(We are currently running a promotion where customers can get 20% off their entire purchase with a coupon. On this day, I watch as a customer brings 5 items into the change room, picks up the first item, and brings it to the cash register, leaving the other four behind.)

Customer: “Just this, please.”

Me: “Sure. Was there a problem with the other four items?”

Customer: “No, no, I still want them! Leave them there for me. I’ll come back for them.”

Me: “You’ll…come back for them? I’m sorry, ma’am. I’m afraid we don’t reserve items.”

Customer: “I’ll only be a second!”

(I decide not to say anything and continue with the transaction.)

Customer: “Wait, I want to use my coupon! It’s a 20% discount!”

(I take her coupon and bring up her new total. She pays and leaves the store. However, she immediately turns on her heel and comes back in, heading towards the change rooms where she picks up the next item on the pile and brings it to me.)

Customer: “Hello, just this, please. And I have a coupon!” *takes out another coupon*

Me: “You know, ma’am, this isn’t necessary. 20% off the total price of all the items is exactly the same as the sum of 20% off each individual item. So you can just buy all your items in a single transaction.”

Customer: “Are you stupid? If I bought them in single transaction, I’d only be getting 20% off! But I have five coupons! 20 times 5 is 100! So now, I’m getting 100% off!”

Me: *speechless*

Customer: *winks* “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone how to cheat the system!”

(I work as the HR manager at a grocery store. We often have various specialty items on display near the registers. One day, an angry customer storms in and confronts me.)

Customer: “Excuse me! Your cheese samples made me very sick!”

Me: “I’m very sorry to hear that ma’am, but I was unaware that we had cheese samples in the store today.”

Customer: “You sure do! I took a sample and my mouth was foaming before I even left the store!”

Me: “Do you mind showing me where you found the cheese sample?”

(The customer leads me to a table filled with samples.)

Customer: “It was these! See, a whole table filled with them. They’re not even being attended by anyone! They’re all rotten. I demand compensation!”

Me: “Ma’am, the reason you got sick is because these are not cheese. These are bars of soap.”

(The customer stares at wide-eyed at the table: it’s filled with unwrapped bars of specialty bath soaps which are clearly labeled as “Organic Soaps”. Realizing her mistake, she covers her mouth with her hand and runs out of the store.)

(I am rolling some fabric for sale. A woman and her daughter approach the basket full of unidentified fabrics that I’m working on.)

Customer, to her daughter: “Pregúntale a la muchacha si hay más de esta.” (“Ask the girl if there is more of this.”)

Me: “¿De cual tela, señora?” (“Which fabric, ma’am?”)

Customer: “How dare you?”

Me: “I-I’m sorry?”

Customer: “You’re all the same. How dare you assume I don’t speak English!”

Me: “Ma’am, you asked your daughter to ask me a question in Spanish instead of asking me yourself. I assumed you were more comfortable with Spanish.”

Customer: “Well, I speak English just fine.”

Me: “I see that, yes. I was just trying to make things easier–”

Customer: “I just didn’t want to speak to YOU.”

(A customer comes through my check-out line looking agitated.)

Customer: “How dare you work on a sacred day of rest!”

Me: “Excuse me?”

Customer: “Today is Sunday! Why are you here? You should be in church, you blasphemous heathen! Why are you here?”

Me: “I’m working on Sunday because there are customers that want to buy groceries on Sundays.”

(The customer immediately shut up and didn’t speak for the rest of the time I rang up his groceries).

(At our store, we sell individual tea bags for fifty cents each. Free hot tap water and a foam cup come with each bag sold. One customer, a man in his thirties, has been coming in and buying a single bag of tea every Sunday for two years, but he never takes the water or the cup.)

Customer: “I’d like a refund of $50 please.”

Me: “We don’t sell anything that expensive.”

Customer: “Well, I bought 100 of those herbal mixes and they haven’t done a d*** thing.”

Me: “You mean the tea you buy every week?”

Customer: “No, the herbal mixes in the little yellow packets.”

Me: “Yes, that’s tea.”

Customer: “You mean it won’t make my man parts larger?”

Me: “No, it’s a beverage.”

Customer: “Oh. Never mind, then.”

(He leaves, disappointed. I never saw him again.)