Retail Certainties

[Lace Neil Singer]

Just as you will always encounter The Woman With The Noisest Child In The World when you have a splitting headache, or The Man With The Biggest Head In The Entire World will always sit down in front of you at the cinema; when you are about to finish your shift the customer pushing the most piled high trolley in the entire shop will go to your till.

Can you list any more Retail Certainties?

[Worker-Intellectual]

Just when you are about to go on break you get one last customer... who is either buying half the items in teh store or being a total SC.

[Reyneth]

If you are working with only one other person, as soon as your coworker goes to the bathroom, on break, or home you will have five people walk in the door, even if the store has been empty for the past three hours.

[Brighid45]

Guaranteed, if you work in a call center you'll take 'one last call' at the end of your shift to get your CPH rate a little higher, and end up staying an hour past your time. Bonus points if it get escalated to a supervisor.

[MCSledgehammer]

If you have something to do right after work and are closing, you will get (at precisely 5 minutes until closing time) a parade of absolute morons that would put Macy's to shame. Every single one of them will be "just browsing." (IN A FREAKING HARDWARE STORE.)

[workerbee222]

When you sign on Sunday afternoon with $100 in your till, your first customer will break a $100 bill to purchase $11 worth of merchandise.

[CreepyCarrie]

(From my Days O' Hell working at Baskin Robbins):

-If you're out of a particular flavor of ice cream, every other customer all day long will want that flavor. Even if it's one of the nastier less popular ones, like Cotton Candy or Bubblegum. And most of them will bitch at you like it's your fault.

-The day your second blender breaks down leaving you with only one is, unbeknownst to you, National Icey Drink Day, the day on which everybody in town is required to go order AT LEAST 2 milkshakes/Breezes/Blasts

-The most popular ice cream flavor for milkshakes is always the one that's hard as a rock and can't be scooped out easily even if you had a chainsaw and an ice pick.

-When you see mothers entering the establishment with more than two children, it is almost certain you will spend the next 15-30 minutes giving each child sample spoonfuls of every. fricking. flavor. Bonus points if they don;t even end up ordering anything, super bonus points if this is occurring near or after closing time, and super duper bonus points if said children start taking spoons from the holders and throwing them at each other while Mommy watches as if it's the cutest thing in the world.

-At least one customer a day will think they're clever and go "How come you only have 23 flavors? What's up with that? You're supposed to have 31. You guys should learn to count. Hee haw guffaw cackle giggle."

-9 out of 10 customers will not tell you if they want a cup or a cone, and 5 out of those 9 will get huffy when you can't read their mind and ask them which they'd prefer.

Gawd, I hated BR.

Most of the certainties from my current job have already been covered.

[Mighty Girl]

When you call off sick, and you make a quick run to the pharmacy to pick up medicine, you'll invariably run into either the boss or one of their flying monkeys who will immediatley report back that they saw you "shopping" when you're supposed to be sick.

[KamenRiderOsaka]

Guaranteed, if you work in a call center you'll take 'one last call' at the end of your shift to get your CPH rate a little higher, and end up staying an hour past your time. Bonus points if it get escalated to a supervisor.

Ahaha, I was about to say that one.

Or, how about this one. You're ringing up your last customer, on your last shift, EVAR, and the entire system goes down, as well as the power (brown outs in Texas summers rock) and they're pissing and moaning about how they want their stuff NOW and they're gonna SUE us!

True Story.

[Ciarrai]

With two minutes to go until the end of your shift, you will always get a call to help a customer with some time intensive question in one of the aisles, even if you haven't had to answer any other questions for the entire eight hours you've been there.

[Lace Neil Singer]

If you're understaffed for any reason, that day would be the day that everyone in the entire town decides to go shopping.

[MMATM]

- If you have one day off in the week, that day is the one during which everyone and their mother will call in sick and your boss will call up demanding that you cover for them. Even though when you call in sick you have to find someone to cover for you by yourself.

- If your boss anticipates a busy day and bakes a lot of stuff to cover it, you will have a slow day. Your boss will of course flip out at you for making the customers disappear.

[Scottya21]

my contributions:

Precisely 5 minutes before the store closes ( hell, after the closing time if you're busying yourself and don't pay attention to the time), some exceedingly polite customer will come in and talk your ear off.

You can sit on your bum and busy yourself with entirely non-productive activities for hours, but the moment you get up and try to do actual work ( restocking, cleaning things, whatever), you'll be inundated with customers.

(background: There is a lottery in which you pick 3 or 4 numbers, with a number of modifiers such as "box" or "straight", and the amount you want to put on that number. There are also convenient little cards where you can fill in this information and the lotto machine will read it. You can also get your lotto tickets for drawings up to a week in advance. )
The customer that wants the above sort of lottery will inevitably be somebody with an incomprehensible accent, he'll want at least $20 worth of different $1 things, and your store will be entirely busy. They will not use the convenient cards that the machine can read(they won't know they exist), they'll want all the modifications allowed, and their "regular place" will know what they want so when I do *exactly* what they *say*, they'll bitch about it being wrong. GRR. On top of all that, the choices they make don't really affect the odds significantly ( it's designed to always be a sucker bet). GAH.
(moral of the story, the lottery sucks)

[Demonoid Phenomenon]

When your check acceptance system is down, everybody whips out those checkbooks! Same with giftcards.

The longer it takes to remove something from it's packaging, the less likely it will be that the customer will actually buy it.

There will always be that one jackass who will put something on hold until the end of the day and show up a week later expecting the items to still be waiting for them.

It's perfectly okay to open food items to sniff or even taste them to see if you like it.

There will always be that OTHER jackass who had a layaway 5 years ago which they never picked up and they come in expecting a refund of their deposit.

If a customer asks for something to be demonstrated so that they know it works, they NEVER buy the one that you had to open.

[Jester]

There are two Restaurant Certainties that are so guaranteed you might as well call them Laws.

Law #1: If it's dead, and you order food for yourself, no matter how dead it has been all day, as soon as your food is ready, you will get busy.

Law #2: The last table of your shift will always pay with a credit card, causing you to have to wait for them to fill it out. If you are in a hurry, they will always take their sweet time with this.

Anyone who has ever worked food service knows these two Laws all too well.