Having worked in retail for five years, I know how stressful dealing with the public can be. Sometimes I’m sure I was perceived as rude when I hadn’t meant to be, or totally clueless when I was asked a question about a product I wasn’t familiar with.
But recently, with the shortage of help in the majority of stores and restaurants, and customers complaining about poor service or having to wait in long lines, more than once I’ve heard a manager say, “We’ll hire anybody who walks in here, we’re so desperate for help right now.”
It made me think back to some of the less-than-stellar employees I’ve witnessed or dealt with over the years and how they rated their own special paragraphs in my daily journals.
Several of the employees at Walmart have made particularly great fodder for my journal entries.
For example, back when the store had an aquarium section and sold live fish, I remember a little boy and his father asking an employee for two goldfish. The employee, a young male, grabbed a net, dipped it into the aquarium and pulled out two of the fish, both of which had been floating belly-up before he removed them. I thought he was going to toss them out, but instead he put them into a container for the customer.
The father, looking surprised, said, “Um, those two fish are…dead.”
“Oh? Really?” the clerk said, peering down into the container. “I thought they were just sleeping and would be easier to catch.”
Then just a couple weeks ago, a clerk at Walmart made me laugh. I had gone shopping there the day before and when I got home, realized my bag of chicken was missing. I wasn’t about to rush back to the store, mainly because it nearly was dark by then and it was a 30-mile round trip, so I waited until the next day to return.
I went up to the service desk and asked the clerk if anyone had returned the chicken I’d left there the day before.
She rolled her eyes and said, “God, I hope not!”
I burst out laughing. I guess having chicken sitting out back in the lost-and-found area all night wouldn’t have been too great – and I definitely wouldn’t have wanted it back. Anyway, she told me to just go get some fresh chicken to replace it.
And I remember a Walmart employee last year who definitely was fed up with the pandemic rules.
There was a woman loading her cart with rolls of toilet paper, even though the sign clearly said to limit one per customer. An employee suddenly swooped in, seemingly out of nowhere, grabbed up all but one roll of toilet paper from the woman’s cart, and then shouted at her, “Can’t you read? It says only one per customer! I am SO sick of this shit!”
I suppose using the word “shit” was appropriate when referring to toilet paper, but I later saw that same employee do and say a similar thing to a woman who was trying to buy more than one gallon of bottled water.
On the plus side, you can bet I wasn’t about to attempt to take more than one of anything, not as long as that employee was still lurking about. So I guess her tactics worked.
And then there are Walmart’s greeters. One elderly greeter was very gung-ho about stopping customers as they were leaving the store and making them show their receipts for items that weren’t bagged. Armed with her hand-held scanner, she stopped me and said, “Whoa! Let’s see your receipt for that six-pack of paper towels that’s not bagged.”
While I was digging into my purse, where I’d just shoved the receipt so I wouldn’t lose it, I noticed a guy pushing a cart with a flat-screen TV in it walk right past us and out the door!
The current greeter at Walmart, however, makes everyone laugh by saying, “Thank you for that nice smile!” primarily to people who are wearing masks.
I remember being at the checkout counter in another store years ago and this young employee with “trainee” on his name badge picked up the store's red plastic divider that was separating my items from the customer's the customers’ behind me and tried to scan it. Amused, I watched him and wondered what the heck he thought it was…a “go fetch” stick for my dog? Finally, he held it up and asked me if I knew how much it was. I thought he had to be joking, and I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. But the poor kid was serious. To this day, I still wonder if he’d ever even been in a store before he was hired, or if he might have just been beamed down from another planet
But, and I hate to say this, some of my worst employee experiences have involved food servers.
I’ll never forget when my friends treated me to dinner at a popular restaurant one afternoon and there were only about four other patrons in the place. Still, we had to wait for what seemed like hours for our food. When it finally was served, my steak tasted like old grease and my baked potato was completely raw, as if it had been taken straight out of the potato sack and slapped onto my plate. The server never came back to ask how our food was, and there were no other employees anywhere to be seen.
When she finally did return, to ask if we wanted dessert, I explained to her that my meal wasn’t even edible. She shrugged and said, “Don’t blame me – I didn’t cook it!”
She made no offer to remove it from our bill or to get us something else, so we asked to speak with a manager. She said the manager hadn’t come in that day.
That explained a lot.
I still cringe whenever I recall how my friends paid the full bill and even left her a tip! Had I been paying, I think I would have camped out there until the manager finally did show up.
Another time, my mother and I ordered fried haddock at a restaurant in Manchester. When it was served, we could smell a strong ammonia-like odor coming from it. My dad, an avid deep-sea fisherman, always told us that whenever a fish smelled like ammonia, it meant it wasn’t fresh. So my mom and I notified the server.
She, looking extremely irritated, used her bare hand to pick up my mom’s piece of fish. She then took a big bite out of it, tossed it back onto my mom’s plate, and snapped, “Tastes just fine to me!” and walked off.
But the server I’ll never forget is the one we had at Lamey’s Tavern in Hampton many years ago. My parents, my husband and I had decided we’d go there for Thanksgiving dinner so we could just relax and eat without any cooking or cleaning to do.
The server, a middle-aged woman, greeted us with an angry rant about how she hadn’t been scheduled to work on the holiday and how upset she was about not being able to spend the day with her family, and how she wanted to strangle the employee who’d called in sick at the last minute. She then asked what we’d like to order.
My husband, a man who never would eat any vegetable created (other than mashed potatoes or fries) even if he were on the verge of starving to death, and who also ate only the breast portion of poultry, explained to her that he’d like the turkey dinner, but with all white meat and a double serving of mashed potatoes because he didn’t want any squash or green beans. He then added, “Oh, and no dressing. I don’t like the strong seasoning smell of it – it ruins the whole meal.”
The server narrowed her eyes at him, put both hands on the table and leaned forward, close to his face, then said through gritted teeth, “You WILL take the standard turkey dinner and you WILL eat all of your vegetables! WON'T you?”
My husband, his eyes growing wide, leaned back away from her and squeaked, “Yes, ma’am.”
To this day, I’m still sorry I didn’t hire her to come home with us. Cooking for my husband sure would have been a whole lot easier with her around.
When I consider the fact that the above-mentioned employees were hired during a time when no one was desperate for workers, I can’t help but wonder what the holiday help in stores will be like this season.
I
think my journal is going to get full very quickly.
# # #
Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net
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