<p>So basically I just had a horrible experience with a belligerent customer, and I want to ask some older wiser parents if I can get in trouble at my job for this. </p>
<p>So tonight I was closing at the small grocery store I work at. The store closes at 1, and right at 1, I was getting ready to leave. I hadn’t seen any customers come in in a long time, so I didn’t announce it or anything (we’re not really supposed to since it’s seen as hurrying the customers, we’re just supposed to go up to them in the store and let them know). I walk out the door and it’s about to be locked, when one of the stock guys out front smoking says “oh did that lady leave?” Ummm what lady? (If she’s in there, she’s obviously been there for over 45 minutes. I’ve been watching.) So I go back in to look for her with my friend (who is an employee there, but not currently working, just seeing me out to my car). We find her, let her know that the store is closed, but we’ll let her check out what she has now. I go back up front, clock back in, turn the register back on, etc. (Plenty of time in my opinion to make a grab for that one last thing and come up). Still no customer. I go back and find her berating my friend because he won’t show her where all these things she needs are, even though he’s trying as nicely as possible to explain to her that 1. he’s not on the clock, so he could get in trouble for appearing to work after hours, 2. he has no idea where these random specialized items are (if we even carried them), so they’d spend a long time looking for it together, and 3. the store was now closed 10 minutes ago. He finally convinces her to come check out, I get through with the order, she leaves, and I go through the entire process of shutting everything down again. We’re going to leave (the guy with the keys has also been waiting by the door for 20 minutes for all of us) and she barges into that area between the 2 sets of doors and starts yelling at us about how she pays our checks, etc. I try to explain that we already re-opened the whole store for her, what else would she want? But she’s beyond talking and just wants to yell. My friend is a lot smarter than me in realizing this and tells me to just keep walking, but before we make it out she tells us that she’ll be talking to management tomorrow. </p>
<p>Now if my managers had been there, they would have seen the craziness and backed me up 100%. What I’m worried about is how it’s going to look when she comes in all calm and tells our manager how we wouldn’t show her where the one box of popsicles she wanted was…</p>
<p>(Sorry if this isn’t a good place to post this, I’m just a bit freaked out. I don’t want to be seen as the rude employee denying service to paying customers.)</p>
<p>Talk to your boss first about the problem and how he or she would have advised you to handle it. If your boss knows your work, they won’t believe a crazy story about you, even if told by a woman who looks calm the next day.</p>
<p>First off, I believe what you did was just fine. You were not rude, your friend helped the woman even when he was off duty. She was in the store 45 min prior to any incident and she held up the usual closing of the store. I would calmly tell the boss first thing in the morning so that he/she is apprised of the situation before she may have a chance to call. It is always best to clue in management of a potential problem, than for them to be caught off guard when she calls or comes in to complain. It looks better for you and gives the boss a little more leverage. Its called CYA and damage control. It’s always the best strategy.</p>
<p>You did great – stayed calm, didn’t engage. Your behavior before this incident shows your boss that this wasn’t about you.</p>
<p>And guess what? She may have done this before!!! At your store!!! I have worked enough places where the staff acknowledge a resident crazy customer who periodically berates someone, especially someone new. It’s like they have adopted your store as a place where they can flip out on the staff.</p>
<p>It also would be good to re-open the discussion about a “closing time” message with your boss. Had your friend not noticed that the woman went into the store, she could have been locked in, which would have led to even bigger problems. </p>
<p>You also might want to ask your boss to advise you on handling this type of customer. Someone who wanders into a small grocery store around midnight, then vanishes between the shelving, and subsequently “can’t find” a whole lot of specialized stuff that regular staff members don’t believe you have in stock, may have some special issues of his or her own. Was this customer drunk? high? possibly homeless? If any of those would be the case, how would your boss want you to handle things?</p>
<p>I agree with prior posters … you did fine. The woman was obviously unbalanced, and yet the store got closed without damage or injury. Tell the boss about the incident. Ask him how he should handle similar events in the future.</p>
<p>She wouldn’t have really gotten locked in, there’s always a ton of stockers, vendors, and taggers in there. She could have just asked any of them and they would’ve unlocked the door. But she would have had to leave all her groceries behind. Unfortunately, all these people make it hard to tell who’s a customer and who’s just wandering around on their lunch break. I find it embarrassing to accidentally go up to an employee and tell them we’re closing, which is why I just watch the front door and keep a mental note of all customers, but I might have to just start going around and telling everyone in the store I don’t recognize.</p>
<p>Also she wasn’t drunk or anything strange, she was just trying to do a month’s worth of groceries. It may have been the only time for her to shop, which I always feel bad about. As far as specialized, she was looking for specific brands of everything, and sometimes our store does put stuff in two places. (For instance, we have different brands of horseradish sauce in 5 different places! It never makes sense to me.) Unfortunately, she was probably waiting till checkout to ask and by then it was too late. She was more high maintenance than anything else.</p>
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<p>There is a manager, but he’s more there to be in charge of the stockers and vendors than me. I usually have to page him to find him, and he’s usually swamped so I try to hold off unless I really really need him. He was coming over when the woman came back in to yell, but never made it as once we stop engaging her she left.</p>
<p>The thing that I still don’t understand was that she wasn’t mad at me at all for making her leave, she was mad at my friend for not helping her finish her grocery shopping!</p>
<p>Was it a full moon yesterday? I had a customer banging on the door five minutes after closing last night in desperate need of dog beds. Yes we let her in, she spent $100, and we closed about 20 minutes late. Not particularly fun.</p>
<p>I think in your situation you did just fine. Lots of times when you start turning off the lights the customers will get the message – although it sounds like your lights don’t go off – so that would be a problem.</p>
<p>I think you need a closing audio message, and I also would have left a note for the manager so he/she had a heads up about crazy customer coming back to rant about you.</p>
That was my thought. I usually call that the ‘floor’.</p>
<p>OP: It sounds like you did okay as long as you didn’t raise your voice or be rude to the customer. Just explain it to your manager and you should be okay. The manager might give you some pointers on how to handle it differently or you could seek them out so you make sure you’re aligned in the event something similar happens again.</p>
<p>Does your store have security cameras? (I would hope so for your own safety in a store that closes at 1 AM!) If it does, then you have no cause to worry - just ask your manager to view the tapes. Even if there’s no sound, your and your customer’s demeanors will be self-explanatory.</p>
<p>Besides, every manager who ever worked a floor has had your same experience.</p>
<p>I was in retail for 16 years…13 of those years as a manager. I will believe any story, no matter how outlandish, that begins “There was this weird lady…” A lady once berated me for daring to talk to her while my hands were in my pants pockets.</p>
<p>It was actually <em>two</em> emergency dog beds … they were leaving on vacation first thing in the morning and needed two new beds to go to the kennel. </p>
<p>Of course the best after closing story this week was the two action figures found in the small animal department after closing. The phone rang at 6:20. We could hear wailing in the background. Had we found any children’s toys? The young woman who answered phone said, “We’re closed, but we did find Spiderman and half another dude. We’ll have them at the front desk in the morning.” Thank goodness they weren’t in their car calling so we would have had to open up and let them in to find said dude’s missing legs.</p>
<p>She did call my manager and complained only against my friend. The store manager called my friend into his office and made him read out of the handbook where it says that being at the store more than 15 minutes before or after your shift is loitering and can result in immediate firing. Basically scared the bejeezers out of him, and then asked him for his side of the story. My friend explained and the store manager goes, “Yeah, that’s what I figured. That lady sounded like a jerk. Oh and that thing about loitering, you can come up here whenever you want.” Apparently she was just angry because the guy who usually closes (and is on vacation this week) lets her stay as long as she wants because he has to stay anyways to help stock and she just decided to take it out on my friend. So all’s good. Even the department manager who took the call told her that he would forward her to the store manager, but that he didn’t believe my friend would ever smart off to anyone.</p>
<p>Medschool - Glad you got it resolved. You might get a kick out of this. We close at 11 pm and we have quite a few peole who work from home. One of my coworkers somehow forgot to clock out when she ended her shift at home at 11 pm and at 11:30 her phone rang. She answered it and a gentleman was there asking a question. She nicely told him that unfortunately we were closed and that he would have to call back in the morning. He said thank you and wished her a good night. Apparently he didn’t hang up his phone right because she overheard him in the background saying to his wife “I got the gosh darned cleaning lady!” We still laugh about that story today. :)</p>