Anyone her ever worked in retail? Any horror stories?

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I currently work in a retail clothing store, and like almost any job, it has its pros and cons.

I enjoy when we receive our clothing shipments and put them on the sales floor. It appeals to my desire to organize and put the clothes in their proper place, and also feel the textures of different clothing. And it's a somewhat repetitive task which mentally relaxes me. And sometimes when customers try on clothes and don't want them, I have to organize the clothes on a rack before placing them back on the sales floor. I enjoy this as well, as again, it involves organizing and putting the clothes in their proper place. There's also a few nice people there who I get along with well.

The worst things about it though, are dealing with customers, with the eye contact, screaming kids (overload), having to come up with answers to their questions quickly (which isn't my strong suit), dealing with customers that don't speak English, and having to "sell" the benefits of opening up a store credit card (I haven't been doing great with this lately; I'm not sure if the fact that it's a credit card turns them off, or just my mannerisms when I tell them. I've always thought I came across decently, though). Also dealing with managers that expect you to multitask and have close to perfect job performance, at the same time while contradictingly treating you like you're incapable and beneath them (not just as an employee, but as a person). It gets very overloading at times and sometimes I just want to dash into the restroom, get away from it all and stim like crazy, and I have to hold it in until my scheduled breaks.

I've been working there for over 3 years, and if I had my way, I'd probably get a different job that is more task oriented and less of a people skills job, but at the same time, I have a job that pays the bills, and with the economy being the train wreck that it is, I'd be an idiot to quit this job before having another one lined up. Which probably won't be happening anytime soon with the lack of jobs out there. So I manage as best I can here, day by day.

One summer I worked as a tour guide/art gallery attendant/lunch room attendant/gofur. The man who ran it had it in for me, I swear. I could do no right - "I" let someone in with a video camera that they shouldn't have (the guy whipped out the camera mid tour, it was NOT my job to strip search customers for their cameras, they knew the rules), "I" allowed a small child to run his 99 cent "hotwheels" car over the expensive wood (this guy was going to call the cops on me and have me hauled off for vandalism. Now, I think I would have dared him...the cops would have laughed him out of town, I am sure - how about the kid and its parents? What was mommy doing while jr. was taking a swipe at the walls?), if I brought a tour in "late", I would get a lecture (they should have hired more people, I walked backwards for 20 minutes, got to the end of the tour, and had to run back down the the end of the train to start the next one), and this guy accused me of losing keys - which he had instructed me to give to the caterers in the first place (and of course denied that they hadn't returned the keys, and he believed them over me). He started warming up to me at the end of the summer, suddenly - it seemed that my father, who worked for the highways department, was in charge of some government licenses that he needed to get the new train cars to the site, and this jerk realized a connection between our last names. Certainly I didn't have any pull either way, or I would have told dad to make sure the paper work didn't get approved...

I remember also getting yelled at for assisting my coworker (a male) - our shifts were close together, and he helped me out too. I was accused of inappropriate flirting. The boy wasn't interested in me that way, and we were more brother/sister rather than girlfriend/boyfriend and anyway - we were doing our job, unlike the girl who fancied herself a model who was constantly out having a "cigarette break" and was never chastised for it. Sigh. We were punished - I was put on shift alone in the tearoom, and the boy was put on broom duty.

I was also yelled at for taking too long on a tour with seniors (have you ever led 80-90 year olds over uneven terrain? it goes slow) or going too fast with children (the kids were more interested in trashing the place than the history - the parents didn't think they got a good deal, but I wasn't there to baby sit their accidents). I was yelled at for stopping for a moment to grab a drink of water in between a tour.

Then the customers. The most memorable were the "Great Root Bags". They often frequented restaurants around town - most notably the "A&W" restaurant - and would be served. A day later they would come back and complain bitterly to the manager how they were mistreated, misserved, and that they were given the wrong change - total effect = free lunch on the restaurant, and the waitsperson being chastised. I managed to get them in one day - they were nice as pie, but the next day apparently I hadn't served them fast enough, I was listening to their inane conversations, and a few other crimes against the old biddies.

I also had to contend with a barfer on one of my tours - the kid was car sick, so what do mommy and daddy do? Buy a ticket to tour the train, hand junior a plastic bag, and the kid vomited every once in awhile --- it was all I could do to keep my own lunch down, and the smell was atrocious.

Oddly enough, they called me in the fall to ask me to work a shift. I declined, as I had a physics or calculus exam to study for, and I needed that day of study. They said okay, in a very icy tone, and hung up. So, I guess I should fail a test just to work at a place I couldn't stand in the first place? Not bloody likely.

I work in retail now and have been for about 2 years. I don't particularly like it, but at the same time I don't usually feel out of place there. I'm not good with job interviews so I guess I'm lucky I got this job. I basically just walked in and they hired me because they needed young guys to unload their trucks (I was 19 at the time). The pay is crap and the customers are awful. Almost everyone I work with is nice enough though. Some of the managers can get a little "corporate" at times. But with what I do there, I'm usually working on my own.

The biggest thing I hate about the customers is how they'll think I'm an expert in every department of the store and if I don't give them a quick and correct answer, I'm a dumb ass. The store has like 30 departments and none of them have people specifically assigned to one part. I can tell them exactly where something is located, but when they start asking me questions about how certain things work, I'm not going to always have an answer. I do know a lot about some things, but I'm lost in other areas. Like electronics, I can always easily answer even the most technical question a customer has, but if they ask me about curtains, I don't have a clue and so I am an idiot.

A few... funny stories rather than horror stories. One time an elderly lady told me that the local news station would be paying the store a visit because we didn't the have cranberry sauce that was advertised. There was another time when a lady came up to me with a curtain rod asking me if it would fit on her window. I asked her what the size of the window she was putting it on was and she said "I don't know. Do you think it would fit on my window?". So I just said "yes" and walked away.

I worked at Target for 5 years, fortunately it was in the stockroom, so it wasn't so bad. I think the worst was some pompous older lady getting pissed off and talking down to me because the display blender was still up when we were out of stock, and I wouldn't sell her the display model, even though I explained that we only do that when they're on clearance. Also had some problem with people going on power trips when they got hired into management with their BS (bull s***, not Bachelors of Science) degrees when I transferred to a Target that was a hub for management training. I really didn't like it when one of the momentary HR managers rotating through tried to explain the math behind why I didn't get a raise when minimum wage went up. It may be arrogant of me, but I'm sorry, Engineering degree trumps Communications degree when it comes to understanding math.

However, I have to say there were a lot more entertaining moments than frustrating, especially working in the stockroom. This ranges anywhere from trapping someone in the bathroom when the toilet flooded, to using giant rubber bands to launch carts across the stockroom.

i currently work in the electronics area of target

How do you like working at Target? I work at 0fficeMax. When I hired on I was to work in the Electronics Department. They now want everyone to switch to checking people out at a moment's notice, and then back. I don't know if I could do so, since that would involve a lot of multi-tasking. If I did that all day, I could probably eventually do an acceptable job of it, but I would hate it.

Last edited by Rocky on 29 Aug 2008, 2:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.

its alright, i just started yesterday. most the people there go to my school so i get along with them fine

I just got "terminated" from my first retail job. On the positive side, I have a job interview in a few hours for another job, so hopefully I can use the experience I got from my first job and won't end up losing it.

Retail sucks, but if you can find a job selling things you're passionate about, you'll be happy.

I had a job in a petrol station. I had to work in a room with flourescent lights (which I can't stand), where little bleeps and other electronic sounds were going off all around me, concentrate on ten different things at once, deal with a million people a minute, and smile all the time. I got overstimulated and so scared I wet myself. Then I had a nervous breakdown, so I quit after six weeks. I _hate_ customer service.

I work nights all the time so that means my shift doesn't end until the store has been closed for awhile. So lately, the managers have been really paranoid and have been actually locking us in the store way past our scheduled time to leave until everything is "perfect". Has this happened to anyone else? It can't be legal. Even if I weren't doing my job (which I am; my job is to organize the store... and come on, I have AS and OCD ), it doesn't seem like they could just do that.

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I worked in pizza delivery for many years. It has been hell for me. I fell as if when I make eyecontact, people can see inside me and makes me uncomfortable and that is half the job. Knowing that on a Friday night, there are alot of people watching you work is even more uncomfortable, and having to deal with irate customers was hell too.

I've done those sort of jobs in the past when I was desperate to make ends meet, but it was beyond hell no matter what. So many stories about it, I could probably fill up the pages of a novel with them all.

Yeah, I used to work at dairy queen w/a bunch of popular chicks... Pretty much got hired for the job cause they needed a male there to shoo creepy stalker guys off whenever they came to "stalk" the girls. One time during a rush-hour I gave a guy change for a twenty he flipped out said he gave me a fifty. Then we argued and my boss told him to get lost and gave him the correct change. To this day I still wonder if it was a ploy to get money but the guy was making a scene during a rush and we didn't want to lose the business. Oh then these freak'n reservation rockets (native americans) would come down with an order for the whole tribe... They would intentionally say we messed up their order for so we would give them extra. They really flipped out when we called them out there game... How ignorant do they think people are? When you become a frequent annoying customer the staff will catch on. oh well Lots integrity issue where Im from.

People would yell at us about the prices at dairy queen or about how we didn't give out the free promotions that a dairy queen 20 minutes away did.

Umm, hello, you can see we're cashiers. isn't that a pretty big clue that we don't set the prices or determine what promotions this location gives out.


Thats like me going up and chewing you out because you attend Student University and they don't have a football. Just imagine that "YOU GO TO STUDENT UNIVERSITY. HOW CAN YOU NOT HAVE A FOOTBALL TEAM?!? EVERY UNIVERSITY SHOULD HAVE ONE. WHY DON'T YOU? I CAME HERE EXPECTING TO SEE FOOTBALL AND I WANT TO SEE IT. - go out and get a team together because i want to watch football. Well go on, you can do it, just for me."

I've done a lot of retail, as well as restaurant work, though the worst for me was video game retail. The problem was that both shops I worked at took trade ins, and customers always had delusional ideas of what their old games were worth. It didn't help that both places I worked at would give you a niggardly amount of store credit for even a brand new game, then turn around and sell it for only $5 under new price. The process for entering trades into the computer was also quite cumbersome, and invariably the guy with 3 crates of 1980's era games would walk in during a rush and tie up a clerk and computer terminal for an hour, and we'd have to log and inventory all this weird crap that may not even be in our systems. At EB, we HAD to take anything they brought in, didn't matter what it was or whether it was scuffed up or damaged. At Game Crazy I had discretion, and I was merciless about checking discs and testing old cartridges. I might add that both shops were located in "ghetto" areas, so I was also diligent about applying Washington's pawnshop regulations about having ID with trade ins, being 18 to sell goods, and that didn't make me popular with the locals. I had one guy explicitly threaten to come over the counter and kick my ass because I wouldn't take his trade in, fortunately (for him) he didn't try to make good on the threat, or his day would have gotten much worse. That was a job that fell into the "not worth it" category, you'd think video games would be a fun job...