You serious?

As you may already know I work at Lowe's. It's a great job, its really easy work, the people are cool, they provide me good hours... for a student it's perfect. However there are moments were you faith in the human race is tested. These moments come in the form of customers who come up to you with the most unreasonable requests oblivious to how things are run in the 21st century.Usually when you hear one of their dumb request's you sometime's debate to yourself as to whether or not their joking. For example a relatively annoying one is when a customer uses a gift card on a small purchase and expect's change back, they'll usually ask "can I just cash back?, same thing right?". In that moment ill just explain why I can't, then send them packing. A more a annoying moment is where a customer has a seriously outrageous request and fights to their death to try and win at it.

Today I think I may have had the most annoying customer I've had in a while. For sure in the top 5 asshole customer list that I have in my head. It was a couple who were working in a drywall project, now the husband/slave was a cool guy, his wife, who was possibly the widest lady I've every seen, was not. She whined about everything! With every beep of the scanner she questioned the price, "oh, no, thats not right... it said that the drywall was $6.75 per piece, not $8.25!!" She was making stuff up, I could tell... some customers with her physicality have the potential to intimidate and bully some cashiers into yielding to their unreasonable demands. I wasn't one of those cashiers, I knew my department's product's price's well and I wasn't letting this big lady defeat me. So I stood my ground and rang up 9 drywall pieces for full price. The big lady wasn't giving up though, she was examining each drywall piece looking for a flaw, knowing should she find a flaw she has a justifiable case for a discount. Her husband, meanwhile, just stood there with about as much life as a dead flower, she must have drained his life force, but he had just enough energy to look at me and mouth the words "sorry" to me. Which I did appreciate.

She eventually found what she though to be a flaw, a minuscule bit a of crumbling in the corner of one piece of drywall. So minuscule that you would literally need a magnifying glass to observe it. Because of that she wanted 50% of that piece. Heck no! she got 10% only because passing floor manager allowed it. So the score was 1-1, I kept the price the original cost, she got her minute discount of 80cents. Then the real battle begun.

I scanned a box of drywall nails. Big lady not being pleased with her discount, still thirsty for a bigger a discount, ask me. "If we don't need all these nails and we have some left over can we return whatever's left?". I gave her a stonewall reply of "no". Nothing less nothing more. Just, no. "Why!?" she replied, "we probably won't need them all, what are we going to do with all thats left over?" I honestly stood there stunned, I couldn't believe how stupid this lady was. Does she really not understand how things work? All I could do was suggest that she find some cheaper nails. She snapped back at me that they were the cheapest she could find. I risked getting a customer complaint, and in a very cheeky manner replied, "well then looks like you gotta make do with what you got then!, cause you can't return half used boxes of nails." The lady was about to rebuttal. I cut her off mid-sentence and gave her a brief analogy. "Do you return a half-eaten box of donuts to the supermarket? It's the same thing here! your total is $197.17cents"... she hesitantly paid the price then told me that from now on she's taking her business to Home Depot. Despite the fact that more Lowe's customers mean more job security for me, I was okay with the fact she's now a Home Depot customer, I just hope she keeps her word. Oh, and god help her husband.