Asking For Their Pound Of Flesh

Working in a small grocery store in an affluent area, we get a lot of privileged, insane customers.

Each week, our store emails three coupons to customers on our mailing list. These coupons are very popular, and we usually see a few hundred a day. One week, one of the coupons is for half off a nice cut of steak.

At around 7:00 pm on a Friday, the store is starting to calm down just after the dinner rush. A customer comes to my check stand, visibly upset, with a package of said steak in his hand. Before I can get a word out, he holds the steak to my face.

Customer: “Tell me exactly the total package weight.”

Me: “It weighs exactly 1.015 pounds.”

I will always remember that number.

Customer: “I asked the meat department to give me a cut that weighed exactly one pound!”

To those who haven’t worked with meat, it is incredibly hard to get an exact weight and customers are usually okay with a little extra.

Me: “We can go over to the meat department and have them trim off some of the weight?”

Customer: *Getting angrier* “I don’t want the meat cut. I want to only be charged for the one pound I requested!”

Being new to the store, I didn’t know how to respond, so I called one of my managers over. The customer loudly repeated his story and request to the manager, insisting that we could and should do this.

My manager replied with the same solution of returning to the meat department, again setting the customer off. This process was repeated verbatim to another manager and eventually the store manager. Eventually, my manager told me to only charge him for the one pound and give him a 10% discount.

To top it all off, the customer had left his coupon at home and insisted we still honor it, which my store manager agreed to do. In the end, the guy had maybe saved $1.30 with the reduced weight price and discount, yet still decided to spend twenty minutes tearing me and half of the staff new ones.

Working in a grocery store has made me hate people.