Oh this. Yes, this. Every retail employee has dealt with this at some point. During off hours inventory, or perhaps a remodel of your store, or even after 5 loudspeaker announcements that your store has been closed for upwards of 45 minutes. But still, there is some blue haired old bat banging down your door or some overly self entitled mommy still wandering the isles like our clocks follow her exact schedule.
So in case you weren't aware, stores have a specific schedule of when they are open and when they are closed. And when someone is working until close, they get to go home after closing. We don't sleep at our jobs and REALLY want to go the FUCK home when we're done. So when we announce that we're closed, we understand you might be at the furthest corner of our store still shopping. We don't have clocks around the store and maybe time got away from you. It's okay. We'll wait 5 minutes. We're okay with that. But when we make the announcement that we've been closed for HALF AN HOUR we fucking haaaaaaaate yooooouuuuu.
We only get like 30 minutes to close the store after hours. So now as your fat ass lollygags it's way up to the front end, I should be lighting my celebratory end of day cigarette and getting in to my shiny little sports car with my bass up far too loud as I blast the hell out of offensive music. But no. I am STILL at my register, asking if you found everything okay and if you have a fucking rewards card. And I still have 30 minutes of paperwork to do after you leave. Really, it's okay. I didn't want to get home anytime before my boyfriend (who works opposite hours from me) goes to sleep. It's fine I swear.
Oh and now, I'm over on my hours! And with out a supervisor's permission to be over the time I was scheduled, I get in trouble! Cool! Now I have to figure out how to spread out 47 extra minutes of break time over 2 days in a way that doesn't screw the rest of my coworkers. See corporate REALLY hates paying overtime. To the point that I could work THREE 13 hour shifts and not get a cent of over time because I'd end my week at 39 hours. I don't get overtime till I pass 40 hours. Not 8 hours in a day. 40 hours in a week. Man I hate corporate sometimes.
And then there are the old people who don't understand being closed. At one point in my current career as register monkey, my store had a remodel. Remodels are kind of awesome because you get a pristine store for all of 30 seconds, and get to spend 3 days or so working without talking to a single customer (in theory). But they suck because we literally had to move our store into a new location and back again when the remodel was done. At this particular location, we had a total glass front and two giant glass doors as our front that looked out into the mall. So we did the sensible thing and bought a HUGE roll of brown paper, cut it to fit the windows and doors, and wrote on the paper in HUGE letters "CLOSED FOR REMODEL. WILL REOPEN THE WEDNESDAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING". (No, I am not making that up. We opened our newly remodeled store the day before Thanksgiving because clearly nothing would go wrong with it and we would have a smooth Black Friday with all new everything. But that's a story for another week.)
Of course, we couldn't lock the doors because we were constantly going in and out to get product and fixtures and what not to set up the new store. About once and hour, some moron open the door, tried to walk in and either asked if we were open, or yelled at us for keeping such a messy store. Now, for our remodel, we not only had our full staff there everyday, but our DM, RM, and some members of corporate to help. For those of you playing the home game, I have a temper and a mouth. I could only take so many of these idiots before I lost it. And that was the third and final day of our remodel adventure. Some old lady barges in, complaining about god knows what, and asks if we're even open. Oh man, here I go.
I start to scream at her, in front of everyone who could fire me, "DOES IT LOOK LIKE WE'RE FUCKING OPEN? IS ANYONE IN UNIFORM? IS PRODUCT ON THE SHELVES? IS THERE NOT A BIG FUCKING SIGN THAT READS CLOSED ON OUR FUCKING DOOR? ARE YOU STUPID OR ILLITERATE?" And that went on for a good minute and a half before she left in shame. My DM marched over and started saying some shit about customer service so I pointed out she wasn't a customer, I was on my 30th hour of work in 3 days, and to suck my dick I was so over it. Our DM wasn't unreasonable, noticed everyone else felt how I was acting, and made the glorious decision to treat everyone to coffee, donuts, and pizza. It's been 3 years since that incident and I still have my job, without being written up for that episode.
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