Sales Are Not A New Concept

I don’t know about anybody else, but any time I tell the customer their total and they look at me confused or irritated, dread just washes over me.

I work at a place that sells gardening supplies. Over Memorial Day weekend, we had a lot of big sales on our gardening stuff. For one of them, all of our dirt and mulch was $2 per bag. Usually, those are somewhere between $2.50 to $5 depending on the brand. The sale ended a few days after Memorial Day, and our dirt went back to the usual price.

This happened shortly after Memorial Day. A man came up to the register to buy some bags of dirt.

Me: “Okay, those are going to be $4.56 per bag.”

Customer: “They’re supposed to be $2.”

Me: “We had a sale over Memorial Day weekend that just ended. They’re $4.56 now.”

Customer: “They just doubled in price overnight? That’s unreasonable.”

Me: “No, they were on sale. That’s their normal price.”

Customer: *Unhappy* “I was in here a few days ago, and they were $2. Someone took it down, but there was a sign saying they were $2.”

Yes, really. I keep trying to politely reiterate that they had been on sale and that’s why they were more expensive now than they had been a few days before. I had to tell a few people that during that week, and this was the only time I had a problem. The guy started ranting to his wife about how my store just raised the price, and they left. I swear, the guy wasn’t even listening to me while I was trying to explain that we didn’t just raise the price that day because we felt like it.