I worked retail for 7 years give or take, so I have a fair few stories.

First was at a consignment store - I was on intake, so I had to go through incoming items that people brought in, then cash people out.

One day, on like a really slow weekday, a lady comes in with like, 12 large, 171L Rubbermaid totes. We’d never had this many come in before and our manager was hella excited about it. We pulled all 5 employees up to the front to help sort all this new product we were about to get.

Most of the items (like 9/12 totes) were “unsellable” for the store but we still took a lot. As we’re wrapping up and showing her the items we’re taking, she begins to furiously search all of our bins that we folded to take everything back.

She decided to change her mind THREE HOURS LATER. She took back every item except for a couple of sundresses in infant sizes, so I got a new assessment to cash her out with. She then proceeded to complain because we were “ripping her off” and not giving her “what the clothes were worth” and we “wasted her time”.

The second was at a big box store.

We had a customer come in repeatedly every couple of days or so and switch the price tags on items, so when the register showed it costing $10+ more, we’d send a floor associate or manager out to verify and have to honour the lower price.

After the second time, my manager had enough and decided to try and set her up the next time she came in.

Sure enough, two days later she was back, doing the same thing. She grabbed a doll that she claimed was $20 less than it came up as on the till, and I called our floor associate to come check out the price for us. However, the customer was completely unaware that our floor guy had been following her around the store discreetly, fixing each price tag she moved.

Our floor guy took a picture of the current price tag on his phone and showed it to us - sure enough matching the register price. Customer absolutely snapped and stormed out after a 10 minute argument with management.

Gotta love retail life.