Teenage daughter: Your blunt cake.

And here you can see the moment I silently lost my mind last night. That is a pack of Kraft deluxe American cheese, room temperature, hidden behind some crackers.

Now look y'all, I get it when you got the wrong kind, or your kid grabbed it while you were distracted, or went over budget, whatever, but Y'ALL KNOW DARN TOOTIN WELL THAT DOESN'T GO THERE AND CHEESE NEEDS TO BE KEPT COLD. Most people have had cheese in their fridge at some point. Everyone who has ever been to a grocery store and bought cheese know it was in a cooler when they picked it up and it feels cool to the touch.

And what really gets my goat is that the cheese was literally 10-12 steps to the left. From where this cheese was hidden, if you face the shelf and turn your head to the left, the cheese is right there directly in your line of vision. And, I counted, about 10-12 steps away.

Look I know $5-$6 (plus tax) isn't a ton of money to a huge corporation like Walmart. But you and this cheese aren't the only instance of crap like this happening. It happens every single dang day. We can't sell refrigerated or frozen stuff after it's been left out that long. It's given to claims so they can log the loss and it's tossed. That profit loss gets made up somewhere else eventually. But it's not coming out of the Walton's pockets or the CEO's pocket. It's going to get made up with cutting hours or bonuses or something that only hurts employees like me and my managers.

Y'all that do this are on my last nerve. You're wasting food and being lazy. Knock it the heck off. I get it's embarrassing to tell the cashier you went over budget. But trust me, I wouldn't judge you or want you to feel bad. It's fine, seriously, just give me whatever you're putting back and I'll try to get the cold stuff put up while it's still good. If anyone gives you crap, let a manager know or mention it in the survey on the back of your receipt.

Also, any rumors you hear that Walmart has employees walking around looking for stuff to put back is a lie. We're lucky to get enough people scheduled to do their regular jobs. Even if someone is casually walking by, they probably won't see it if you hide it. We also don't have someone live viewing the cameras all day who will see you do this and go put it back after you walk away.

All of this also applies for people who put stuff they don't want in the candy in the checkout lane or on top of the drink cooler. Knock that off too. You know the cashier will find it eventually so just give it to them. You don't know how irritating it is to run a whole cart full of go-backs just to find something else hidden in the aisle when you bring your empty cart to the front.

I know it's my job to put stuff up and tidy up my lane, but it's not my only duty. And no, you're not getting paid to "work". It's picking up after yourself to be a decent person.

Me as a child: I don't understand how this will be helpful to my life

Real life customers: *Be the way customers are*

So a woman my age, 20-something, comes to my register to pay for their meal ticket. She’s using a credit card but asks if she can leave a cash tip at the table, and I’m like yes! (Because you can) And she’s like cool! and we go about the transaction. She signs and I tell her not to include the tip on that slip, that is her credit card slip and writing that in will charge the tip on the card and she wants to leave it as cash, just ignore it, easy enough, so she does.

Everything’s approved, receipt’s printed and handed over, end of transaction. Except she’s still there???

Where’s the cash? She asks.

What?

The cash for the tip, where is it?

And it takes me a little bit to realize what’s she’s after and I have to break it to her, oh, but we don’t do cash back here...

Because what the hell? How was I supposed to glean cash-tip-at-table? as cashback-to-leave-tip-at-table? That’s a leap my dude. So I tell her we don’t do cashback here so as far as the system knows you only paid the exact amount of your meal, as far as the system knows you’ve left no tip- but (you can leave a tip using your card) you’re already gone. Oh well she’ll figure it out.

She didn’t. And she obviously told her mother they couldn’t leave a tip because she storms over to me demanding to know why I told her they couldn’t leave a tip. I explained best I could what happened and almost ruined it because she angrily asked Well how was she supposed to know?! And i think to myself there’s a sign somewhere on your end of the counter but i replied instinctively with well it’s kinda obvious. To which she gasps an incredulous WHAT? because I did not just seriously say that to her, that’s fucking suicide in the service industry. But she’s actually expecting me to repeat myself because I kinda mumbled, she must’ve misheard me. I could’ve easily said any number of things to placate her but instead repeated exactly what I said like a dumbass. I said it’s kinda obvious. And she’s ready to blow a fuse but I slide a smooth but, perhaps I just think that way since I’ve been working here for so long, you get into that habit of thinking, so I apologize for that. I didn’t mean to cause any confusion. But I did tell her we don’t do cashback.

But only after the transaction was done. She tried to stump me.

Yes ma’am because that’s the only time it came up. She asked from the get go if she could leave a cash tip at the table and I told her you could. She never mentioned anything about cash back, I assumed she already had the cash she wanted to leave on the table, sorry for the confusion.

Like what any normal person would think with that exchange. We’re not a grocery store. What restaurant offers cash back? Yeah we have a gift shop but we’re a restaraunt first and foremost. besides we have to still swipe the card, no chip readers here, and you know this so why would you think we have the capabilities to do cash back? And another thing, how many regular shops offer cash back unless there’s a self checkout? Use some cognitive thinking skills please. Ask direct questions please.

Ugh my daughters only twenty she doesn’t know how this stuff works!, she then realizes both my coworker and I are obviously either younger than her daughter or about the same age so this intimidation by age tactic she had been using with me to make me squirm is not compatible with the ugh-kids-these-days-am-I-right? excuse to excuse her behavior and she knows it, So how can we leave a tip?

You can leave one with your card so long as I can see your reciept for the server number but you’ll have to swipe it again.

This is what I was trying to avoid, I’d rather it’d have been all one transaction now i have to keep track of two reciepts.

You have txt alerts calm tf down

Yes I’m so sorry for the inconvenience ma’am I didn’t mean to make such a fuss.

Well at least this was a learning experience...

And. She. Left.

No managers involved to smooth things over. Still left a decent tip, exactly the normal amount for their meal, they didn’t turn stingy just because something went wrong on our end. And she got a humbling experience. For a brief moment she saw me, a lowly wage slave as a human, with critical thinking skills which proved to her she was in the wrong and she knew it.

Was a scared shitless? Holy shit yes. I was doing my damnedest not to visibly tremble or stutter, she’s exactly my mom’s age; it was like my mom was yelling at me, my legs got the jellies and everything. But I held it together, I got through it and she actually listened to me. Did the daughter get a stern talking to for flubbing it? Probably, good thing I’m behind the register and not on that awkward car ride but I dare think it’s deserved. Maybe not to be yelled at but to tell her I’d she was confused she could’ve just asked? She sorta just walked off on me before we could figure it out together which is not a good thing and she should know it.

It’s like basically the same concept; referring to when a customer tries to explain to an employee how THEY think said employee’s job works, or tries to tell an employee how to work something that the employee obviously works with every single day. Even if the customer means well, the customer-splaining is still done under the assumption that the employee is stupid or otherwise incompetent in their own job, and ranges from annoying to infuriating depending on the situation.

(i.e. every time a customer tries to explain to me how to start a fuckin car, as if I don’t work with cars every day, and as if I don’t HAVE one, and drive it every day, to get to the job where I work with cars.)

-Our Vampire Manor room includes an antique piano from which, as I listened carefully, I could hear float a haunting refrain, a startlingly-perfect cover of the true national anthem, Smash Mouth's "All Star".

-A thoroughly inebriated pair of forty-somethings came in the store late at night, announced that they would be playing the next game, and told me in great detail of their sexual plans for the night. As they sat in the lobby, their conversation flowed from excitement for their third date to an emotional analysis of the man's ex-wife and what him still being in love with her entailed to a series of highly upsetting moans as they elected to share one chair for the remainder of the time. Against all odds, they escaped our hardest room. Here, by they, I do in fact mean the poor group of college kids they were joining who learned the true meaning of escape on this night.

-One of the last retales shared told of a man enlisting me in his proposal plans. All went as expected, save on important detail: he took the ring out of her hand immediately and pocketed it without explanation. Panicked at the apparent change of heart, I offered as much help as I could to quicken their escape. As it turned out, the man decided to throw our carefully laid plans out the window, waiting until their time ran out to make his move and use a line about there being no one he would rather be trapped with. This moment could only have been sweeter had I been let in on this change so I would not have offered them so, so much extra time. 

-My eight months at this store have seen a dozen employees come and go in a violent vortex of inexplicable overturn. I know not the cause of this wild whirlwind, but there is one thing I do: I will prevail. 

-Never will I understand the intense desire of the world to pay a great deal of money to be locked away with an endless sea of engineered obstacles between them and freedom. 

-I have received many a job application as a manager now, many featuring questionable quotes such as "I have never had a job, but please" and "I do not know what an escape room is, but I will look it up if hired." Additionally, we receive many requests for positions in specific locations which, sadly, we have been unable to oblige, as these locations do not exist, and we are not a chain.