English 101: All versus One

Hello students, today’s lesson is an easy one, if you can read English. Are you ready? All is everything, all is everyone, all is basically all. One is singular, one is by itself, thus one stands alone. Got that? Good.

A customer comes with an older coupon, which is still good, giving her 25%-off one regular-priced item. I go through the transaction, and she’s buying three items, two are regular-priced and one is sale. We always give the discount for the most expensive regular-priced item. I tell her we actually have a special for today only–40%-off instead of 25%-off. She seems okay with this, but of course, you can never tell with these kinds of people. So I go through the transaction, and she stops me.

“Wait! That’s not right! That’s the same discount I’d get for 25%-off!”
“What?”
“You aren’t giving me any savings, it’s better with 25%-off!”
I blink, and wonder why I”m faced with such utter brilliance on a daily basis. I explain to her there is no way 25% is greater than 40%-off.
“No, it’s not a better discount!”
So I go back and I show her the discount, and I even pull out a calculator to show her the price of 25%-off and 40%-off. Obviously, in any world except for advanced mathematics, you can argue the 40% discount is far better. She’s still yelling at me, getting angry at me.
So I say flatly, “Fine, I’ll do what you want, okay? I was trying to be nice, but I’ll give you the discount you want. 25%-off.”
So I change it, watching the total increase as I showed her several times with the calculator. Then she yells stop again.
“What are you doing?!? Isn’t this for all items?”
I roll my eyes without rolling them. I point at the coupon, I want to say, “It’s printed in English.” At the very top, the first line, “25%-off one regular-priced item.”
“Oh, I thought it said all items.” She gets violent with the credit card machine, swiping it. I tell her to stop, because we have to get back to that screen, as I say, “So I guess the 40%-off is better.” There is silence. “Now you can swipe.” NO apology, just like there was no thank you I even offered to give her a better deal. This was my first customer of the day. Oh, be sure, be quite sure, she helped make the rest of the day FANTASTIC! Utterly fabulous, thanks lady.

Customer Type: The Blind, The Dumb, Learn the Language, Unapologetic

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Coupon Literacy

I’m at the register, the bane of my existence, and we have special coupons, which give a pretty good discount on regular priced merchandise (You can read this as full-priced, non-sale items, etc. Yet, knowing society, people will choose the dumb options on how to interpret clear English. Because you know, they ask, “How long will this be on sale for?” And they could mean marked-down product–which never return to full price–or they could mean promotional items, which return to regular price eventually.) I got side-tracked, where was I? Oh yes.

A woman comes up with a bundle of items on promotion–read this as items on sale, because they aren’t regular priced if they’re not full-priced, right? (I mean today, I had to deal with cheap people who wanted me to mark items back to regular price, since they were on sale, in order to get the coupon savings, which amounted to roughly $1 savings. Congratulations for you! Big saver! Bring out a banner! I just love how special promotions bring out the sale-mongers who decide their I.Q. has dropped twenty points in order to shop.) Either way, I ring up the woman’s items, and I tell her, the register will remove the promotional price–thus the item becomes full-priced/regular priced; this is actually automatic–and then she’ll get the discount off the regular price. (This comes out to about $2 savings, lucky lady!) To which, the woman angrily yells at me, “How can you do that? Where does it say that? I want to read it!” (There really should be a test for people to be allowed to shop in person, with so many people lacking social skills. One question should be repeated twice, “Can you clearly read and understand your native language?” “Are you sure you can read English/native language?”) I point at the coupon, of all things, it isn’t even in the fine print, it says on the very top, ” Regular Priced Merchandise.” To which she complains, mumbling to me saying, “You should have made it clearer! I wouldn’t have even come in if that were the case. I wouldn’t have even bought this!” I love when it’s my fault.

If that is a threat, I don’t know if I care. Does it look like I have a thousand ripples of pleasure having to deal with your stupidity and lack of literacy where you can’t even read English? Do I really care if you’re trying to make me responsible for not only your greed and lack of intelligence, but also you pointing your finger at me as if it’s my fault? I didn’t teach you to read, nor did I teach you to use this lack of logic, nor did I make you come trying to money grub super-discounts and getting items for free. Some people actually do have to pay for their rent and feed themselves in this world, woman.

Of course, all I said was, “Please swipe your card.”

Customer Types: Big Baby, The Blind, Capitalist, The Dumb

Not Sale

One day, during a major Holiday sale. We were overwhelmed by the sheer number of sale-mongers that came out of their anti-social chamber-caves to shop. The entire store was turned upside-down, shook around, and left a disaster. I work quickly and efficiently to try and maintain order; I consider it a game. Can I put clothes out faster than customers can try it on and destroy it? On days like this, I have no chance.

So I’m holding a large pile of folded clothes, and I have to put some away. The only open space is this huge table which was once full of clothes, which are now in nasty piles, falling on the floor. I place the pile down quickly, assuming I have about five seconds time to put the sale items on this table; the rest of the clothes is full-priced waiting for relatively untouched homes.

Immediately, two or three hands reach out and start to fumble through my beautifully folded pile. I yell, “There aren’t sale items, they are full-priced!” In a matter of moments, the hands disappear, the clothes falls back down, and the monsters disappear, looking for weaker, cheaper prey to devour. Moments like these teach you something about sale-mongers, and how to control them better.

Customer Types: Capitalist, Lowered Expectations, Piggies

$9.99 Markdown

I am rather protective of the tools we use for marking down products. In general, I have no reason to be, since as much as I’ve heard rumors of people peeling off stickers putting them on other items, only to say the item was ‘found like this, marked down like this’, I have only seen this happen once. There are times I can bend the rules to my advantage, so people can’t abuse a situation. Yet, they are also times, where the customer wins by bending the rules. I just don’t like when they win, and we both know they shouldn’t have.

I’m at the register and a customer brings me, literally, a heap of about eight different items–t-shirts, tops, pants, and even denim. She starts off by saying, “These prices are unbelievable! Is this the right price?” She shows me one item, it’s marked $9.99. I scan it, and it is actually $14.99. I tell her I must honor the price on the item, but I make sure to look at the item, so I know to check later if they are all marked incorrectly. She hands another, asking if the price is right. Yet again, $9.99, this time the price discrepancy is $19.99. I tell her she’s found quite the bargains, and that someone is going to get in trouble for marking these items wrong (and amazingly, all in her size). The irony begins to take a toll by the time she hands me the next item, a pant, marked–wait for it–$9.99. This time, the price difference is more than $20, and I stand and look at her. She has a hard time looking at me, and says, “If these are marked wrong, I will pay the right price, I don’t mind. I just thought you would give it to me for the price marked. But if that is wrong, then I will pay the regular price.”

There are scenes in movies and television shows where the antagonist tries too hard to be flexible, willing to help, and open in their crime that they make themselves stand out even more. I only make comments about how amazing it is that she, and she alone, found all the same sizes of both tops and bottoms all at the same price. Because, each of her items were marked $9.99. So either she’s very lucky, or a greedy idiot who only realized her mistake marking everything the same once she got to the register. But as I said, there are certain rules I cannot break–if an item is marked wrong, we must honor that price.

So I complete the transaction, overriding all the prices, giving her a savings of nearly $100. My gaze upon her is strong, and without humor, as she keeps saying she found them like this, she was amazed they were such a good deal, and how she’d be willing to pay the regular price. I tell her she’s done a good job, and let her leave with her ‘savings’. I search every single item she bought, making sure to check every single tag, and not one, not one of them was marked incorrectly at $9.99. Somewhere, somehow, she must have gotten her hands on a price gun and marked everything wrong. Ever since then, I’ve taken it seriously when I put down a price gun, because you never know when some greedy moron will mark everything $9.99. These days, if someone tried that, I’d definitely make a big scene about it, it’s just too bad I don’t have a coworker that can cry on cue and make it seem like she’s going to lose her job because of these petty thieves. I doubt it would affect them much, but at least once in a while they should face the people who have to pay for the price of their stealing.

Customer Type: Agreeing to Disagree, Capitalist, The Liar, Rhetorical

I See It’s On Sale

I’m standing near a table folding, and a woman comes up to me asking, “Everything here, it’s on sale, right?”

Usually such a question is rhetorical, but here she points at a sign on a bench, then waves at a table near it. (Just so you can understand, there is a larger table where the main product is placed, and then there are lower benches near or around the table–like satellites, or moons around a planet.) One bench has a sale sign, and it’s half-hidden by the higher, larger table–so all you can see is the top of the sign, which says, “Sale”. You can see 3/4ths of the word.

I try to tell her the bench is on sale, but the table is not, otherwise a sign would be on the bench and the table. I show her what I mean by placing the sign on the table (which also says, “Sale, Select items”), saying, “This would mean the table is on sale.” Then I put it back down on the bench and say, “This means the bench is on sale. And it says select items anyway.” She keeps arguing with me, saying, “But I can see the sale sign from here! I can see the sale sign from here, that means everything is on sale.”

First, while her jaw is going ‘blah-blah-blah’, I’m thinking, “Okay, the sign is a little big, but it isn’t even on the same table. Well, actually, it’s been there for a while now, and she’s the first person to get confused in over a week, making problems, and getting weird about it. You know, some people live their lives causing this kind of trouble for themselves. They just create stupidity.”

Then, I’m thinking, “If a wall nearby says sale, it doesn’t mean everything in the area is on sale. You can’t point and say, ‘Well I can see the sale sign, that means everything is on sale.’ Who says that, other than this woman? Even when a window says sale, it doesn’t mean everything in the store is on sale.” We’re just arguing semantics, and a customer’s ability to demand stupidity. I tell her everything on top of the table is going to ring up full-price, because it is full-price, but the sale items on the bench, they’ll ring up on sale. It’s not like I can change that fact.

Yet, she goes on about being able to see the sale sign; that it’s misleading marketing; that I was trying to trick her into buying something that’s not even on sale; that now she doesn’t want to buy anything at all. I’m sorry, you caught me in my dirty tricks; I wanted you to take something to the register and think its on sale, as if you would not whine and cry when you get there saying, “I can see the sign!” I am left to assume such threats and insults work to scare someone into changing their mind, saying everything is on sale? I just shrug and say, “Okay, but if you change your mind all this stuff on the back bench is REALLY cheap.”

I remember telling my boss about the dumb, fat woman, saying she’s a size-12 and she wanted a new pair of denim on sale, because she could see the top of a sign nearby. My manager replies, “She’s not that fat!”
“Well, because she’s so dumb,” I tell her, “That makes her fat-ter.”

Customer Types: Big Baby, The Blind, Capitalist, Don’t Kill the Messenger, The Dumb