Just Retail Problems

At my store, we are all very friendly with each other and treat each other like family. We also have an extremely sassy group of people. So, often we are joking around and saying things like “oh I’m gonna fire you!” or “If I were doing your job, I’d have been done by now!” And nobody is ever offended by it because we are all aware of who we are and we all love each other and plus we don’t even have the ability to fire people so generally our sassy threats are just empty threats anyways. 

Anywho, so one day the line up was extremely long, everyone just showed up at once and overwhelmed the single cashier we had so of course she called for back up. Our other cashier we had was notorious for being slow (she’s been working there for 28 years and she knows who she is so she just goes about her business and we all just let her do whatever she wants) So my supervisor at the time made it up to cash before her and rang a few customers out before the back up cashier even made it to the register. So the supervisor “yelled” over at the cashier and said to hurry up, and that she was really slow. The cashier took it well cause she knew she was joking and also nothing ever phases her so she was smiling and joking around with her customers too. 

Later that day our manager comes over and says she received a phone call about a supervisor mistreating her cashier, and that the cashier was doing a fine job. It’s nice to see a customer sticking up for a cashier but like you don’t know the situation?? And now it’s just made everyone uncomfortable because the manager had to talk to each of them even though she also knows we all joke around and the cashier was so embarrassed because she also took it as a joke and wasn’t hurt by it but now it’s turned in to a whole situation.

So since February I've been having seizures. They've ranged from full on grand mal (whole body convulsions, total lack of consciousness etc) to small 'petit mal' or partial seizures. As I'm still undiagnosed I'm not medicated so these seizures can happen anywhere at any time for no real reason (that we know of yet.) 

Anyhow, I was at work and it was a fairly standard evening. we were about an hour and from closing and I started to feel really strange. I kept feeling detached, couldn't remember simple information and kept getting twitches in my arms. I knew what was coming next and sure enough within 15 minutes had this feeling that I can only explain as feeling really drunk; the store felt like it was spinning. I had a couple seconds to get a colleague (who to his credit realised pretty much immediately that something wasn't right) to take over on the till and stumbled my way off of the shop floor and into the office. 

Here, I had 6 or 7 partial seizures one after the other, then a further two more serious ones. I don't remember much of it except lying on the office floor so that I wouldn't smash my face into the waist hight steel safe, so the next part has been told to me by my colleague because I have no idea what was going on. 

Of course, my manager called an ambulance, and as he was tied up making sure I wasn't going to stop breathing/choke on my own vomit or tongue and generally doing first aid until the paramedics got to me, it left only one person on the shop floor, so he decided to close the store 20 minutes earlier than usual because we can't have only one person running the store for legal reasons. 

Apparently 'someone is having a seizure in here' wasn't a good enough reason for some customers, who proceeded to try to come in through the locked door and argue with my colleague. Once the ambulance came, apparently most people got the message and left, except one woman who continued shouting obscenities through the glass and practically tried to elbow the paramedics out of the way to get in because obviously her need for cigarettes was greater than my need for medical attention. My colleague kicked her out and she's threatened to report us to Head Office for closing early. Which we are allowed to do in exceptional circumstances like a member of staff needing urgent medical attention, for example. 

I just can't believe some people's inability to think about other people and realise that we are human beings too. Makes me so mad! I'm fine now thankfully, just upset the whole thing happened (it was a matter of time though, I'm just lucky I had a good manager and colleague on with me that night who looked after me and knew what to do!) 

Anyways so when I was called over to cosmetics, the cosmetician started to explain the situation to me, as she should. The lady was huffing about it the whole time, saying how she’d already explained all of that and how she just wants a return done. 

Both the cosmetician and I politely explain that I, as the supervisor, has to know all the details which is why she is repeating everything that’s already been said, and that I will get to her as soon as I know what’s going on. Again the lady got mad that we were talking about her situation even though I didn’t know half the story yet. 

I found out that she has no receipt. Ok, I mean we don’t usually accept things without a receipt but we’ve been doing more and more no-receipt returns because hey gotta please the customer right? So alright, I can probably still do the return even though I don’t want to, as long as we can find the transaction online. We search using her rewards card number and low and behold, there it is. It was purchased in November. Ok, again the return policy is within 30 days... so I really did not want to do it for her but since we were already doing a no-receipt return, it technically doesn’t matter when she bought it (if it has a receipt, the machine will automatically void the entire thing if it’s past 30 days) so I was waiting to see the reaction from the customer to test whether or not I should do this return.

Then, I find out that this product was part of a gift set! It came in a set of 3 for $100 and this particular product sells for around $45 on its own. Again, if I had the receipt, I would have known for sure I couldn’t do the return because the computer would tell me that the single product was not part of the transaction, but instead it was the whole gift set.

This women then goes on to say that she’d called the company about the product (she’s returning it because she had a reaction to it apparently) and the company said we would return it no problem. That is some real bullshit because obviously the company doesn’t know the situation. Under normal circumstances, of course we would do the return. With a receipt. Within 30 days. 

Yeah true. We don’t have much food at our store so I’m not sure with those kind of things but basically if you return anything and it’s not sealed even though you promise you’ve never used it, it will be thrown out. 

Maybe they were talking about products that can’t be re-used? I mean if it’s perfectly good obviously they shouldn’t throw it away but if you open up make up or skin cream or anything of the like but it’s obvious you didn’t use it, we still cannot resell it because it’s no longer sealed and you never know if something’s been tampered with, and no customer is going to want to buy an unsealed product anyways so yeah it does get thrown out. We had a lady return one of those expensive $200 electric toothbrushes because she opened it up but decided it was the wrong size. It wasn’t even fully taken out of its package and the brush heads looked completely fine but we had to throw it away so there is $200 down the drain. 

I am beyond happy with my job right now!

I mean besides the fact that yesterday my main cash and night supervisor called in sick so I worked 13 hours straight and covered for 3 people while also dealing with a theft. My manager thought I had it in control yesterday when really I almost burst in to tears a few times throughout the day.