Unfiltered Story #159875

(Today is the first day of my store’s big clearance sale, where all clearance items are an additional 30% off the orange sticker price. A woman comes up with a pile of items and I begin ringing them up. A few scans in, we encounter a problem.)

Customer: No, no, no. Those all have clearance tags on them. They’re ringing up as full price!

(I look down at the clothes and see that these are all new merchandise items we have just put out on the floor today, all ranging about $30-$40 a piece. However, they all have orange stickers on their tags for less than $10, albeit a little torn and obviously tampered with.)

Me: I’m sorry ma’am, but we just got these in today. They’re at the front of the store, and our clearance is in the back. There’s no way these are supposed to be marked down as clearance.

Customer: Well, they have the stickers on them! I should get 30% off that clearance price!

Me: I’m sorry, I don’t know how they got there. And I’m really not allowed to do overrides this big, I could get in trouble.

Customer: But someone messed up, that’s not my fault! I should get what the sticker says, plus my percentage off!

(Though very uncommon, there are times when our markdown team may mark the wrong items down on clearance. I quickly have someone check the identical items on the floor, and of course none of the others have clearance stickers. At this point it’s becoming very clear that the woman tore the stickers off actual clearance merchandise and put them on these new items. At the same time, my manager comes up to help.)

Customer: These have clearance stickers on them, but she won’t give me the clearance sale price!

Manager: I’m sorry, but the best we can do is give you the sticker price. I can’t give you the additional percentage off.

Customer: That’s ridiculous! You’re robbing me!

Manager: It’s the best I can do. This is already a bigger override than our policy allows.

(The woman huffed for a while, but in the end only bought one of the items, and my manager gave her the fake sticker price. Sometimes I wish we would actually stick to policy and not give in to customers like this… hopefully she never tries it again!)