The customer is always right.
Never has a more untrue statement been uttered. As of last week, my year-and-a-half stint in retail is finished. I worked as a cashier and camera sales associate at Best Buy since June 2010.
Overall, it was an enjoyable experience, but only because of the great people I worked with.
Everything else about the job? Terrible.
I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but people can really suck.
Let me explain. My very first day of work, a woman yelled at me for informing her she could just swipe her card on the machine right in front of her.
“How impersonal,” she exclaimed. “I might as well be talking to a machine.”
I don’t know what hell hole this woman crawled out of, but she needed a big glass of calm-the-hell-down that morning.
Unfortunately, that was only the beginning.
The sad thing is, 90 percent of the customers employees deal with in a retail environment are likable. They’re polite, they’re knowledgeable and they want your help.
But the remaining 10 percent is all kinds of awful. Rude, inconsiderate, mean and generally unlikable people love to congregate in stores to make everyone around them miserable.
Having a good day? Don’t worry, it’ll be ruined by the end of a shift.
Maybe it’s because my generation does research online before shopping, but it seemed like everyone older than 35 became an idiot when they stepped into the store. I once had a 15-minute conversation with a customer about whether or not a pair of headphones would fit her iPhone.
No, every phone uses a different sized jack. Just to piss you off.
Or the one guy who came in looking for a camera and wanted “the best one for the money.” I politely pointed him towards the Canon 5D Mark II, a $2,400 professional DSLR.
He didn’t think it was as funny as I did.
Customers also like to think they’re funny, which just isn’t true.
I get it. You probably don’t understand why we have to check for the watermark on $100 bills. It’s so the store doesn’t lose money on fake bills.
It’s apparently not as obvious as I thought. And I see the allure: While I’m holding the bill up to the light, you’ll just casually mention it was printed only this morning.
Then you’ll laugh harder than necessary, desperately trying to get some kind of reaction out of me, and I’ll chuckle and say you did a good job.
This is a lie. You didn’t do a good job and your joke wasn’t funny. That was a pity chuckle.
Do you really think you’re the first person to tell that joke? The color of the sky isn’t as obvious as that pitiful excuse at humor. Don’t flatter yourself, you’re not that original.
But the mountain of misery hits its peak during the holidays. To those that get their holiday shopping done early, thank you. Congratulations on being a reasonable and responsible human being.
To everyone who waits until the week before to shop, you deserve the disappointed looks you’ll get when you go home empty-handed.
One woman accused me of ruining her Christmas because we were out of iPod Touches on Christmas Eve.
Sorry, but the rest of Baton Rouge wasn’t idiots. They bought their gifts two weeks ago when we had some.
Will I miss retail? Nope. Not even a little bit. I’ll certainly miss the fantastic people I worked with, but the amount of crap I put up with didn’t come close to justifying my pay.
I served my time. I’m a better person because of my experience. But if I hear another damn $100 bill joke, I’m shoving it down someone’s throat.
Taylor Balkom is a 19-year-old mass communication sophomore from Baton Rouge.
____ Contact Taylor Balkom at [email protected]