I’ve worked at three hardware stores and each one had one of these ladies.
Seriously, one just spent like half an hour ranting to me about how she thinks the local gas and electric company is conspiring against her.
You can’t really say you worked retail until you’ve had to play Social Worker for 15-30 minutes and talked to an old person who has nobody to talk to.
If you’re lucky the old rascal will tell you something unhinged but it’ll be weirdly charming and not racist or sexist (it’s a throw of the dice but that’s life)
You can’t really say you worked retail until you’ve had to play Social Worker for 15-30 minutes and talked to an old person who has nobody to talk to.
people will still really call it “unskilled labor” when the percentage of the population that can gracefully deal with this is infinitesimal and you can’t learn it from a bootcamp
Customers are literally throwing a temper tantrum when you simply state “no, we can not do that/have not in stock, etc…” - people sometimes will just trauma dump randomly. It is a job that is requires skills found in social workers and therapists. It is exhausting. I remember the summer job, I had as a teen and oh god - never again.
my wife’s got a weird old man - he doesn’t have any friends or family, so he goes into every store downtown to talk at people. it’s a bit sad (the consequences of not having third places, etc) but also he says some really weird shit so the goal is always to be kind but not so nice that he’ll be weirder at you personally (which happens)
Some guy I was helping years ago went on a rant about how Japan secretly won WWII and now an order of samurai are running the US through the national parks service based out of Alcatraz.
Monkey’s paw: They destroy both the US and China so that the Japanese emperor oak may reign for a thousand years
That would make for a hell of an alt-history Man In The High Castle sort of fiction
Basically yes
I have worked retail for 20 years and I have known so many of these people lol
One time my partner offered to drive this older lady who lived nearby to do some errands. Turns out her errands were basically going to a bunch of retail stores to complain at them about the silliest things, like how she let her store credit card expire or something like that. Shit they can’t even really do anything about in the store. Partner didn’t even know because they just sat in the car at first, but went inside and one of the workers explained the old lady does it a lot.
Sad, but also fuck her for manipulating my partner into helping her harass retail workers
One old lady started coming in once a week or so to rant at me about all sorts of stuff happening in her life. Every single time I would nod along wordlessly until she wandered off. Every single time she would find my manager and file a complaint that I was swearing at her. My manager let two of the complaints stick so she could deny me raises, but would never file the third. It felt like a conspiracy sometimes, but it never happened to anyone else as far as I could tell and the lady never stopped coming in.
