Brought to you by my discovery that some people think that “the customer is always right” isn’t the slogan of a long-dead department store, but rather it’s an actual call the cops law.
I once had a b2b customer (store owner) tell me that having different pricing for wholesale and retail customers was racist.
I’m pretty sure meant discriminatory but even that doesn’t make much sense.
It absolutely does make sense because it is discriminatory. He’s absolutely correct.
The mistake that you are making, is thinking that all forms of discrimination are bad. They’re not. Most are in fact good. We just don’t tend to call them discrimination.
I don’t think my customers were dumb but I was regularly accused of breaking the law in a previous job. This was back in 09-10, I worked for a mortgage company in the insurance escrow department processing homeowner insurance claims. The way my job worked: If a homeowner has significant property damage (fire, flood, fallen tree) and the home is under a mortgage, the insurance company will make the check payable to the homeowner and the mortgage company. If it has both names it cannot be cashed unless the mortgage company endorses the check. I was the person responsible for determining if we would sign the back of that check so the customer could cash it.
Mortgages have a clause that allows this, because it’s in the best interest of the mortgage company to make sure the property is returned to the way it was before the claim. If the claim was over a certain amount (I think it was $5k) we required a whole process of holding the money in an escrow account and doling it out in increments using property inspections to verify the work was being completed.
It was honestly a whole annoying process to have to go through, especially if you are already dealing with a traumatic situation that requires the claim in the first place. I got yelled at a lot.
Oftentimes it would start with the customer calling in to figure out why the check was made payable to the mortgage company also. The mortgage company I worked for was part of a large bank, so if the homeowner called the 800 number they were often frustrated by the time they finally found their way to me. Then as I explained that they couldn’t just have the money, we needed them to select a licensed contractor and get our approval, then we would provide 1/3, then we would do an inspection at 50% and release the next 1/3, then a final inspection at 100% and release the remainder. I would get yelled at and told it was illegal. But I would just point them to page 18 section 5 of the mortgage. I could access people’s mortgage docs and I was often asked to send the relevant pages.
Eventually people would accept their fate because they had no choice. I tried to be very sympathetic because it did suck for them. And I had customers tell me a lot of sad stories about fires and floods and tornadoes. It was a super interesting job though. I loved looking at the home inspection reports.
Lots of people buy Emotional Support Animal vests online and think that means they can bring them into restaurants. Nope, FDA is very clear about it: trained service animals only. ESAs actually have almost no special privileges over regular pets. Basically the only exceptions they get are against pet policies/fees on leases.
I watched a guy get kicked out of the Costco food court area because he kept saying his dog was an “licensed” ESA. The Costco manager busted out a little card with the relevant federal laws for a service animal and listed all the rules the dog was breaking by lunging at people, not staying under the table, and barking it’s head off at a real service animal that was just sitting calmly under it’s owners table like nothing was going on around it.
Even if your dog is truly a licensed and trained service animal, but you’ve allowed it to continously break all the rules it’s supposed to follow in a private business. They can still kick you out if your dog doesn’t behave like it’s supposed to be behaving. That’s why it’s a big no no to interact with working animals with their vests on and for owners to let their working animals to break the rules repeatedly by misbehaving and never correcting them.
There are, in fact, no products in that empty drawer. I promise I’m not hiding them from you, ma’am.
could you just check the back please?
Sure, I can go play on my phone for 5 minutes while “checking the back”.
Karen look, ‘the back’ only has things we don’t have space for, it isn’t a secret second store we hide stuff from you.
I used to work in CS for a cell phone provider. The most memorable call I had from that experience was a woman who spent over an hour yelling at me because her daughter had ordered a $1200 phone upgrade without permission. She was absolutely sure that it was illegal for us to charge her for that, because her daughter was not authorized to use her card, and because her daughter was under 18.
She didn’t want to return the phone, because she didn’t want her daughter to hate her. She just didn’t want us to charge her for it.
That sounds like an improbable attempt to leverage the notion that minors can’t enter into a legally binding contract into a loophole to get anything for free by simply having your kid order it.
This one simple trick will get you any product for free! Retailers hate it!
Worked in bars as a supervisor for 3 years, almost everytime I decided to cut a patron off (usually for being too drunk, or for being an arsehole) I would be met with “you can’t do that, it’s illegal, you HAVE to serve me”
No, I don’t. Service is at my discretion, and it wouldn often be unethical for me to continue to provide you with more alcohol, endangering yours and others around you further.
At one point I worked for an electronics repair shop fixing mostly phones, laptops, and game consoles. We actually had a great manager and we all just enjoyed fixing things, so we really weren’t out to rip people off like they usually came in thinking. Our store policy was even if we didn’t fix it, we didn’t charge you, and we stood by it.
One day a lady drops off her laptop with a cracked screen. Part of the screen was still working, but the majority was non functional and would surely worsen over time. We diagnose the laptop and give the customer a quote and she agrees to the repair. I let her know that once we start the repair, the previous screen will be destroyed during the removal process since it has no more integrity from being broken, she’s fine with that. We get the part in a few days later and I start the repair. At this point the woman’s husband calls - literally while I have the cracked screen half out of the laptop - and says stop the repair and return it how it was. We were like, we’re happy to give the laptop back, but unfortunately we’ve already started the repair and while removing the old screen it broke more so it would end up being returned in a worse condition.
This fucking guy screamed at me over the phone about how what we were doing was illegal, how we never got proper authorization blah blah. We offered to even do the repair at cost, but no that wasn’t good enough. When the husband and wife finally came into the store to pick up the laptop, he left screeching about how he was going to sue us. Unsurprisingly we never heard from him again.
how we never got proper authorization
Why do I feel like this is a domestic abuse situation. Husband broke her laptop in order to reduce her attempts to communicate with others? She goes to get it repaired, he finds out.
I think it’s the belief that the wife can’t authorise the repair…
My thinking was that there was something in that computer that he was trying to hide.
One thing I learned from working in customer service is the amount of people that have a lawyer on retainer. Better be careful!
We developed a very effective strategy for this at a furniture store I used to work at; the moment the customer makes any suggestion of legal action, all our employees were trained to immediately say “I understand. Have a good day” and end the conversation on the spot. The unhappy customer immediately tries to press the issue, because what they want is for us to magically teleport a couch here from China or whatever, and at that point the employee says “I’m sorry but as you’ve notified us that this issue is now the subject of a pending legal action any further communication will have to go though our legal team.”
Repeating this a couple more times would inevitably lead to the customer admitting that they were bluffing.
I’d hate to work directly with customers, but pulling the rug from under idiots sound really satisfying.
This is my favorite thing to do.
Second lawyer is mentioned, shut down all communication and offer only “Due to your pending litigation, Please direct all correspondence to our lawyers as we are not authorized to discuss legal matters.”
No, I don’t have to accept a digital photo of your license as ID. No, your birth certificate is not proof of identity; it doesn’t have your picture.
But the absolute worst one: Not only is this a beat-up photocopy of a foreign ID card with no photo; it also clearly states that you are 19 and even if I accepted this document as valid identification, which I can’t, I still could not legally serve you alcohol.
During my very brief stint as a security guard at a casino I ran into that last part way more than I ever would have expected. It is astounding how many people do not understand that the laws from their home country do not apply in the country they are visiting.
The foreigner in question almost certainly did not know the age was 21. This happened to me in the US. Sitting with my mum and sister in the hotel bar, having a quiet beer. Then I get asked for my ID and it all gets very confusing. “But I’m 18, what’s the problem?”
Takes the drink away and hands you a gun and car keys.
