I'll Be Right Back

All too often a customer is at the register buying something when they forgot they left their money in their car or at home.

"Oh, shit. I forgot my wallet at home. I'll be right back!" they say as they run out the door.

Many times they come back. Sometimes they don't.

When they are buying prepackaged stuff that I can just throw back on the shelves, then it's no big deal.

But when they get coffee, doughnuts or anything else that they have to make and/or touch, it pisses me off.

That's perfectly good stuff that we have to throw away, all because you said you'd be right back. Asshole.

I'm assuming that since the customer had to go back home it made them late for work so they decided to skip coming back into the store.

If you've done this before, then screw you. I could be giving this stuff to the crazy woman that comes around all the time begging for food, but who knows if you've coughed or sneezed on it, thus transferring your cold to the crazy woman. Then she will come in coughing and sneezing on me and I'll have to look at puke on her jacket while boogers fly out of her nose.

Which means that the next time I see you, I'll give you the crustiest dirtiest money I can find as your change.

Favorite Retail Blogs?

I like to read retail blogs. It's funny to see the other stuff people complain about, which is usually the stuff I mostly bitch about, too.

One of my favorites is The Pizza Man Blog. He doesn't post anymore, but his stories are hilarious.

Does anyone have any other retail/cashier sites they like? I need some new reading material.

If you have one or know of a good one, post it here.

The Missing Girls

I'm sure everyone has now heard of the Cleveland women that were missing for 10 years.

That's not far from us at all. I remember 9 years ago putting up flyers on our front door for one of the women that went missing. She was 14 at the time and it was scary. I remember customers commenting that she was probably a runaway. It's sad that so many people thought that. She was alive and being tortured the whole time, along with two others.

The house that they were found in is not located in the greatest area. There are tons of other houses around there boarded up and vacant looking, and that's probably why the house didn't really seem out of the norm around there.

Anyways, I'm glad that scumbag is caught and I hope he rots in hell. Reading about what he did to them for 10 years makes me sick.

This story makes me think about how we don't really know anyone. We could have customers that come in our store now that are hiding someone they kidnapped. We'd never know. It's creepy.

And then there's stories like this woman who was closing up at her gas station job and appears to have been abducted. As of now (two weeks later), she still hasn't been found.

This is why at the sign of anything strange at my store I'm always on the phone with the cops. Many think I overreact but I don't care. Any creepy motherfucker that comes in is always watched by me until they leave the store. And even then I write down their license plate just in case.

But even looking or acting creepy doesn't mean they are doing anything wrong. It's these "normal" ones that have everyone fooled.

I'm just still in shock that those girls were found. It's made me even more suspicious of people though, that's for sure.

Not Cool, BP. Not Cool.

Our night shift girl was working the other night and got a phone call at 11pm.

"Hello?"

"Yeah, I got $10 worth of gas there today and my credit card was charged $70. Why is that?"

"I'm not sure, you'll have to come in while the manager is here."

"So you don't know why my card was charged then?"

"No, sorry. I'm just the night girl. I don't work in the daytime."

"I want to know why I was charged $70. You're going to tell me ad fix it. See you in 10 minutes."

And with that he hung up on her.

She spent the rest of the night scared that some crazy guy was going to come in and harm her.

In the morning, I told her she should have called the cops. So I decided to look up what happened.

It showed on our caller ID that the call came from the BP gas station about 20 minutes from us. Once I saw this I got pissed and called around until I got the manager.

I explained to her what happened and wanted to know if it was a disgruntled customer really calling us or if some of her employees were fucking around on night shift.

She told me she'd look into it and would call me back.

A few days later, she finally called. And it was just like I expected. Her employees had called our store (as well as many others) because they were bored.

I didn't ask what she planned on doing with them, but i told her that it was hard enough to find people that wanted to work night shift and that we didn't need anyone trying to scare them. Especially people from another gas station.

If any of our employees pulled that, I'm not sure if I'd fire them or not. If they were a good worker but just got bored, I'd make them a list of crappy jobs that need to get done and have them do it. If they were a lazy ass and I knew they weren't going to last long, I'd probably cut their hours and wait for them to just quit.

But in either case, if they ended up making those prank calls again after I told them not to, they'd definitely be fired.

People piss me off sometimes. Do your fucking job instead of scaring other people. We're all in retail, we shouldn't be working against each other!