What is THIS shit?00:58 Aug 04 2011
Times Read: 1,048
When dealing with customers' questions, it's best to be very specific with your replies, and ask lots of questions yourself. Otherwise you wind up with the situation I just got done with.
A guy phones up about 5:30 and says he has "a few shirts". Wants to know how much. We first have to ask what kind of shirts they are and he says business shirts. Okay, now we know what we are dealing with. So we tell him our price. He says he needs them by Saturday, since his new business is opening Monday and he needs the shirts for his staff this weekend.
I should have seen the warning flag right there. We told him to bring them before close of business tomorrow (Thursday) so we would be sure and have them done by the end of Friday. He says ok. My boss is about to leave but something tells me to ask him to stay for a few more minutes and I am damn glad he did.
The customer comes in...at about one minute to close, huffing and puffing and toting a big-ass carton FULL of shirts...all still in their plastic wrappers, full of pins and tags and carboard backs/collars. Holy mother of fuck. I about shit myself. Right away we tell him that he did not mention the shirts were STILL IN THE WRAPPERS IN A DAMN BOX and he says with a goofy grin "Well, you didn't ask." Mister, this is NOT something we should need to ask. This is also NOT "a few" shirts. This is a shitload.
We immediately told him, before he could open the box, that if we have to unwrap every goddamn shirt ourselves, take the pins out, take all the tags and wrappings off, that he would get charged a service charge. For not being honest with us over the phone, both with the condition of the shirts and the amount.
Right away he says "Well, I can see how you don't get much business. You have a real crappy attitude." I love it when people do this. We have so much incoming stuff that we are hiring extra staff (more on that later). We can't do it all in a day. And this jackass comes at closing with a shitload of shirts expecting us to take them all apart and back to him tomorrow (yep, he decided to change the day also).
My boss: "You want them or not? We are closing, and if you want them tomorrow, ALL OF US....INCLUDING YOU...are gonna stay here and unwrap all of these shirts." The guy about dropped his drawers. I shoved a cart at him and said "Let's go" and started grabbing shirts out of the box.
There turned out to be 60 shirts. We each did 20. Customer guy took a long time since he obviously had no experience doing this. Me and my boss were grabbing, unwrapping and tagging and had our 20 done and customer guy only had 6. Shit. Before we let him go we told him that in future we will need two full days if there will be this many shirts, and no bringing them in at the last minute.
He was decent enough to apologize. He thought people worked at our store all night and would have no trouble tagging his shirts. Uh, no. Fourteen hours is plenty, thank you, and in 100 degree heat too.
I got one ten minute break at lunch. Had to get up to wait on a customer, who proceeded to tell a long winded story about how the stain got on her suit (she was on a cruise, oh my, and had I ever been on one? did I know about all the food they had on cruises? I said no, but I do know about my lunch, which is going stale. Why the hell do people go on and on and on with a boring ass story? I've always been tempted to have a boat horn under the counter, and reach down and casually blast it when some yutz gets verbal diarrhea.) I'm about ready for bed right now.
Night night, VR.
COMMENTS
-
BLOODLIFE
20:22 Aug 30 2011
..and I thought you had a wand!!