I honestly do wonder where the average person thinks the customer service workers have some kind of stake in the company or something. Getting fired from a job like that is only a minor inconvenience, and the odds of their complaint being anywhere near a firable offense is usually laughable (and half the time the opposite as usually it’s wanting the employee to break store policy).
I can tell you what it was for my mother. To her it was a “cheat code” to talk to a manager and get free shit or a discount.
Which is actually valid, pushing up the chain can get you stuff. So many people just hang on to the minimum wage grunt and expect that to accomplish anything besides making both their days worse.
Thing is, if you have a valid problem, you can do that politely, not even waste any time with the peon, just say, “Hi, I have a problem that’s going to require a manager, will you please call them for me?”
If you’re just bitching in search of freebies, you should just not.
Yeah. And not only does the person behind the register not give a shit about losing your patronage, if you come out of the gate acting like an asshole, many of them will 100% make your life more difficult just to fuck with you because they’re bored.
It’s amazing how far common courtesy can go in situations like this.
I feel like everyone should be required to work like a year in retail or something, so they know how to behave
It might be valid, but not very moral.
I mean it’s by design. Megacorporations put retail workers and customer service on the front lines to bear the brunt of the anger at their shitty policies. People who have no power to change anything.
The customer service rep is the face of the company, customers are SUPPOSED to complain to them since thats their job.
Kinda. There’s usually a complaint department.
But bitching / threatening the worker - who is ringing up your purchase - about something that they specifically cannot control, and making their day worse? That’s an asshole problem that needs plugging.
Looks like we have one of the shoppers from the comic in our midst.
Uhhhh how 'bout no.
I used to deliver pizza, occasionally someone would open their door and start complaining to me about our (pretty damn low, actually) prices. Like I fucking set them. Like I’m going to say “yes $15 is a lot for a 16in two topping, here, take it for free, I’ll pay for it out of my own pocket.” Nah. You saw the price on the menu, we repeated your total before we even stretched your dough, now you wanna complain to the driver when I show up? You can go fuck yourself, call little goddamn ceasers.
Best part is, our owner’s wife was the manager and ran phones, and you want to complain to the driver? It’s because you know this complaint is bullshit, isn’t it?
I had a stake in the company because my parents owned the shop I worked in. But I still didn’t care when some dickhead threatened me with a “you just lost a cistomer.” My dad told me not to take shit from asshole customers if I knew for sure I was not in the wrong. They usually came crawling back a week after pretending nothing ever happened.
Oh and he also told me to provide the best service we could to the normal customers so that they become our favourite customers.
See, what you gotta do is threaten them with absurdity.
Don’t say “I’m never coming back”. Instead, walk across the street to the bus stop. Wait for them to come out to their car. Memorize it.
Now come back to the parking lot every day for a week. Wait for them to leave their car, and go inside. Once they’re inside, you walk over to their car, and write down their liscense plate number.
Now go home, and use public records to do a search to find their name and address.
Now go back to the store, and take a picture of them with your cell phone.
Now, sit across the street from a police department, and watch for a cop arriving to work. Take note of his liscense plate, and search his name/address.
Now write a letter to the clerk, threatening to wait outside his work with a giraffe. Tell him “Giraffes have 15 inch tongues, thick as a beer can. I’ve trained this one to stick their tongues into your butthole, and grab your waist with their teeth. You’ll be 19 feet in the air, getting tongue fucked by a giraffe. If you try to escape, you fall. See ya at Costco, Gary!”
And you use the cops name/address as the return address. Now if he tries to go to the cops, they’ll protect their own, and find something to arrest him with.
Checkmate, Gary!
Username checks out, I guess?
New kink unlocked
I know, right? A 15 inch beer can!? Don’t tell the boys, or they’ll start trading out the forties for the… I don’t know how tall a typical beer can is, but let’s just say fifty-fives.
I don’t understand. Why doesn’t the Giraffe, the larger of the mammals, merely out-think the other ones?
Giraffes have 15 inch tongues, thick as a beer can
LOL
Holy shit I love this
best comment in the thread
Fuck yes!
Companies I boycott:
Bank of America
5/3 Bank
Wells Fargo
McDonald’s
Walmart
That corner gas station that never paid their invoice Planet Fitness
John Deere
Verizon
AT&TNumber of store employees I’ve told that I’m never coming back:
0
Trader Joe’s for being fascist union busters. Amazon for being fascist union busters. Target for being fascist hypocrites. Chick-fil-A for being homophobic fascists. Google for being fascists. Microsoft for being fascists.
Target was the hardest one for us. Went from spending hundreds per month (they were also our grocery) to zero. Fuck them for dropping DEI and bending the knee.
You and me both. Giving Target the finger a few months ago stung because Amazon and Walmart were already longtime members of the blacklist. Costco is getting my money now. I also didn’t tell anyone except the stupid online form that asked why I was canceling my 20 year Red Card membership.
- Adobe for being greedy fascists.
- Nestle for committing crimes against humanity.
- Starbucks for being union busters.
- Walmart for being union busters and exploiters.
- Coca-Cola for being the biggest plastic polluter in the world.
- SC Johnson for knowingly selling asbestos tainted products to unsuspecting consumers.
- Oatly for suing a small family business that also made oat milk.
- Airbnb for driving the housing crisis that plagues the entire world.
- Chevron for selling oil stolen from Palestinians.
- Meta for being fucking fascists.
- Nike for using sweat shops to make products.
- Uber for exploiting drivers and interfering with public transit development.
- Whole Foods for being union busters, same as their parent company, Amazon.
- Apple for using exploitative labor practices overseas where they escape accountability.
- Wells Fargo for rearranging the order of transactions in order to cause overdraft fees.
I could go on and on…
Huh. I never really thought about what you wrote about airbnb, but it hit me hard now. My partner actually works for an Airbnb and they have an enormous amount of property and apartments in rural areas which could’ve housed families. And to think there are many more of these businesses doing the same thing.
I rarely use airbnbs, I prefer hotels, so I haven’t done a lot of contribution there but still, this has convinced me to never use one. Unless, the stay is in their house, or in a small house in their garden etc, which I actually have been in some years ago.
Tell ya partner to slack and steal as much time as possible from his employer, make careless mistakes, and cost the operation valuable time and money.
That’s how ya fight capitalism: by making it unprofitable.
Worried about getting fired?
The truth is that boomers are dying or retiring, and there’s not enough people out there to do the work.
Hiring and training new people costs a lot of money, and a new hire would want a salary just as high as a current employee, if not higher, due to inflation.
Source: I work in public accounting. The rich do nothing but steal from the working class 24/7.
I am sad to hear that about oatly. Not disagreeing with you, but do you have a link?
Not sure why you got downvoted, this is a space where reasonable questions should be encouraged.
Here ya go, my dude:
HP, Siemens, Intel, SodaStream and everything else on this list for supporting and profiting off the genocide of Palestinians
When everyone around you is a fascist, the real fascist is you.
No doubt there were muppets in Nazi Germany who said the same thing.
“Tell me you don’t know what a fascist is without saying you don’t know what a fascist is” speed run challenge.
“Sir/mam, this is a Walmart. Your loss of business is literally a rounding error in pur profits.”
“…Also all the other local stores were run out of business so there’s no where else to shop.”
“Those side road weeds sure look tasty.”
As someone who worked retail for a long time, I relished these moments… Their righteous indignation would snap me out of my ennui, and I’d love watching their face when I’d respond, “OK, bye”, or give them no reaction whatsoever.
You have to appreciate those moments in retail because the rest of the time is pretty awful.
25 years ago I worked the registers at Target. One day at the back end of a pre-christmas lunchtime rush, this woman snidely remarks that I should be scanning faster. I bluntly told her that if she wasn’t happy she could simply shop elsewhere. Shocked she threatened to complain to my manager, I simply pointed to thr front dedk and said “go ahead”.
I still have my written warning in a box somewhere. Completely worth it lol
How ever would you find another minimum wage job?
And they’ll all be back next week, simply because it’s the most convenient for them to drive to.
This, 100%. Their lack of shame is almost envious to those of us with anxiety. Some anxious people would avoid a place for months after an ok-conversation with an employee, because they overthink the interaction and become convinced that they fucked up royally. Meanwhile, the employee never thought anything was offensive at all, and in fact forgot the entire interaction by the time they rang up the next customer.
Then there’s people like in the OP who throw a dramatic fit about how much they hate a place, sometimes even screaming at managers, then they show up the very next day pretending nothing ever happened. The audacity is mind-blowing.
On the other hand, I did just tell a bunch of local places I will no longer be a customer because they advertise on PublicSquare.
So I guess I’m those people now.
What’s PublicSquare?
A list of MAGA affiliated business. Created by them. Which the businesses sign up to voluntarily.
I see, that makes sense.
Yeah and we should be glad they’re so dumb: It has a nice little “in your area” feature where you can see all the ones who signed up near you(no need to give them location data, you can specify the area and check several to hide your real one).
They of course made it so magas could show support. But in reality it’s literally a perfect way to find local business to boycoytt that you might not otherwise know was supporting evil.
I’m actually amazed. There are way less around me than I thought there would be.
It’s a little different when it’s a local place, because your business might actually matter, and the person working the register might have a personal stake in it.
But when its a chain, LO- fucking L. Good luck getting the cashier that makes minimum wage to give a single shit about your complaint.
True. I actually told the owners - it wasn’t actually a thing that happened at the registers, so maybe I’m less of a those people I suppose.
“I’M NEVER SHOPPING HERE AGAIN”
“Oh thank gods, I thought you’d never take a hint. You are objectively an awful person and no amount of spending on your part was ever going to make dealing with you worthwhile. Yes, PLEASE leave and never show your face here again.”
When I was a teenager in the 90s I worked a local, Chicago-area chain fast food job, as ya do. One customer was mad that his ribs were taking a while so he came up to tell at the cashier. The General Manager was a older Chicagoan with a Mike Ditka mustache, and came out of the office right behind the cashiers and yelled right back, mad that somebody was yelling at his employees.
The guy shouted that he’d take his business elsewhere and never come back, at which point the GM pointed at the line that stretched to the door and said something to the effect of “you see all these people? I don’t need your business! Now get out of my store!” It was in the middle of the dinner rush, and it’s still a popular chain.
We all really liked that GM before and especially after that. He was one of those “tough but fair” types, the kind of boss you could respect. Good guy.
The point is that yeah, go ahead and take your business elsewhere Karen. It literally makes no difference and nobody cares.
Also if the difficult customers go and take their business elsewhere that means that mostly nice customers remain, so that’s nice.
Why would i want my dinner ruined by some rude asshole yelling at their staff? I’ll gladly take my business to a place free from dicks.
Even the tiniest semblance of power can go to a person’s head. You had $25 worth of merchandise in your hands, Karen. The store will be okay without you.
An interaction I had when I was in my final days of my fast food “career”:
Karen: “The service here is terrible I’m NEVER eating here again if you don’t fix this RIGHT NOW”
Me (actually said to them): “Oh no, please don’t, the giant multinational corporation with billions in revenue that is [Big burger fast food joint] will notice and cry”
Karen: “I…yea…well!” Storms off
I only did a little fast food, but a lot of retail in my younger years.
People would “threaten” to call corporate over things that were outside of my hourly hands.
Honestly, most of the time, it pissed me off too. Management wouldn’t listen to me though.
So call corporate. Please. We’re store #1234, and the corporate number is 1-800-COMPANY. Shit was fucked…
To put it in perspective, I worked at a store in a state that bordered Mexico. I quit, but still had an active employee discount card and shopped in a smallish town in a state connected to the Canadian border. The employee asked me which store I worked at, as they didn’t recognize me. I told them the store # and who my store manager was.
This person ACROSS the country had heard about how badly our store was run and knew the manager by name because of the shitty working conditions and how many issues we had with customer “service.”
“And I’m not paid enough TO care.”
My absolute favorite response to these types of people is “can I get that in writing?”
For real! The ones that make a big deal and repeat that ‘customer-is-always-right’ bullshit while simultaneously demanding something outside any normal accomodation, those ones always come back.
I’ll admit it; I want to say things like those customers in the comic. Sometimes I do. But I also understand and appreciate that the person I’m talking to both doesn’t care, and can’t do anything about it. So when possible, I try to take some marriage advice I saw somewhere online:
Never say the first thing that comes to mind. Don’t even say the second thing. Say the third thing.
This works really well in emails or online forums, where you can revise many times until you hit send or post.
And for anybody who has read any of my past replies and feel inclined to point out that I still say stupid shit: just know that those stupid shit were the third things that came to mind. 😊
What was the first thing you were going to write here?
Judging by the comic probably one of these:
I’ll be putting my comment elsewhere
I’ll never return to this thread
I’ll leave my comment somewhere else
You just lost a commenter
🤣
You sir/madam have won the Internet for today. Please see management for your prize.
![[ItsMegComics] Those Customers](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/0f7e3f53-8162-4793-a7f5-f4ec2ad41a46.jpeg){kind=link}