Customer Service: Rants, Raves, Back Pats, and Appreciation

[Wraith]

Although I am not a citizen of the USA, I live and work in the UK and our culture and attitude towards customer service has long since caught up to that of our stateside cousins. As such, after 15 years in "front-line" retail I have a menagerie of stories about horrible people treating other people horribly in a variety of roles.

My first job, aged 16, was in a small-scale equivalent to Wallmart - we sold everything from food and clothes to furniture and mid-sized electrical items like portable TV's and DVD players.
Memorable story from that job: The guy in his 30's who took a scooter (like a skateboard but with handle-bars - they were huge in the early 2000's) off of display and got it up to full speed on an aisle; had I been 6" to the left when he went by me, he would have definitely bowled me over and possibly broken some of my bones. When I confronted him and told him to stop riding the children's toy around the shop he - in the act of putting it back onto the shelf - told me that he had brought it in with him and to go away. He then followed me down an aisle with a shopping trolley, waited until my back was turned, and deliberately rammed me face-first into the display... because he "didn't see me there".

Eventually I moved to a supermarket, at the time the biggest chain in the country, counting stock and removing perishable goods at the end of the night while studying at university. The biggest task was a process call "Potential Reductions" - every night we'd go around and find all the stock that was going out of date on the next night and take a small amount of money off, just to try and shift it before having to lose money by reducing it to nearly nothing and ultimately throwing it away.
I have lost count of the number of insults, threats, demands, tears and outright lies told to me over the equivalent of about 10 cents. I know that times can be hard, but if you have ever wrestled a loaf of break out of a shop-worker's hands in order to stop two other people from trying to do the same, you should probably re-evaluate your life.
And if you're getting banned from a supermarket on Christmas Eve for elbowing another customer in the head because you were trampling over them in order to get hold of a pack of cheap sausages... God help you.

From there I went to the store's Fishmonger, my first full-time job after graduating. I will never forget the guy who came up to me, pink in the face with anger and demanding both a full refund and to speak to my manager, because the frozen squid that I had sold him the previous week had ice in it.
Not ice in the bag, that I had dropped in to make it weigh more and thus cost more; the frozen squid that he specifically requested be frozen had ice in them which then melted so he had a net-loss in weigh when they were cooked.

I moved away from food after that and got a job as.... Well, it was called "Technical Support", but with the benefit of hindsight we were actually a sales team who were expected to troubleshoot faulty products, and offer user advice and information, without the benefit of being paid commission.
Ye Gods, where do I begin?
The guy who demanded a refund and replacement on a faulty TV, and refused to accept that we weren't going to give him either... Because he had bought the TV from a rival supermarket. Not even that the receipt said "<Rival Company>" on the header, but that the actual brand of the TV was their own, and not sold by any other company on the planet.
Being threatened with physical harm because a warranty had expired, or had never been in place to begin with.
DVDs and set-top boxes hurled across two-dozen feet and into a wall above a colleague's head.
The guy who bought a $40 refurbished laptop, brought it back 11 months later as faulty, and demanded that we either upgrade him to a brand new $500 laptop or give him a full refund for everything he had with him - including for the carry case and mouse which he had bought from ebay, and the replacement laptop casing he had bought and had installed (he wanted us to refund him for that labour cost too, by the way) because the old one was scratched.
When that was refused and told that we would only refund him for the cost of the laptop which he had originally paid to us (a process which took 40 minutes of arguing back and forth) he insisted on being allowed to return the laptop "as it was sold" and gouged at the new case with his keys and a screwdriver, apparently so that we would not be able to take "his" new laptop case and sell it ourselves.
Needless to say, we did not, never had, and never would, sell laptop components - let alone unpackaged, off-brand, used ones - and had never suggested otherwise. He was just that determined to "win" I guess.

....To be honest, I will stop there now for fear of being here all day. I've worked in retail since Tech Support and now work in a Call Centre because it's as far removed from a supermarket as can possibly be, but the tales I could tell of that job could run into the thousands of words....

"The customer is always right". I would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that that statement is the motto for Selfridges Department Store in London, England. It's not law, and it's absolutely not policy of every other store in the world; it's their stupid gimmick that has gotten monstrously over-exposed.