War Musicals Please!

Well, it's been a DAMN long time since we posted anything. I am ever so sorry for that. My life has been one big pile of CRAZY. First of all, I left my retail job and I moved half way across the country. If you are interested in reading rants, I have some some of my adventures up on a little bit called City & Island. Anyways, I'm going to try and post a few stories for you to enjoy!

So I had been at cash pretty well all day. It was a busy day and our store had just had a flood. Anyways, so I was working on something like making price stickers and this man walked up to me. He seemed normal enough, so I smiled and asked him if I could help him.

The conversation went something like this:

Me: Hello! Can I help you find anything today?

Him: Yessum. I'm looking for Civil War.

Me: Ok? Civil War documentaries? Or like a war drama movie?

Him: NO. Civil War the MUSICAL. Do you have it or not?

Me: Well, I don't have a listing anywhere in my computer system, so unfortunately that's going to be a no.

Him: Well I BOUGHT it at your store in Miami before!

Me: Well, we don't have any stores in the US anymore. We've been out of the states for quite some time and now we're only in Canada and the UK.

Him: Are you calling me a liar?!

Me: No, but I'm just telling you that you couldn't have got it from us.

Him: Well I will find another store that carries it.

Me: Alright sir. I have a nice day!

Anyways, so as a sidenote to this whole thing. Civil War the Musical DOES exist, but not on DVD... It is a play and not a movie.

Do I speak English?

I thought I would hop on over here and post and update the site a little for our dear Cookie.

Some basic background about me. I have worked retail for about 7 years now - in a few fields. My main field is as a service station assistant manager/cashier, and also at the same time as a sales associate in clothing and kitchenware.

In the glamourous world of "retail", almost everything is computerized. I happen to work at a gas station where to function, everything but the staff is computers. Our point of sale system (or debit network) likes to randomly crash and start up again. There are days when I can't get outside to put signs up on the pumps. Instead, I hop on the intercom: hi there pump number ____. It's cash or credit inside only. The debit system is down."

There are people who bring inside their debit cards. "I'm sorry. The network is down".
"oh, I thought that was for the outside only".

"no. It's the same network thats down".

The one thing I learned today was our ATM is also hooked up to the same system- doesn't seem too smart.

Of course it was up and down today, as it has been all week.

Working alone, I inform the customers via intercom about the change in how the have to pay. All is well and good.

You knew this was coming...

Until a middle aged gentleman came in to use his PayPass. He swiped his card at the machine. The computer printed out a MasterCard slip for him to sign.

"I used this so I wouldn't have to sign"

"I'm sorry- the network is down and the paypass is attached to the network".

*mumblemumble"it's supposed to be convenient"mumblemumble*

As he walks towards the door, all cheery, "Have a nice day".


Relax. It's only retail.

Do Not Fret!

Hey everyone!

Thanks for following the blog and sincerest apologies for not posting lately. As you can imagine, it's the Christmas season and us retailers are currently trying to keep the gray hair at bay... although we should be so lucky as to have any hair left from wanting to rip it out!

We are not closed and TONS of stories will be following after the Christmas rush is done with! In T Minus ONE WEEK! AHHHH! I will leave you with quite possibly a story that takes the place of my favourite stupid question EVER. It happened today:

Basically, I was the only floor person in my store, so approximately the entire population of the city was trying to flag me down for help. One woman walked up to me with the new Keith Richards book in hand and turned the book over to ask me the price. The woman pointed to the barcode... like the zillion number barcode and asked me if that was the price...


I wish I was lying, but this woman VERY seriously wanted to know if the barcode was really the price of the book... and quite honestly... if books cost as much as she thought it did, I ponder a couple of things:

1) how this woman has managed to survive in the world up until now
2) how this woman has any money at all cause if she asks stupid questions like that frequently, I can't even imagine how many times she's been ripped off...
3) how much does she think houses and cars cost nowadays?!

Anyways everyone.... Merry Christmas and check back with us really soon for more stories after this shenanigans called Christmas is overwith!

I Can Spells Wordz

Today I thought I would share some employee screw-ups that I've seen over the past little while, focusing on header cards. For anyone who doesn't know what a header card is, it's basically the card that is behind a CD or DVD that has the title of the artist or movie on it.

Most of the times when we're cleaning the sections out and we discover these, we all just have a good laugh over them, and if they're really good, we put them on our "wall of shame". You can see a few of them in the provided photo, but here are some that really made me chuckle (some of which are, again, included in the photo!)

-Ass Assassination of Jesse James
-Hairy Potter
-Darkwood Duck
-Transforners
-Sabrina Who? (for Samantha Who?)
-Suffer Dude (Surfer Dude)
-National Geographics
-Barestain Bears (Berenstain Bears)
-Sharkboy and Waterboy (Sharkboy and Lavagirl)
-Toothy Fairy
-Blind Melo
-Schwayze (I don't even know what this header card was for...)
-Beatie Boys
-Kindz in the Hall
-Huge Cornwell

If you've seen any awesome examples of employee shenanigans... send them to us for our little mini special editions like this on header cards!

Where's the Bathroom?

This story is a short one, but I hope you'll enjoy it.

I was helping this little old lady find some CDs that she was looking for. She was super nice and friendly and I really enjoy helping people when they are like that. I was with her for a while and found most of the CDs she was looking for and even recommended her some other CDs that she just bought because she liked me and thought I had good taste.

Anyways, so I bring her over to the cash and start ringing her through. I get the transaction completed and she asks me if there is a bathroom nearby. I tell her how to get to the bathroom and where it is and she smiles really sweetly at me and says: "Oh goodie! I really thought I was gonna have to crap in my pants! Have a niiice day!"

And that was that.

I Did Not Get THESE To Be Called Sir...

I used to work in downtown Toronto, as you may of read in past posts. I have met some really interesting people in that experience and this story is about one of those very interesting people I have encountered.

One day, I was scheduled to work in the basement of the store I work at, which is pretty much all of the movies for the store. The basement draws in a lot of the crazies, which is generally fine as they just like to shop for the most part and leave you be. On this particular day, I guess I just had an extra friendly face on, and I was chit chatting with this dude about this and that. We were talking for a while and I was kind of getting antsy and such, but kept listening.

Another customer comes down the stairs and walks over to us and is apparently a friend of the person I am chatting with. The person that comes over is a tranny with big straight blonde hair, gigantic Pam Anderson tits, big botoxed lips and very little clothing on. The shirt was barely covering nipple. And I will just refer to her/him as she hence forth for now.

So she came over and said hi to her friend and then proceeded to tell me about her experience in the main floor. We had just hired this British guy and he was working with a few other people. Apparently, she was walking around the store upstairs and looking for stuff, when the British guy walked over to her and said "Can I help you find anything, sir?"

Now, normally it's good training if you know better than to gentrify anyone when addressing someone in retail, but apparently, he did not know better.

The tranny was really offended by this and said no and continued shopping. I guess after a little while, the British guy returned and offered assistance again, following it up, once more with "sir". If anyone knows any trannies or has met any, you know that this is a really big no-no. So she came downstairs, as I mentioned and proceeded to tell me this:

Her: "That British guy you have working on the main floor is a HOMOPHOBE!"

Me: "Really? Well he's new and I haven't worked with him much, but he doesn't seem like that?"

Her: "Do you KNOW what he said to me?! He called me SIR!"

She proceeded to tell me about the incident above that I have already mentioned, so once I was filled in on that, she carried on:

Her: "Do you think that I dress like THIS and I got THESE (at this point, she sticks out her chest to a point where she might as well of been flashing me, since her boobs are like all up in maa space...) to be called SIR!? No, I didn't, and it's really rude and disrespectful of someone to treat me like that. I mean, you work DOWNTOWN! You have to expect people like ME pretty often here!"

She was not wrong at all. We had strippers, prostitutes, homeless people, trannies, alcoholics... all sorts show up at the store to shop, but we all knew how to deal with it and we had an awesome security team that kept us safe. You need to definitely be open minded to work at the store and homophobia definitely doesn't fly since like half the staff are gay and such too. So if you're a homophobe, you won't last very long.

She carried on for a bit more and thanked me for listening and being so open-minded and pleasant etc. They chatted with me casually for a little bit and such. Then they had to leave and they said their goodbyes and such and thanked me again. As they were leaving, the tranny just quickly popped in this little treasure for me to remember:

"I know what will make the British boy not so homophobic anymore... I'll just march right up there and give him a blow job and that will change his mind REEEEEAL quick!"

Go Find Yourself a Tic Tac...

Alright, so a couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of dealing with this Spanish couple that came into my store. The other guy that I work with had dealt with them before and asked me to help them out. Basically, the couple had bought a copy of Predators and it wasn't working in their FIIIVE DVD players. The guy who had dealt with them before had already exchanged the DVD for them and apparently the DVD still wasn't working. It was supposedly skipping at certain parts of the movie.

We have a DVD player in the store, so the simple solution was to just check the DVDs to see if they were actually defective. The man had claimed that the movie skipped pretty much right from the get-go and just froze at other times.

I just want to take this brief moment to say that the man had had Taco Bell for lunch and had the WORST onion breath I have ever smelt. I wanted to vomit a little. And the wife had big gaudy jewelry on and silver front teeth.

Anyways, so we pop the DVD in our player and start watching it. It works perfectly fine. No skipping. We watch like 15 minutes of it just to make sure it doesn't start to skip. After, the man gets all defensive about the situation and says:

"So just because it doesn't work in MY DVD player makes the movie NOT defective? Are you trying to say that because it doesn't play in my FIVE DVD players, that it's my DVD players that are defective?! I have a 2009 Escalade, are you telling me that my Escalade is DEFECTIVE?!"

I followed up by saying to him that I could do another return, but if it was in fact their DVD player that was defective, the new disc I gave them still wouldn't work. I popped in the first DVD that they had returned and it wasn't defective either, so I tried to explain this to them. I asked him if he had a Blu-ray player, because I thought maybe the Blu-ray would not give them as much trouble. He told me that he did have a Blu-ray player, and he would trade up for the Blu-ray if the disc continued to not work.

Long story short, I told them to try to the DVD in a normal DVD player and not a DVD player in their Escalade... They were not really impressed with that suggestion and the woman said, "So you made us drive ALLLLLLL the way from Blah blah and blah blah all the way in BLAH?!"

The place in question... changed to BLAH, was down the street from me and literally like five minutes away from the mall, so it really wasn't very far for them to come and all I could think about in my head was maybe if they didn't drive an escalade that probably cost an arm and a leg to get gas for, it wouldn't have been such a big issue, and all I REEEEALLY wanted to say to them was, 'You should look into getting a Prius'.