Customer: “I’m looking for sugar-free candy without any food dyes, organic, and sweetened with natural sweeteners, like honey. Nothing artificial.”
Coworker: “I’m terribly sorry, we don’t have anything that fits that description.”
Customer: *Disbelievingly.* “Really! Isn’t this a candy store?”
Coworker: “Yes, and I think you are thinking of actual fruit.”
Back when Pokémon Go was really in swing, I made friends with another player whose job brought him to the mall most days. One day, he comes into my store, and I excitedly challenge him to a Pokémon battle.
My coworker knows nothing about Pokémon OR my mall friend. So, what SHE sees is me leaping to my feet and yelling at a uniformed police officer:
Me: “FIGHT ME!”
Related:
Here We Pokémon Go Again, Part 45
Here We Pokémon Go Again, Part 44
Here We Pokémon Go Again, Part 43
Here We Pokémon Go Again, Part 42
Here We Pokémon Go Again, Part 41
Many moons ago, I used to help run a sports scheme for my local municipal area in my country during the school holidays. Kids aged five to twelve could come along, their parents would pay a heavily subsidised small nominal fee, and get a cool four-hour sports session of soccer, basketball, tennis, etc. It ran very successfully and was really popular.
Around halftime, there would be a break to get a drink and a snack. There was a little 7-Eleven-style store just around the corner from the field/grass where we ran the scheme, so kids could get refreshments if they had money. We tended to walk everyone down there as there was a nice seating area outside the shop.
The trouble was, the kids started buying the most sugary snacks, candy, and drinks they could, and ended up hyper for the next hour, then had a sugar crash and were irritable little horrors for the final half hour. Magically, they’d all be fine about pick-up time.
To get around this, I banned the kids from buying anything sugary, and only savory snacks or fruit with water could be purchased. This lasted two days before the entitled parents of these little darlings complained to my boss that I wasn’t letting their kids buy whatever the h*** they wanted.
I was told by my boss to just let them buy whatever they wanted again, because apparently, “you’re not their dentist, it doesn’t matter what they buy!”
Fine, you wanna play rough, let’s do this.
From then on, we didn’t go to the shop at half-time, we went forty-five minutes before the end. They had just enough time to get super annoying and hyper before it was home time, then their parents had to deal with their sugary carnage at home. I kept it that way till the end of the summer and felt so much delight at these entitled a**holes having to deal with their own kids being awful, day after day.
The next summer, nobody complained when I went back to regulating their purchases at snack time. Win-win!
When I was thirteen or fourteen, I decided I wanted a PlayStation 3. My dad refused to buy me one, but my uncle made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. He said that if I worked at his sweets shop for the two months of summer break, he would buy me a PS3 and some games in lieu of payment. For teenage me with no commitments, this seemed fantastic!
[Uncle] sold a kind of specialty snack known as a mini-samosa in his shop. They are like samosas but smaller, about 3.5 to 4 cm in size (about 1/2286 of a football field for my American friends). They were sold by weight in sealed packs of 250 gms and 500 gms as these were the most common amounts people bought.
Making those packages turned out to be my job. At some point after [Uncle] started his business, he realized that 250 gms was roughly the weight of twenty-eight mini-samosas and thus fifty-six were 500 gms. So, instead of weighing each packet, I was told to just pack by counting individual items, which was easier and saved time. We also sold them individually for people who wanted larger, smaller, or unusual amounts.
This was also around the time when our government started airing customer awareness PSAs (“Jaago Grahak, Jaago,” for my fellow Indians) — basically, telling customers to beware of fraudulent businesspeople.
One particularly hot afternoon, it was just [Uncle] and me at the shop. In India, frequent powercuts were very common during summers and thus there were no fans or AC running. Both tempers and temperatures were running high at the shop that day.
It was then that the villain of our story made his entry. He was a local resident and a regular. He seemed angry from the onset when he barged into the shop. He took a look at the fans and saw that they weren’t running, and then he angrily picked up a 500-gm pack of samosas.
Customer: “How many samosas are in this thing?”
Me: “That’s 500 gms.”
Customer: “I asked how many, not how much! Again, how many in this?”
I replied immediately since, you know, I had packed them.
Me: “Fifty-six.”
Customer: “How can you be so sure? You didn’t even count! You’re trying to cheat me! I demand that you pack me 500 gms of those individual ones, and don’t you dare cheat me again!”
I looked over at my uncle who was wet with sweat and fanning himself with yesterday’s newspaper. He slowly nodded, and I beamed a huge smile.
Me: “Sure, sir! Whatever you want!”
I took a bag, picked up some samosas, and started putting them on the balance. I kept counting samosas as I put them in until they were a little over 500 gms. Then, I removed the last samosa, and the weight fell below 500. Now, keeping eye contact with the customer, I crushed the samosa and started putting its powdery remains in the bag until it was exactly 500 gms.
But wait, there’s more! The guy apparently didn’t seem to mind powdered samosa but instead asked:
Customer: *Smugly* “So, how many samosas now?”
Me: *Triumphantly* “Forty-eight!”
You see, sometime in the past, my uncle’s old chef had retired, and the new chef made samosas with a little bit more filling in them. They looked the same size on the outside and only weighed a couple of grams more each, and since he made them in bulk and also sold to other shops in the area, the price wasn’t too much of an issue, so [Uncle] let it slide. But those couple of grams added up on mass orders, and that is what this customer found out the hard way.
He looked sheepishly at the pre-packed samosas and then at his own package and asked if he could buy the former instead.
My uncle finally spoke.
Uncle: “No, my nephew made a package specially for you, at your own request, so that is what you have to buy.”
The man silently took his pack, paid, and left. He was a lot more respectful during his subsequent visits.
I was reminded of this story yesterday when my PS3 finally died.
As a candy store, we’re involved in a promotional campaign for the latest Willy Wonka movie and we sell novelty ‘Wonka’ chocolate bars. A customer is browsing some of our chocolates and spots the bars.
Customer: “Are those real Wonka bars?”
Me: “They’re real chocolate, yes. They’re part of the promotional campaign for—”
Customer: “—wow! So they come from his chocolate factory?”
Me: “Well, actually, I think they come from a factory in Illinois, but it’s—”
Customer: “—wow! So that’s a real place! With the little munchkins?”
Me: “I think you mean Oompa Loompas, but no, that’s just in the movie, which is actually based on a book. This company just—”
Customer: “—wow! I didn’t know that was a real place! Amazing! I need to visit sometime so I can swim in that chocolate river.”
Realizing now that he’s not listening to a word I’m saying, I figure I might as well turn this useless conversation into a potential sale.
Me: “Would you like to buy one?”
Customer: “Yes! You never know; I might win a golden ticket!”
Hey… a sale is a sale.
