The Ugly American, Day Four: The customer ain't always right.

Not a happy camper.

     So this little rant comes to you courtesy of my wonderful Wife's premier Black Friday encounter.  For those who do not live in the US, Black Friday is the ceremonial day after Thanksgiving where thousands of Americans attempt to kill each other to get "discount" prices on various and sundry items.  She had travelled to a specific store to buy a specific item and while she was there she encountered the ugly side to the Ugly American Practice.
     America has a saying that goes, "The customer is always right."  The idea of course is that a business' employees should do everything within their power to keep a customer happy so that said customer will return and do business with them once again.  On the surface, this is actually a decent little concept.  Even if the customer has made a mistake or is outright wrong, it is generally better to give into their belief in order to keep them happy.  However, there are instances where, no matter how much you may want to or even how reasonable the customer's demands are that you simply cannot give them what they want.

This is not my happy face.

 

      So in this instance as my wife is attempting to self checkout two very large and heavy items, one lane over a very irate customer is berating a cashier because she has told him that he can only buy two of the item (Oddly enough the same item my wife was buying, go figure) because the item was a Black Friday item with a limit of two.  The customer was very angry and demanded to buy as many as he wanted to.  He told the cashier that he had not known the item was a BF item.  (Note here:  The store only had like 4 items that were specifically BF items so the odds were kind of against this last statement being true) and even offered to pay full price for the other items over the limit of two.
     On the face of it, this seems like a reasonable offer.  Buy two at the discount price and then purchase the rest at a normal price.  The only problem is that most BF sales items are purchased by the store in limited numbers, say lot of 500.  This lot is specifically offered at the discount price and generally that lot is all there is in the store for the day of the sale.  That is generally why BF sales have very strict purchasing limits (1, 2 etc).  So if the Cashier and later manager had allowed the customer to purchase all of the item he wanted, that would have meant that later shoppers coming in to get the sales item would have be unable to do so.

Dunno why, just thought it looked funny.

      So in this case, there was no easy way out for the Store.  The manager politely refused to sell the gentleman the extra items no matter how irate he became because it would have been unfair to people who came later.  According to my wife, the shopper was later gently escorted from the building when he refused to accept the reasons for the refusal.  The Cashier and Manager did everything they could to defuse the situation and, from what my wife says, remained calm and polite even as the customer got angrier.
     The very crux of Assdom is to demand satisfaction when you are wronged.  If you get bad service, complain.  If a product you bought sucks, complain.  Never be afraid to voice your concerns when you feel you are in the right.  However, the flipside to that is to know and acknowledge when you are in the wrong and be big enough to admit it and move on.  In this case, the customer was in the wrong and should have accepted it, bought the two items he was allowed to and moved on.  Instead, since he was a jerk, he wound up with nothing.  I sense a life lesson in there somewhere.

End of Rant