Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Clorox on the counter

Sunday was slammin. In the early afternoon, this woman comes up with some of those Swiffer Clorox pads, the kind that go over the little Swiffer brooms. Obviously she's dropped the package because the plastic is leaking.

She sets it on the counter and goes "This is leaking." Well, DUH!. I take the receipt, and then she starts taking the thing out of the package, as if to illustrate the fact that it is leaking.

I DON'T NEED YOU TO DO THAT. I CAN SEE IT AND I CAN SMELL IT. I ask her "Please don't do that ma'am." SHE CONTINUES TO DO TRY AND TAKE IT OUT OF THE BAG.

I go again, "Ma'am, please don't take it out of the bag. You're going to get the Clorox all over the counter." And then the witch give me the dirtiest look, like I said something ugly to her when she was 'only trying to help.' I've asked you TWICE, politely and clearly not to do it. YOU are the stupid one, not me!

And then she starts wiping her hands, slinging drops of Clorox all over me, the counter, the register and everywhere. "Let me get you a paper towel, ma'am." I get her some paper towels and hand them to her. AND SHE GIVES ME ANOTHER NASTY LOOK, like I handed her a dirty dishrag or something. And her husband goes - "You do need a towel, honey." And she gives him a dirty look!"

So I did her refund and gave her the money. As she walked off, the girl next to me asked "What was her problem? I heard you ask her twice not to open it up, and then offer her paper towels. She didn't have to act so rude."

She was white, upper-middle class Caucasian and spoke flawless English. She was also one of the most horrible people I've ever run across.

The people that are horrible because the want something and you can't help them, at least I understand their frustration. The ones that you JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND ...

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

You know, I might sound a bit paranoid, but I often wonder if one or more of WalMart's competitors sends these people to do these things to drive the associates crazy and make them quit working there.

Larry Kollar said...

Anon, I think it's more likely that evil corporations attract evil customers. ;-)

Anonymous said...

farfetched, Maybe so. Why take it out on the clerk? They just work there. Most have nothing to do with the corporation politics. They're just there to do a job to pay their bills. I still think that there is something underhanded going on with some of these customers that behave so badly. The BS our blogger has described goes on time and again in Walmart stores across the country. I should know I'm a clerk in a Walmart thousands of miles away from the one in this blog. I also have personal friends who work in various Walmarts across my state and another in another state. I wish their was some way of looking into this sort of thing.

Anonymous said...

Evil corporations attract evil customers, but always hire intelligent, kind, noble people to work for them? Hmmm.......

Maybe I'll start a blog about Wal-Mart and why I no longer shop there. I could fill it with stories about being overcharged for an item and then, after proving that the posted price was different than what I had been charged, being told by the checkout person that I have to go stand in ANOTHER line to correct a mistake that I hadn't made. I declined and politely asked for the manager to come to the checkout, and when I was repeatedly told by the cashier that she wouldn't do this, I was forced to yell for a manager to come to checkout 3. Said manager arrived and voila! problem taken care of.

And what about the time I discovered, upon returning home with a shop-vac, that I wasn't CHARGED for it after having gone through the checkout? (I do tend to zone out a bit whilst in Wal-Mart because of the noise/chaos, so I just signed the slip and got the hell Out Of There without checking the amount.) When I noticed the error later that evening, I called the store and told the manager that I had been undercharged.

I was trying to be honest. I was more than willing to give the manager my charge card number so she could charge me for the shop vac. But I was told that I would have to return to the store with the shop vac in tow so I could be charged. You see, in Wal-Mart World, it's essential to inconvenience a customer who is trying to be honest by demanding that they make a 100-mile round trip to your store in order to correct their undercharge.

Instead, I sighed and asked the manager if I had bothered to mention Who I Was. She replied "no".

So I hung up.

The shop vac broke a month later.

I brought a new one somewhere else.

Larry Kollar said...

Anon#2, you might have something there. I know that Arby's has "secret shoppers" who pose as regular customers and pretty much audit the whole "experience." It's possible that Wal-Mart itself is doing something along those lines, sending in obnoxious people to see how well corporate policy is being followed at various stores.