate manager talking about how those two assistant managers owed the store over $1000, because this was essentially theft.

After these two managers were fired, corporate came down and said "alright, here's a brand new store manager, he's going to get all of the shelf prices updated, and pricing overrides at the register are no longer permitted." Period. Full stop. Our store manager and assistant managers are no longer allowed to adjust prices at the register under any circumstances.

To make this situation even worse, in the last few months we have had several price changes throughout the store, and while we are doing much better about keeping them updated, sometimes even we are blindsided by the changes, and we are extremely short staffed and it's hard to keep up.

All of this has racked up to mean that, unfortunately, our customers are feeling the results of this situation in a very bad way. Is it fair that all of our customers run the risk of having a product ring up incorrectly? No, of course it's not. A few bad actors - both the customers that originally lied about pricing discrepencies and the managers who failed to correctly follow policy - shouldn't make all the rest of our associates and customers suffer.

But I am just a cashier, and I cannot change the prices. The current Assistant Managers are not allowed to change the prices. All we can/are allowed to do is offer to remove the item, and make note of the discrepancy so that our store manager can try to find/order the correct labels.

So, we return to today's customer. She is livid when I explain to her that I'm not able to adjust the price. She puts her hands on my counter and leans in as far as she can, and she informs me that that is against the law (see above) and that the corporate managers that passed the new policy down are wrong for doing so. I tell her that I don't know anything about that (at the time I didn't) but that she is welcome to contact corporate herself and report them.

She tells me that she's not reporting anybody - at this point it's a miracle she heard me because she keeps interrupting and talking over me. And that I need to shut my mouth and not talk on things that I don't understand (I am literally just doing what I've been told to do in this situation).

She proceeds to tell me that she worked at TJ Maxx for 20 years (this is not a TJ Maxx. This is X retail chain, which is NOT TJ MAXX) and that while she was working there, if an item was on the wrong shelf they had to honor the price (this seems particularly stupid to me because, in that case, could a customer not CLAIM they found an item in the bargain bin or wtf-ever even if they did not?). She tells me that they once had $90 purses that were mistakenly marked as $20, and her eyes get big and wide and frankly a little bit wild (I have video footage of this and I looked back on it to make sure that I'm not exaggerating) as she gestures at me very aggressively, "A lady brough a whole cart of those bags to the register and do you know what we had to do? We had to mark down each and every one to $20!"

Somewhere around this part I have completely checked out. It's very clear to me that this woman is Going Through Something, and that she just wants to be big and mad and aggressive with someone who cannot fight back, and she's chosen me as her target.

After several minutes of berating me, she turns to the customers behind her in line and throws out her arms in a big "tada" gesture and says "Am I right or not?"

The man behind her just shakes his head and backs up. The woman behind him says "Lady, she's just the cashier, I don't know what you want her to do."

Now she hasn't gotten what she wants from any of us. I haven't adjusted the prices or, I suppose, reacted "correctly" to her big angry speech. The customers behind her aren't on her side. So she starts getting aggressive with the woman.

It's at this point that I notice the Manager on Duty has arrived, and let me tell you something. While I was playing this back on the cameras, double checking everything to make sure that when this lady calls corporate on me that I did everything right, the thing that stuck out the most to me was this:

A customer went to get my manager. (Later, he told me that a customer came to him and said "there's gonna be a fight at the register".) A customer went to get him, told him, essentially, that I needed help, and I watched on the camera playback as this man stood there in line for several minutes, then walked around behind the counter and stood there for several more, before finally coming over as this woman was losing steam to say "It's the store manager's policy, there's nothing we can do."

My manager on duty did not have my back. After this was over, he did not ask if I was okay. He just walked away and went back to whatever he was doing. Halfway through this woman's tirade about TJ Maxx, I was visibly checked out.

Do you know who did check on me?

The customers.

The woman in line who said "She's just the cashier", when the woman turned on her, said "Belittling her isn't going to fix the problem for you. She just works here, she's just doing her job. You can't treat people this way." And the woman who was angry at life told her to mind her own business and started berating her instead. As more people got in line, more people were vocally expressing disapproval, until eventually she gave me the hundred dollar bill that she had been angrily brandishing at me (over a $5 item).

I so very, very, very desperately wanted to tell her, after I ran that bill through our machine, that I couldn't accept it because the machine was rejecting it. But unfortunately the machine accepted it, and I could have lied, but I didn't want to deal with that.

I gave her her change and she finally snatched up her bags and left.

The man behind her checked out without a word, and then the woman who had stood up for me said "You handled that really well".

And I laughed, and I know that laugh sounded dead because I was trying so, so hard not to cry. I rang her up, and she told me that it wasn't my fault. And then the woman behind her jumped in, and she said that she was impressed, because most people she knew would have hit that woman.

And then I rang up several more people before my manager came over and said I could take my break, and I went outside for air, sat on the ground, and cried for several minutes.

Later, when I was tidying up the store, I went to put away the item that she claimed was mispriced.

It wasn't.

The whole situation is fucked up. I should be able to adjust the price when our shelves are wrong. I should be able to go immediately correct the prices - we are supposed to have a label printer for that exact purpose.

But the worst part is that even if we went through and tried to correct all the shelf prices, we would never be able to keep up. The economy as it is prevents us from keeping up.

I've been tracking it. Since I started in April (six months ago almost exactly) several products that I sell regularly have changed prices multiple times.

Behind the register we keep certain body washes and soaps. One of these soaps is my main "price change check" product. It has been changing price (steadily rising) every. couple. of. weeks.

When I started, that soap was $4 and some change. It is now almost $10, after multiple small increases.

How are we supposed to keep up with changes that are that frequent? We fucking can't.

There are days when I just want to go through the store and rip all the price signage off the shelves. When I want to tell customers "It's pricing roulette today. Fucking guess."

Kio Potter - 2/10 Starting super strong here, the very earliest OC I can ever remember was Kio Potter. She was Harry Potter's elder sister that the Dursleys also took in, which of course means she got her Hogwarts letter first. There was a whole thing with her being extra protective of Harry, but I honestly can't remember most of it. She was mainly created as a counterpoint to my childhood best friend's OC, Flame Granger, who was supposed to be Hermione's older sister. The really crazy thing here is that both my friend and I were younger than the Golden Trio so I don't even know where we got this older sibling idea.

Akari - 5/10 I can't fully remember all the details about Akari, but she was my Kingdom Hearts OC and I got a LOT of shit about her name in reviews on FFNet. (Basically I was unoriginal because everyone was making OCs named "Akira" and I was obviously just trying to be special, but I actually picked Akari because it means "light")

Anyway her whole schtick was that she was found one day on the beach on Destiny Island, became friends with everyone there, and when the island was attacked by Heartless she ended up going on her own little adventure separate from Sora's. I can't remember if I had her in love with Riku, or if there was just a weird destiny connection thing going on, but she was supposed to end up saving him at the end of the story so there's that.

The Twilight Dragon Twins - 1/10 The low rating is almost exclusively because I cannot for the life of me remember their names (they were also way OP). The TD twins were my OCs for Xiao"lin Showdown. Separately they were the Dawn Dragon (male) and the Dusk Dragon (female), and the female twin was coaxed away to the heylin side pre-story, so the male twin sought out the xiaolin dragons to try to "set her free". She was actually pretty happy where she was up until a whole dramatic scene with her brother, Chase Young, Omi, and (weirdly) Jack Spicer led her to realize the heylin side wasn't everything she thought it was.

Onyx (and Black Flame & Shadow Dweller) - 10/10 Unironically my absolute favorite of my pre-adulthood OCs. You remember Neopets? Yeah, my username on there was onyx_the_dark_faerie (the account still exists but I can't fucking access it anymore and idek why) and I ended up developing that into a whole character.

Onyx was a Dark Faerie who made a home for herself near-ish Meridell. She had befriended a Xweetok that she called Black Flame and a Kougra she called Shadow Dweller (they didn't have the hearts to tell her those weren't their actual names) and in general she minded her own business as long as other people minded theirs. She ended up getting involved during the whole "Darkest Faerie" plotline because she took great offense to the 'dark faeries are always pure evil' nonsense getting spouted around. If I'd been on the site for it, I like to think she'd have gotten involved in the fall of Faerieland thing too.

Kmart - 8/10 I really liked Kmart actually, but I have some bad memories of ex-friends completely ripping me apart over what a shit character she was, so I ended up abandoning her.

Kmart was my South Park OC. No one knew her real name, everyone just called her Kmart because of her clothes ("Kmart Kid" was a whole thing where I grew up and I distinctly remember it, but I can't find anything about it when I try searching. Essentially "Kmart Kids" where I grew up were kids who wore cheap, usually mismatched/oddly styled clothing). She was written into a lot of my "SP characters as adults" stories as being close with Kenny (both in a friendship way and economical/neighbor way) and working as an exotic dancer.

Circuitbreaker (and Circuit) - 5/10 My Transformers OC! Circuitbreaker (CB) was heavily influenced by the Armada cartoon, since that was the one I grew up with, but I also pulled a lot of her backstory from G1 and the MTMTE comics. Her origin story changed up based on whatever mythos I was using for stories at any given time, but she typically considered Jazz as her "parent" and followed in his footsteps as a saboteur. While she was on a mission one day she found a blue and black cybercat and decided to bring it home, and oh so creatively named it "Circuit".

Chamuel - 5/10 An angel character that I made for Supernatural, back when I was deep in the SPN fandom trenches. I really put a lot of work into my design for her, but the role of her character in my writing made me bump her rating down. Essentially, she serves as my catalyst for a fix-it fic that I was working on. As an archangel, she got tired of all the fighting between her siblings, and where Gabriel went into hiding, she decided to take matters into her own hands and fuck around with time.

Crowley Diavolo - 9/10 I don't even care that he's probably the biggest "Mary Sue" I've ever written, he's my baby and I love him.

Technically not an OC, but also definitely an OC. Basically back when SPN roleplay on Tumblr was super big, there was a trend of making "baby" blogs for the characters - literally people playing as toddler/child versions. It didn't last very long and it wasn't super widespread - eventually I think it got limited to Magic Anons turning characters into babies for x amount of time, but I DID make a baby Crowley blog. Eventually that changed into a teen Crowley, and then he mostly aged "normally" within the confines of storytelling.

My "version" of Crowley started out as just regular SPN Crowley, but then I decided to sprinkle in some details from Good Omens Crowley because they meshed well, and eventually he just evolved into his own unique iteration of the demon.

Katsu - 9/10 Okay, okay, aside from the absolute lack of creativity naming him, I do adore Katsu.

Katsu is a character that I made for a private RP with my late partner. We kept seeing a lot of really cute art of Izuku with two or more Katsukis pining after him (usually multiple AUs) and we thought it would be fun to do a plotline where Izuku grew up with TWO Katsukis. One got to keep his name and OG characterization, while the other was (so creatively) named Katsu and given his own quirk and personality.

Katsu is quietly introverted with a strong sense of right and wrong - to the point that he actually spent more time with Izuku growing up and rejected Katsuki's treatment of him. He loves Izuku, but knows that Katsuki loves him too. He adores his brother and doesn't want to get in between them so he keeps it to himself. I gave him the quirk Smokescreen before Smokescreen was revealed in the manga. I about cried, but did give him a pretty fun quirk evolution that distinguished it from the version stored in OfA.

Khaliyah/K'lia - 10/10 K'lia is my Khajiit Dragonborn. She puts off her responsibilities for as long as she possibly can, preferring to just live her life, but eventually fate catches up to her and she has to face Alduin.