Retail Rant

Retail Rant coming.

Fasten your seat belts kiddies cos we’re in a bumpy ride.

Or maybe I’m just super hyped up on caffeine and built up rage.

So I’ve started to notice something in the past week that has undoubtedly been happening since forever ago but, like I said I’ve just started to notice. Maybe my non-existent patience for people being rude and having zero awareness of other people or just their surroundings in general.

The thing that I’ve noticed is this.

Actually no. I’m not just going to outright tell you. Here’s a scenario;

Me: *filling shelves, content to mind my own business*

Customer: Where’s the salt?

Me: *turning around in confusion as to whether it is in fact I that is being asked a question*

Me: *seeing the customer looking at me expectantly* Aisle 8, right hand side coming from the back, underneath the spices.

Customer: *walks away*

Did you pick up on it? Yes? No? Let’s try another one just for funsies.

Me: *Pulling a full pallet of meat weighing in at roughly a tonne through the store to the meat coolroom*

Customer: *Gets in my way deliberately* Where’s the milk?

Me: *Forced to bring the very heavy pallet to a very sudden stop* *I point to the milk case right behind them because if I open my mouth I will undoubtedly mock their lack of powers of observation*

Customer: *turns around confused before realizing they’re an idiot and leaves*

You know what I’m kind of having fun with this let’s do another one.

Me: *In the middle of doing literally anything to do with my job*

Customer: Where’s the eggs?

Me: *wondering how they don’t see them, points to the right* Literally right here.

Did you catch it?

Alright, the answer is, none of these customers actually said any of the following; hi, hello, excuse me.

Like, I’m not expecting them to ask how my day is or to hear my life story. If they did that’d be really weird. What I do expect however is just the bottom tier of general politeness. They don’t even have to smile. Honestly, I kind of prefer if they don’t smile because it means that I don’t have to fake one and we can all get on with our day that much sooner.

I don’t know how I haven’t noticed it before. Maybe I was more focused on being annoyed that I spend roughly an hour to an hour and a half of a shift (that’s anywhere between the hours of 9am to 8pm) waiting for people to move out of the goddamn way.

Now here’s where the lack of awareness for surroundings comes in. The amount of times that I have had to stop a fully loaded cage from hitting someone who has a) stopped suddenly in front of me, b) come out of the aisle not paying attention to the flow of traffic or c)…you know what I think a and b are enough and they happen the most frequently.

Now moving targets are one thing, but when they’re standing completely still in the middle of the aisle and not moving that’s when my patience disappears. Most customers realise that they’ve put themselves in the way and move to one side or the other with an apology but when I have to excuse myself multiple times just for them to remain oblivious…I get a little testy.

Okay I get a lot testy but due to the fact that I can’t actually stab people just for being in the way I have to tone it back a little bit.

Now this was going to be the end of my rant but I’ve also just remembered something that happened at work Monday night, this is going to continue.

So I am once again minding my own damn business running a cage and filling the rework when one of my regulars walks by. Now I don’t notice her at first because I’m not actively paying attention to who the people around me are, I just know that they’re there and that I want them to leave.

Now this is how she greets me; “Hello…what’s wrong with your face?”

At least she said “hello”, right?

Now just for the record, there was nothing wrong with my face, as a matter of fact I think I was having a particularly good skin day and the slight shadowing under my eyes from lack of sleep was well hidden under the concealer I remembered to put on…unlike today.

I’ll just write out the conversation for you shall I?

Her: What’s wrong with your face?

Me: Um…nothing…this is just my face.

Her: No it’s not. You normally have a much better face.

Me: Yeah, nope, still just my face…my normal filling face that I have when I’m filling stuff.

Her: You’re normally smiling. You look sad.

Me: Nope, not sad. Just…not really thinking about anything.

Her: Okay well you feel better dear.

Me: Yep, you have a good night.

And I left that aisle as quickly as I could and avoided her for the rest of her time in the shop, which wasn’t easy because the rest of the stock on my cage just so happened to be in the aisle that she went to next.

So just to clarify; there was nothing wrong with my face. I have resting bitch face which turns into my patented “who me?” look when someone abruptly asks me question or just speaks to me in general (as the assistant store manager has discovered).

Now I don’t know about any of you but I personally don’t find myself just smiling at nothing. Sure there’s been plenty of times that I’ve been in a really good mood and maybe when I start talking to people I don’t hate then I will smile at them when I talk, but I don’t think I’ve ever just been filling the cat food and been smiling for no reason. Like…what?

I’ve smiled at texts or if I’m listening to something through my earbuds and it’s a comedy show or something then yeah, sure, 100% I will smile. Sometimes I’ve even laughed to myself. No doubt there have been times when I’ve been working nightfill and the person in the next aisle has wondered what drugs I’m on because I’m just chuckling to myself at 2 in the morning.

They might also be wondering why I’m not sharing but that’s their issue not mine.

My point here is this. Why is it that this lady felt entitled to point out the apparent problem with my face? Now as I might have mentioned before, I used to work in the customer service department. I was actually the Second-in-charge for a period of time that will only be referred to as almost a year of pure hell. When you’re working on the registers you’re kind of expected to be nice and smiley to the customers. All. The. Time.

It hurts.

Christmas time, my face actually hurt from smiling all damn day. I was the Christmas elf. I was a good Christmas elf. Full costume and makeup and I smelled good. It’s not that weird. Just this sugared cranberry moisturizer with glitter in it from The Body Shop that made me sparkly AF. I had a look and I worked it.

Now I no longer work in customer service for a number of reasons. There are too many for me list right now but one of the biggies is this. I hate people. You know this. You’ve read it before. I have not made it a secret I’m sure. I work in the department where I can actually run away from people when they start to annoy me under the guise of “checking for something out the back”.

The way that our stock room work now is that whatever stock is out the back the shelf is already full/has stock. Very rarely will we have stock out the back and an empty shelf. So if I say to someone that I’ll go check out the back there is a 95% chance that I’m just going to get a minute of peace and quiet. There is a 5% chance that there is actually stock out the back because the load has come early and I know that so I’m going to find it because I like you. HOWEVER. There is a 100% that if you’re a dick to me, I will tell you that we’re out of stock regardless.

Something I’ve learnt over the years. The only real requirement is that I don’t kill any customers on the premises. And I feel like even then, if I made it look like it was the customer’s fault I’d get away with it even though everyone would know that there’s a good chance I did it.

We don’t actually HAVE to be nice to people. It is not a requirement to keep our job. How do I know this? Because I have witnessed countless colleagues be outright assholes to everyone (including other team members) and still keep their job. Being nice to people is not a job requirement. It’s preferred. But not actually a requirement as I have come to discover.

On that note. I will continue to be somewhat pleasant to customers in general because either I’m good at my job or maybe it’s just a character flaw. Who knows at this point? However! If you are a dick to me or any of my team members or even other customers who haven’t actually done anything wrong, I will call you out on your bullshit and due to new rules brought about by the SDA, I can refuse you service.

Literally a thing when COVID started, we could refuse service to anyone who was in any way rude or abusive towards team members. 

As for the people who just come up and get weirdly close to me when they ask a question with no preface, I may just start to ignore them until they actually do things the polite way. Negative reinforcement and all that. Withhold the location of the groceries they seek until they give me the password.

Either that or I could just…send them in the wrong direction…

Oh my GOD! Why have I not done this before…

Literally why? It’s so easy for me to do as well. Considering the accuracy with which I direct people normally I can very well send them in the complete opposite and then…go on break…by the time I come back they’ll be gone and I’ll have…probably annoyed someone who was rude.

But I also have a really good track record of sending people to exactly the right place….

Ugh.

You know what…I’ll decide what to do in the moment. Depends how much of an asshole they are.

Circling back really quickly before I wrap this up. For anyone who knows me, like actually knows me…they know that I’m not really a “smiley person”. If I’m smiling too much it’s probably because I’ve thought of something evil to torment Matt with. So if a customer thinks of me and believes me to just be a nice, smiley person. They have been customer serviced. If a customer thinks of me and believes me to be a soulless demon who occasionally smiles when something funny is said or because I am genuinely pleased by their presence…then good. Because that’s work me.

Home me or not at work me says LOL out loud instead of actually laughing. (I started doing it ironically in early high school and now it’s ten years later and I can’t stop).

Okay one last thing and then I promise I’m done. This family came in last night and one of the kids had a velociraptor mask on and it made noises when he opened his mouth!!! I’m not even kidding it was so amazing. You know that video with the mum in the car in the carpark who just bought a wookie mask for her son and then discovered how amazing it was when she put it on? It was that kind of mask. It was so freaking cool and I’m pretty sure I scared this kid because I walked past him and his dad in the aisle and I turned to the kid and was like, “I’m sorry but I have to tell you that your mask is amazing and it is actually the best thing I’ve seen all day and please put it back on because it’s awesome.”

Meanwhile this poor kid is staring up at the crazy lady who needs to get a life but the dad is also in the same boat as I am. He totally agrees with me about how awesome this mask is. He ten out of ten tried the mask on himself and only gave it back because his wife told him to.

So there we have it.

Matt and I need to hurry up and have kids so I can justify buying all this cool stuff that kids have nowadays.

Like what did we have? Secret password journals? Light up sneakers? Pffft. Give me a screeching velociraptor mask any day.

P.S. If writing my next book was as easy as writing these blog posts I’d be halfway done by now.