Anyone who has worked as a cashier knows that some customers can react adversely when their card payment doesn’t go through. Some people just take their card declining as a personal attack for some reason. I’m going to tell you about the worst customer like this that I ever had.

At first, everything was normal. I put their groceries through. We exchanged small talk. No problems. Until their card declined. Suddenly, it was like a switch flipped and the customer went from being pleasant to outright nasty in an instant.

Customer: “Why have you rejected my card? I have money! I have thousands of pounds in my bank! Why won’t you take my card?!”

When a card declines, we usually get a code that tells us why. The code I got was a generic network error code, which usually just means something along the chain of different systems timed out. It happens.

Me: “I’m sorry, sir. Sometimes the system glitches out. You can put your card in and try—”

Customer: “How dare you?! F****** idiot! I make more money than you can imagine. How dare you refuse my card?!”

Me: “The card machine rejected it, not me, and it was because of a system error. It has nothing to do with how much money was in the bank—”

Customer: “I have plenty of money!”

Me: “I understand. But it was just a network error. If you put your card back in and try again, it should go through—”

The customer started screaming, going on and on about how he’d never been so insulted, how much money he had, and how it was more than an idiot like me could ever hope to make, as well as calling me a stream of names.

I called a manager over and started to explain the error code, but the customer interrupted and yelled that I accused him of having no money. The manager explained exactly what I explained to him: that it was just a network issue. Nobody was accusing him of anything.

My manager tried to convince him to put his card in and try again, but the customer paid in cash instead and stormed out.

A few minutes later, the customer stormed back into the store, marched up to me, and shoved a slip of paper in my face. It was a printed balance slip. The customer had gone out to the cash point (ATM) attached to our store and printed out a balance statement just so he could shove it in my face.

Customer: “See! F****** b****! F*** you!”

Then, he stormed back out grinning smugly.

I’m in line at an independent grocery store in my small town when I first moved here. The lady in front of me is very elderly, buying just two small cans of cat food and a tin of baked beans. She seems a little perplexed by her surroundings but is polite enough to the girl behind the counter.

I watch her step up to the counter, the lady scans her items, and then the customer walks away! I am a bit shocked at the brazen theft, but the cashier just prints out a little receipt, puts it to one side, and waves me over.

Me: “Did… did that old lady just steal that stuff?”

Cashier: “Nope, watch this.”

A woman in her forties dashes in, puts the tins back on the counter, winks at the cashier, and darts out again. The cashier puts the items back in the go-back trolley and scribbles something on the receipt.

Cashier: “She has Alzheimer’s and forgets completely after about two minutes. She lives up the street with her daughter, and it’s good exercise for her to walk down here every day, so her daughter follows behind her, we let her shop for whatever she fancies that day, and then [Daughter] ‘just so happens’ to run into her outside the doors and offers to take her to the cafe for lunch. She’s always so excited to go to the cafe that she just never notices [Daughter] bringing the things back inside.”

Me: “I… Wow. That’s a lovely thing you guys do for them.”

Cashier: “Eh, it costs us zero dollars to let her feel a bit happy and do something normal for five minutes a day. I’ll be sad when she’s not in here every day anymore. One night, she came in here right on close in her nightie. We had to distract her for a bit so one of us could run and get [Daughter]. She was sorting shelves for us while she waited!”

A bit of faith in humanity was restored. I do see the old dear and her daughter walking back from the cafe most afternoons when I’m on my lunch break, and it always makes me smile that the girls at the grocery shop are looking out for her.

I stopped by the grocery store on a Saturday evening. Predictably, it was packed, and given that there were two universities nearby and only two lanes where alcohol could be purchased, the lines at those lanes were especially long.

I was buying a six-pack along with my groceries, so I settled in to wait. In front of me were four college students with a case of beer. It took about fifteen minutes for the students to reach the register. The cashier asked to see their IDs, and three of them showed them to her. The fourth held up his phone, showing her a picture.

Cashier: “If you don’t have an ID, I can’t sell this to you.”

Student #1: “I don’t have my wallet, but I have a picture of my ID.”

Cashier: “I can’t… I mean, I can’t take that.”

Student #2: “But it’s his ID, though.”

Cashier: “No, it’s the law. I can’t accept a photo; it has to be a physical ID. I can’t sell this to any of you if someone in your group has no ID.”

Student #1: “Oh, really? D***, that sucks.”

Student #3: “Bro, we waited in that whole line…”

They left. I unloaded my groceries, putting the alcohol first, and I had my driver’s license ready before the cashier asked for it.

Cashier: “Thank you. Sorry about the wait.”

Me: “Not your fault. Who tries to buy alcohol with a photo of their ID and thinks that’s going to work?”

Cashier: “Right?! Thank you for saying that. Like, I’m sorry, but it’s the law, and I have bills and I have tuition. I’m not trying to get fired over this.”

Me: “Also, why do they need four people to carry one case of beer? That guy could have just waited outside.”

Cashier: “Yup! They could have sent just two people in, and I never would have known!”

Related:
No ID, No Idea, Part 50
No ID, No Idea, Part 49
No ID, No Idea, Part 48
No ID, No Idea, Part 47
No ID, No Idea, Part 46

I’m at the store where I work, buying ingredients for my wife’s favorite dinner and some of her favorite treats. I’m joking with my coworkers that are ringing me up but seriously explaining that I am, in fact, kind of the worst right now and my wife is rightfully annoyed at me, so this is an “I’m Sorry” dinner.

Coworker #1: “I mean… I don’t know. You can’t be that bad.”

Coworker #2: “To be fair, neither of us is married to you, but what could you have done that warrants cheesecake, strawberries, a homemade dinner, and a promise to clean the house yourself tomorrow, on top of all the apologies you’ve already given?”

Me: “Ah, well, the first thing you have to understand is that everything that happened to make her day awful was directly caused by something I did or didn’t do… that she reminded me to do or told me not to do. For example: an ant hill was built right beside one of our windows, so we’re battling a slight ant infestation right now, so we need to be really careful about not leaving food out. I didn’t scrape out any of my dishes from yesterday, and I left them right beside that window.”

Coworker #1: “…oh, no.”

Me: “Yeeeeah. She woke up to find ants everywhere. My fault entirely. Once she dealt with that, she realized our cats were fighting.”

Coworker #2: “Well that’s not your fault!”

Me: “In this case, it is. One of our cats will forget the other and become territorial if the other cat is gone too long, and we both know this. I’m in school to be a vet. We’re supposed to take them to vet appointments together to avoid this. I only took one cat because I didn’t want to deal with both of the carriers while walking. Now they have to be kept completely separate from each other for a week minimum, and we live in a one-room apartment with no way to separate them. She’s been scratched already.”

Coworker #2: “Oh. Okay, yeah, that’s kind of your fault.”

Me: “One of them peed on her game console, and now it won’t turn on.”

Coworker #1: “No! Aw, okay. I’d be pissed, too, especially if you knew it was a problem and just didn’t do the solution.”

Me: *Nodding* “Yeah, I totally screwed that up. And then…”

Coworker #1: “There’s more?“

Me: “I’m really bad about losing my keys, and we keep having to pay our landlord to change our locks and get new keys. So, my wife made a firm rule: keys go in the bowl by the door. Always. No exceptions, ever.”

Coworker #2: “Right, that makes sense.”

Coworker #1: “I need that rule, to be honest. I’ve lost so many keys over the years.”

Me: “Well, I… couldn’t find my keys, and I was running out the door to work, so I just took hers. And I didn’t tell her. And she had a doctor’s appointment. She had to leave the apartment with no keys because she couldn’t get a hold of me to ask where the keys were.”

Coworker #1: “Uh-oh.”

Me: *Wincing* “She was getting her broken foot looked at, with its also broken toe, after she’d walked on the broken foot for over a month not realizing it was broken. She’s under strict orders to stay off her feet as much as possible right now, and she had to come into my work, get my keys, and then walk half a mile home on a broken foot because I lost my keys again.”

Coworker #2: “…dude.”

Me: “I wasn’t kidding; I’m kind of the worst right now. I think if we had a couch, I’d be sleeping on it tonight. This all happened today.”

Coworker #1: “I think you also owe her some flowers.”

Yes, I got the flowers, too!

During high school, I had a part-time job at a grocery store. We had a lot of cashiers quit and desperately needed more cashiers. At the time, I was making $10.50 an hour. Our general manager made a promotion where any cashiers hired got paid $11.25 an hour. So, I went to talk to my manager.

Me: “Since you’re going to start paying new cashiers $11.25 an hour, can I have a raise to that amount?”

Manager: “No, that’s only for new hires.”

After about two weeks, I got fed up with being the only one who knew how to run the registers because I was really the only one with experience. I was training employees who were making more than me. I asked again to be on the same level as the people I was training and was turned down. I realized that the promotion ended in about a month, so I talked with my parents about my plan.

I waited until I knew that my manager was going to struggle because of people already asking for time off. I went in to my shift and talked to him.

Me: “I quit. Here’s my time card, here are my keys, and here is my vest.”

Manager: “Whoa, wait. Let’s talk about this.”

Me: “No.”

And I walked straight out.

I enjoyed the weekend off and hung out with friends more often than I normally did and didn’t work at all that week.

On Friday — a week and a day later — I went to the website and applied again. I was called in for an interview with my former manager. He seemed relieved and smug that I was coming back, but at the end of the interview, I asked:

Me: “Since I am a new hire, I get the new hire bonus pay, right? Also, [Coworker] gave me her referral code, so I get the referral bonus, as well, right?”

I could tell he was very unhappy, but I did end up getting both.

I missed three days of work but ended up making more from the referral bonus ($250) and got myself a $.75 raise.