Retail Heaven: My first wonderful experience with a customer
From rally_parakeet, Tales From Retail:
This happened on Tuesday during my shift at the grocery store. I'm almost always running the express lane, but the schedules were shifted around that day, so I was on a regular register, meaning I had to deal with all the extreme couponers, huge orders, rain checks, and other problems you don't get on express.
So I was looking ahead to what I figured would be a pretty stressful 5 hour shift. 30 minutes in, I get an elderly lady who has a whole cart full of canned food, soda, and meat (she was getting ready for a cookout) but only had $160 on her EBT card. Start thinking "here we go again" and bracing myself for a bunch of meat go-backs. We get over $160 and I try to help her figure out if she wants me to take other things off, or just take everything else off the belt. At this point the lady behind her offers to pay for her remaining $50 worth of meat. Now this by itself, seeing someone do a nice thing for a fellow customer like that, just about made my day. I ring out the rest of the meat on the conveyor, the old lady expresses her appreciation, even gives the other person a hug for paying for her food, and then leaves.
Then I'm moving onto the nice wonderful customer's large order and thanking her for doing such a nice thing, when she mentions that she remembered talking to me about my upcoming trip to Minnesota about a month ago, and she wondered how it went. Now TBF she is originally from Minnesota (and we live in New York) so that would obviously stick out in her mind, but the fact that she remembered an interaction with a random grocery checker from a month ago just blew me away. And she seemed surprised or even put off when I thanked her again for being so kind... as if this is how she treats everyone. (Holy shit people from Minnesota are soooo fucking nice).
At the end of the sale I used the little up arrow button that feeds extra paper through my receipt printer to create some blank space at the top, and wrote her a note that just said "thank you for brightening my day". No idea if she saw it.
Nice lady from Tuesday afternoon: I know you probably don't read this sub, but thank you again for going out of your way to be nice to random people at the grocery checkout. The world needs more people like you.
There's absolutely nothing fun about working a minimum wage job to try to earn money for college, especially when you know you have no intentions of staying in the retail industry and working your way up to management. Every afternoon I put up with long lines of incredibly rude customers who think I exist to cater to their every desire. These jobs can be soul-crushingly boring almost every day, and when I get to interact with people like you, it's just the boost I need to get through a shift actually feeling like I like my job. Thanks again.
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