It's always our fault, isn't it?

[Anthony K. S.]

It was a pretty typical night. The bookstore I work at had just closed, and I (along with two or three other employees) was trying to restore some semblance of order to the magazine racks (which were, as always, a total mess by the end of the night).

Those of you who work in a store that sells magazines probably know what I'm talking about. Customers will pull a magazine off the rack, thumb through it, and then shove it back in any which way, or just drop it on the first row of the rack (covering up another magazine in the process).

Quite often, they will pull several magazines off a rack, take them someplace to read them all, and then leave them in a big pile for us to pick up and put away. Or, if they do take them back to the magazine rack, they'll just drop them (again) in one big stack on the first row of the rack, covering up other magazines.

<Sigh>

Anyway, as we were straightening the racks, I asked one of my co-workers :

Which annoys you more? The customers who make a huge mess of these shelves, or the ones who come to you and complain, "Those magazine racks are a mess. You people should do a better job of keeping them in order!" . . . ?

He picked the latter. Just out of curiosity, I asked several of my co-workers this same question in the following days, and nearly all of them chose the complainers as the people who irritate them the most.

That's how I feel about it myself. I despise people who automatically blame the employees for everything that goes wrong in a store.

The books and magazines are out of order? And whose fault is that? The customers who always make a big mess of those shelves, or the overworked employees who are almost always scrambling to straighten as many shelves as possible in the wake of the slobbish customers?

The employees, of course . . . They should be doing a better job of keeping the shelves in order!

Bonus points for customers who complain about the books being out of order right after they themselves pull out books and shove them back into the shelves out of order . . .

There's an unsightly used coffee cup lying on the floor? Is that the fault of the customer who drank his coffee and then tossed his cup aside instead of taking it to the trash receptacle?

Of course not . . . It's the fault of the employees, who should do a better job of keeping the floor clean!

The restrooms are dirty, you say? And do you blame your fellow customers, the ones who made the huge messes in them?

(If you don't know what I'm about to say next, then you either haven't been working in retail for long, or you simply haven't been paying attention here.)

Well, it is obviously the employees' fault. They should do a better job of maintaining the restrooms in clean condition!

More bonus points if the customers who complain about the restrooms being dirty are the same customers who complain when we close the restrooms to clean them.

(That happens a lot, by the way.

One time, one of our maintenance crew put out the big sign saying that the ladies' restroom was closed for cleaning, and then he waited for the women still inside the restroom to come out, so that he could go in and clean it.

This one woman walked around the sign, walked right past the maintenance guy, and into the restroom. He tried to stop her, pointing out that the sign said that the restroom was closed for cleaning.

As she walked into the restroom, she said, "Well, you shouldn't be cleaning it when people need to use it!"



I wouldn't be surprised if that woman herself was one of the people who complain about the restrooms being dirty, too.)


You know, considering how short-staffed we typically are, I happen to think we do a pretty good job of maintaining the store in good condition.

When the store does become messier than it should be, it's not because we're not doing our jobs. It's because the customers are being more slobbish than we can keep up with. Simple as that.


<Sigh> . . . Well, thanks for letting me vent.

[AnaKhouri]

I know EXACTLY what you mean. I work in a bookstore too and I am sick and tired of the pigs who come in and leave books and magazines all over the damn place. If you want to be a slob, do it in your own house. I would be ashamed to be seen behaving like that in public, and to have other people think I'm a slob.

We had a couple hilarious suggestions from the suggestion box recently. One said the store should have employees go through and alphabetize every section once an hour. Uh, right. Our owner is so cheap we usually have 6 people running a 45,000 square foot, two-story store on Saturdays. If these people are so concerned about thins being neat, they should put on an apron and help. Or, God forbid, put your shit back where you found it. I learned that by the time I was three years old.

The other suggestion involved having people in the restrooms at all times to keep it clean (like restroom attendants in Europe, I guess). Sure, I'll be happy to sit by the door and clean if I thought you cheapskates would give me tips, but with the rate of theft we have I'm guessing 90% of our customers are too cheap even to pay for the stuff they want, so I would not be getting anything.

Can you tell I've been doing this too long and have come to hate everything about my job?

[rerant]

I hate hate HATE it when people leave things where they're not supposed to be! For me, if I'm in a big store, pick something up, forget where I got it then decide I don't want it I give it to the cashier, since usually there's a place at cash where things like that can be put away to be sorted later on.
We don't have one of those spots at my work and usually just toss everything into the baskets where people leave their in-store shopping bags, but as a cashier it doesn't irrotate me when someone does that.
Now the people who do their shopping at the register, THAT annoys me.
You know, the people who hum and haw over every item while tey're being checked out and want to add/remove things after they see their total.
One or two unwanted items is fine, so long as you've decided by the time you get to cash that you don't want them, but don't make this the time to decide what you'll be buying.

[powerboy]

I got that when I was a cart pushier for Walmart.

You see a bunch of carts around the parking lot and you see only one cart pushier. Chances are, he/she just came on from break and no one wanted to help out for 10-15 minutes. Or, the employee has been working the whole day without a break.

[bainsidhe]

On the other side of the coin, there's merit to businesses having adequate staff coverage and training to ensure the upkeep of the store. When it comes right down to it, it's the store's responsibility if they want to continue bringing in business.

But since we're finger-pointing, customers are absolutely to blame for messes in the store and restrooms. Having empathetic customers who understand this concept would certainly make our jobs easier. But even then, the store is still responsible for cleaning/checking on the bathrooms and putting back reshops, etc.

It is not unreasonable to expect the store to clean a dirty restroom in a timely fashion. It IS unreasonalbe to expect an employee to drop everything and do it NOW. Bonus points if this involves interrupting the employee helping another customer.

[Seraph]

/twitch

There was this one woman once...who went to the Romance section and literally picked up ONE OF EACH Nora Roberts book. Then, she plopped them on the floor, skimmed through each one, and just stacked them back on the shelves. She didn't even attempt to shelve them, mind you. Just...pushed them up there in this disturbing lump of badly written semi-porn.

Then she walks up to me and says "The romance section is a mess. I can't find anything. You should be written up for not doing your job." She then flounced out of the store.

Cripes I wished I was allowed to say what I had wanted right then...

[BookstoreEscapee]

It's the customers' fault it gets so messy, but if there's not enough staff, it's the company's fault if it doesn't get cleaned up in a timely fashion.

Those of you who work in a store that sells magazines probably know what I'm talking about.

I used to try to think of it as a giant game of Memory (or Where's Waldo in the case of those obscure magazines that were in an overcrowded section and there was only a few copies of). Made it seem like more of a challenge and less of an utter annoyance...

[AdminAssistant]

It is not unreasonable to expect the store to clean a dirty restroom in a timely fashion.

No, it's not unreasonable. The problem at my store was we had ONE guy assigned to maintenance and he worked from 7am-3pm, M-F. So, if someone decided to make a huge mess in the bathroom, usually a manager or someone else had to go clean it up.

I realize that it's an inconvenience to customers, but nowhere in my job description did it say "Responsible for cleaning bathrooms". And frankly, I never got paid enough to deal with that amount of nastiness. Let a manager deal with it - I take care of the crap at the front end, they take care of it elsewhere.

[SuperB]

Which annoys you more? The customers who make a huge mess of these shelves, or the ones who come to you and complain, "Those magazine racks are a mess. You people should do a better job of keeping them in order!" . . . ?

I had someone once tell me, "You should take better care of your books", regarding one that was put back in a spot too small for the book by a customer! So glad I'm able to speak my mind I said something to the effect of, "Well, considering we are a convenience store and not a book store I'm a bit more concerned about the dates on the milk or the medicines than a book in the wrong spot that was abused by a customer".

The restrooms are dirty, you say? And do you blame your fellow customers, the ones who made the huge messes in them?

(If you don't know what I'm about to say next, then you either haven't been working in retail for long, or you simply haven't been paying attention here.)

My standard answer to these people: "Sadly, yes, most "customers" think they have a personal maid when they use a public restroom. Being the only one here it's not easy to keep up on it but I'm used to cleaning up after children."

More bonus points if the customers who complain about the restrooms being dirty are the same customers who complain when we close the restrooms to clean them.

(snip)

This one woman walked around the sign, walked right past the maintenance guy, and into the restroom. He tried to stop her, pointing out that the sign said that the restroom was closed for cleaning.

As she walked into the restroom, she said, "Well, you shouldn't be cleaning it when people need to use it!"

One busy weekend the bathroom (just one) had a long line for it for a while when my husband decided it was most likely needing toilet paper, paper towels, the trash taken out, etc. So on a day when the line is never completely gone he did what he always did. Went up to the next person in line and told them it would be a minute while he got it decent again. Most people get it. This day though the guy who was next pitched a huge fit. He walked up to the counter where my Mother-in-law was and demanded that my husband be fired for daring to clean the bathroom before letting the line finish.
I missed all the fun but was told my Mother-in-law told the guy, "Well one of you will be leaving and it won't be HIM!

[evilhomer]

The old Simpson's philosophy of "It wasn't me, I didn't do it, Can't someone else do it" is overwhelming in today's society. Everybody wants to blame someone else for the problem they created, nobody will take responsibility. They're so busy and their time is so valuable that they "can't" take the two seconds that it would take to fix the problem of have it never happen in the first place. No, they're too busy to spare those two seconds, so instead they spend two hours bitching and complaining to get someone else who truly can't spare the time to go and do it for them.

[Reyneth]

Gaaaah! Magazines!

There are always piles on the coffee table right outside of our in-store cafe' and usually you find 2-3 copies of the more popular titles there.

But what gets me is the decorating magazines. Twelve of them. All piled on the bench in front of the shelves. Seriously - you were obviously looking at them right there. Take one off, look at it, PUT IT BACK then take the next one. Or if you're deciding between two, put your one back or if you can't find it, ok. BUT NOT TEN AND MORE AT A TIME! Any more than 3 is inexcusable.

[HawaiianShirts]

In the library at the university I just graduated from, you'll find one empty shelf painted red for every four or five shelving sections full of books. You picked out a book and forgot where it went? Drop it on the nearest red shelf. They had one or two library employees whose sole job was to walk around the library assisting students in finding books and reshelving the stuff that was left on those red shelves. I think it would help bookstores immensely if they did something similar, even though it is encouraging SC laziness, and I'm sure some customer would find a way to screw it up anyway.

But, yes, I can sympathize with this. One just happened today that annoyed me. I saw a guy pick out a set of speakers (aisle 2). He walked around the computer department looking at other things for a while. Then he decided he didn't want those speakers, left them on top of the paper shredders (aisle 8). As I was up on the ladder rearranging some topstock printers at the time, I was able to watch him leave the speakers he didn't want, walk back to the speaker section (aisle 2 again), pick out another set, and take them up front to pay for them. I stood there stunned for a few minutes before putting away his abandoned product. Seriously? You're going back to the same spot anyway and you can't be bothered to take them with you?

That's about as bad as the people who are too lazy to reach up or down one extra shelf. They pick out a pack of 50 DVDs (from the second shelf, just above knee level), look at it, decide not to buy it, and leave it on the stack of DVD 25-packs (third shelf, about elbow level for those not above 6' tall). The extra foot and a half of bending is JUST TOO MUCH for them!

Yeah. It makes me mad, too. I can only imagine what it's like for those of you with magazine racks. You have my condolences, for what little they're worth.

Slightly OT: I once found a Game Boy Advance game, still in its box, abandoned inside one of our display printers. Yes, inside. Someone had opened the printer and dropped the game in the open space where the ink cartridges zip back and forth during printing.

[Listerfiend]

I often deal with people who come up to me to check out, find out that an item they wanted didn't "come up at the right price" and then bitch at me because it was in the wrong location. Every single time this happens they go apeshit and demand to know why it wasn't in the right space, which forces me to tell them that certain customers feel that they're above common courtesy and leave things wherever they like, causing other customers and me headaches. Of course, they only bitch more that we "should pay more attention to where things go" and I have to tell them that most of our customers are adults and so we treat them as such--we can't be bothered to follow every customer around just because we assume they'll leave their things around like a child.

[SugarBeef]

I can't stand people doing that kind of stuff either. But rather than complain to the overworked employees, I'll sort out any mess within my path if I have time to kill. If I see something way out of place that belongs in a part of the store I won't be going to? Dropped off at the nearest register so they know where it is when they have time to sort. Honestly, it isn't hard. It's even easier if you FREAKING CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS!

Sorry, I never had to deal with this problem as an employee. But it's always been a pet peeve of mine as a customer. Seriously, does everyone think their mom works there and will clean up after them or something?

[Boozy]

When it comes right down to it, I know it's part of my job to keep the store tidy, whether the mess is caused by customers or not. Sad fact of retail.

But there's a difference between a customer saying, "There is a section over there that requires attention. Some slob has made a mess." and "You people should take better care of your store."

It's all about the attitude of the complainer.