The Customer Is Not Always Right

I don't know which asshole came up with the saying "The customer is always right," but apparently he has never left his big comfy corner office and stepped into any type of service industry. I work at a grocery store - enough said.

I have had three years of soul-sucking miserable people yell at me because they "just used a check earlier today and it worked fine." Or maybe "$3.00 for a package of cookies is just tooo much!" Occasionally a "Can I get paper in plastic, then put them in this box so I can shrink-wrap it and then ship it to Alaska?" You know, so the cold stuff can stay cold.

"Would you like your milk, green shit, bread, orange-stick things, fancy rich people water and blue tub in the same bag?"

If you're in the service industry, or if you just deal with stupid people daily, you would probably appreciate this website. It's along the lines of F My Life and the less popular My Life Is Average websites that are a hit these days. It's just a series of stories and quotes from dealing with dumb-asses that come into retail stores.

I am a big fan of the singular form 'person.' The word 'people' however, is awful. Person can be smart, occasionally funny, and nice. People however are dumb, scared, angry, and just plain idiotic. You put more than two people in a room and they are all ready taking sides and getting ready to kill each other. I think I may have just accidentally paraphrased that from the movie-version of Stephen King's The Mist.

This is kind of grocery-store related; it takes place in one at least. Still was a suck bomb though.

Ok, that's all for today. In conclusion: people suck; person however is awesome ... and working in a grocery is, well, awful - but its a paycheck. It could be worse. If you have time, check out this blog. It's becoming a website pretty soon, but check out the older posts, they're pretty kick ass. Click here for the link. Or here. And here and here.

Here is one of my favorite excerpts from [The Customer is] Not Always Right:

Dinner Without A Show Is No Dinner At All

Grocery Store | Buffalo, NY, USA

(I’m cashing out a customer and bagging his groceries.)

Me: “And what’s in your bakery bag, sir?”

Customer: “A cantaloupe. I put it in there to get ripe.”

Me: “OK…”

Customer: “You know what they do in California? They JUGGLE the fruit - the cantaloupes and the mangoes and the apples and such.”

Me: “Oh, that must be neat to see–”

Customer: “YOU SHOULD DO THAT!”

Me: *laughing* “That’d be interesting, but I don’t know how to juggle.”

Customer: “You mean to tell me you can’t juggle this fruit?”

Me: “I’m afraid not…”

Customer: “Then take the cantaloupe off. I don’t want it if you won’t juggle it for me.”