So I may have been out of the retail game for a while now (2 years and counting), but the scars from the experience still remain to this day. Granted, they may have made me a slightly better customer, but mostly I feel a pang of survivor's guilt every time I'm in a store and I see retail slaves getting their assholes chewed out by stupid customers or clueless, "Head Office" worshipping fucktard managers. I just found this site the other day, and after getting a chuckle at a few of the posts, decided to chime in with a few war stories of my own.
1. Discount Stackers Can Go To Hell
"Discount Stackers" were what most of us who worked at the gas station that I worked at years ago would call the bitchy peroxide zombies who would try to take advantage of the "double discount" coupons that the large chain grocery store we were connected to handed out every so often to make our lives living Hells. Normally, customers using the little loyalty cards the store dished out could get 3.5 cents off of their gas with them. The coupons (surprise, surprise) doubled that discount, and every two weeks a horde of middle-aged, middle-class idiots with these coupons would flood into the store.
These coupons were good for one vehicle only and expired coupons were not honored without yelling at our department manager or the store manager for 10 minutes.
Stackers would, predictably, show up with two or more (our record was five) vehicles, fill all of them up on one of the far pumps, then come in to pay and expect the discount. We'd look out the window to see who just pumped almost $200 worth of gas, see a Geo or a Neon and batten
down the hatches. After informing the bitches that the offer was only good for one vehicle, we'd usually get a 10 minute tirade about how it wasn't on the coupon (which it was), how they should get it because they're the customer (despite having invalidated the offer), and how much more important they are as compared to we retail slaves (as if that was going to make us do anything for them at that juncture).
Normally, they'd just take the normal discount and swear never to come back (only to try the same thing next time and hope that somehow the staff would completely change), but we did have an instance where one tried to drive off without paying after fighting us for 20 minutes. Dumb bitch floored it, not realizing that her wheels were already cranked to one side and flipped a bitch into a much more expensive vehicle.
2. Video Game Store Does Not Equal Daycare
My most recent retail job was at a video game store located inside a mall somewhere in the 9th circle of Suburbia Hell. During the summer, on the weekends and really whenever the weather was nice the store was usually full of kids who would pretty much just line up at any of our demo displays or plop down in a corner somewhere and play their little games. We did our best to chase them out whenever we could, but for every 2 that we tossed for loitering and generally pissing off
everyone else in the store, 6 more would stroll in and start doing the same thing. In the really hot weeks of summer, the whole store would smell like a junior high locker room. The place rank of feet, sweat and fucking hair gel.
It was only after a week or two that I discovered that the mothers of these fucking cretins would just drop them here and go shopping for a few hours. 
I discovered this when one of the children up and wandered off sometime in the 2 1/2 hours that his mother had spent maxing out her fucking credit card whilst "shopping with the girls" and I was
immediately crucified in front of the entire store for not keeping tabs on her precious little twatspawn. She hadn't even walked into the store when she dropped him off, having simply pushed him off in our fucking direction so she could go play "Sex and the City" with her
trashy, suburbanite friends. The child was eventually picked up by mall security at the chocolate store near the food court, binging on chocolate after having beaten up another kid over a crack at his weight. The wench brought the child back afterward and proceeded to try and convince me that it was all my fault that she'd been embarassed like that and that the next time her "precious angel" came in the store that I should drop everything and keep him in the store...because apparently that's what we do.
Sadly, that was just the first time I'd had to deal with that. I've had women leave their kids there and go work 8 hour fucking shifts. It was a goddamn nightmare.
With my manager's permission, I made a sign that said "Unattended Children Will Be Handed Over To Creepy Old Men For $20/head". I put it up just out of normal sight. It solved the problem somewhat until someone complained to the DM.
The worst, however, was a woman whose child would simply leave the house in the morning and come straight to our store to fuck around, chew his toenails and throw fits whenever he was asked to quit trying to smash our demo machines when he didn't win at something. The bitch wasn't even in the mall at all. She'd just call the store and ask us whether or not he'd eaten anything, if he'd gone to the washroom, if one of us could take him to the washroom, and to send him home around 3 or so. Despite our best efforts, the bitch kept sending the kid to us for 3 weeks straight before we decided to tell her that the boy's "Uncle John" had come to pick him up.
Lo and behold, within 15 minutes an obese redneck woman with a mullet came crashing through our door like King Kong's pale, sweaty, bitchy cousin demanding my head on a platter with two nice officers right behind her. Before she could open her mouth, her son marched over to her demanding money and she ripped into us for lying to her. When the manager and I explained to the officers that we were not in the business of babysitting wretched redneck hellspawn, the officers dragged her and her son out. We never saw them again, though I've heard that the kid recently decided to start trying to sell cheap pot outside the mall instead.
- An Emancipated Retail Slave
