customer disservice

I don't often have to deal with too many customers who behave badly enough that they'd fall into the category of rude-to-service-industry-workers who should be shot. And I'm relieved about that. But every now and again one of them appears at my till and my faith in humanity shrivels a little bit more.

First thing you have to know: the store where I work has a 90-day return policy to get a full refund. But we'll take stuff back long after the 90 days have expired, only not for the full price and instead for the item's current (significantly reduced) price which is rarely more than $3. You don't even need the receipt and within that time period we can look up the transaction in the system in order to give someone back the price they paid for their purchase. In short, it's really easy to bring shit back to our store and get at least a partial refund for it.

Today a woman came in to return some stuff. It was from June and there was no way anybody was going to let her have the full refund and when I informed her that I could only refund the way lower current price, she was livid. She ranted about how she couldn't keep track of her receipts and it took her since then to track the receipt down, so how the hell was I not going to justify scamming her like this?? Yelling at me, snapping at me, claiming the return used to be six months (which it never was, and even then she was still too late because June was seven months ago) and what the fuck was the problem, the guy at the Huntington store lets her do shit like this all the tme--and then she pulled out the big guns. She told me her mother was in the hospital dying of cancer. And she kept mentioning it, saying that she was with her mom in the hospital all the time while she was fucking dying and on and on--and the way she was talking didn't sound like it was at all genuine.

Even so, I told her there was nothing else I could do. She made one last attempt to guilt-trip me by saying, "I wish I could just show you some proof my mother is dying of fucking cancer and I'm fucking with her 24 hours a day."

I never doubted her insistence that her mom was sick and dying, so this was completely unnecessary as well as being a flagrant guilt-trip. Caring for a cancer-stricken relative is extremely stressful and painful, but that doesn't give you the right to act like a complete asshole and snap at people. (That's not to say I never do it--I do it all the time--but at least I know I behaved like a jerk once I'm back to normal again.) It really was extremely fishy, the way she was talking about the whole thing. It just didn't seem right. I suspect she might have been lying to me just to make me feel like shit on the off chance I'd break the rules for her out of pity.

Lying and saying a close relative is fatally ill just to get a store refund that couldn't have been more than $20 even with the full price makes you a horrible person. If she did, she deserves to  get run over by a truck.