I’m at a local chain home improvement store. I needed lawn chairs and asked an employee where they were in the store. He looked at me dumbfounded.

Employee #1: “Lawn… chairs?”

Me: “Yeah… they fold up. Portable. Not like patio furniture.”

Employee #1: “…and they’re portable, you say?” 

I would have thought it was just an off occurrence, but he called over two more employees for help.

Employee #2: “Chairs… for lawns?”

Employee #3: “And… portable?”

Employee #2: “And they fold up, you say?”

Me: “Am… I in a Monty Python sketch?”

None of them knew what I was talking about. I had to go to a different store entirely.

Customer: “Where’s your Home Improvement section?”

Me: “Sir, this is a hardware store, so it’s pretty much all Home Improvement. You need to be more specific.”

Customer: “Oh, sorry. I’m trying to improve my home, specifically.” *Waits expectantly.*

CONTENT WARNING: Injury detail.

A woman is buying a boxed metal shed. It’s basically a giant pile of sheet metal in cardboard. We pull the first box down.

Coworker: “This one’s ripped.”

One corner is torn open, and sharp metal is sticking out.

Me: “Yeah, not safe. Let’s grab another one.”

We lean the damaged one aside and start loading the second box. My coworker bumps the first box. It tips, and I jump back. It misses my left leg and slams into my right calf.

Me: “Ouch! I’m fine, it’s okay.”

I look down and see a few scratches, but nothing too crazy. I finish loading the good box onto the cart. Then I notice the customer staring at me like she’s seen a ghost.

Customer: “Oh my god…”

I look down. My sock is turning red. I pull it away. There’s open skin on my ankle and something white inside.

Me: “…That doesn’t look great.”

I calmly walk inside and see a guy from appliances.

Me: “Hey, do you have any paper towels?”

Coworker: “I think the next department—”

I lift my pant leg. He goes pale, grabs a chair, and a roll.

Coworker: “—Sit. Sit down!”

My manager shows up, followed closely by a worried-looking HR rep.

HR Rep: “We need to drug test you.”

She sticks a strip in my mouth with practically zero warning.

HR Rep: “Can you drive yourself to the hospital?”

Me: “I don’t know where it is, and my driving foot is bleeding. Isn’t this what ambulances are for?”

A manager sighs.

Manager: “I’ll take you.”

At the ER, he pushes me in a wheelchair to the desk and disappears.

My fiancée arrives just in time to watch me lose it when they start sticking needles all around my ankle. That was my first time ever getting stitches.

I woke up the next morning to a long email from HR asking me to sign a bunch of documents immediately.

Nice try.

I sent them to my aunt, a lawyer, who told me, ‘DO NOT SIGN!’ She told me I might not be able to get any compensation from the company as my injury isn’t life-threatening, but they do have to give me as much time off as I need to recover, without fear of losing my job or position.

So that’s how I got four weeks off paid. Don’t sign HR forms without looking them over, people!

I work in a store that specializes in flat-pack furniture. I get a call from a customer on the support line:

Customer: “I got this cabinet from you and built it, but it wobbles!”

Me: “That’s odd. It should be stable after you’ve slotted the board into the back. Maybe it’s not slotted in correctly?”

Customer: “I didn’t put that in! It’s a useless piece of cardboard and ugly as f***! I want people to see my nice wallpaper behind the cabinet!”

Me: “…Well, good news! I think we’ve identified the source of your wobble.”

Customer: “Oh, really? How? You haven’t even sent anyone out yet…”

I turned sixteen right as I started working part-time. At the aproned home improvement store that employed me, there were four main assignments for cashiers: Self-Checkout, Garden, the inside normal register, and the Pro Desk register.

As a trainee, I was to stay only at the self-checkout or the normal inside register as I learned to do my job. While this taught me the ropes, it left me inexperienced in the less-than-ideal assignment: Pro Desk.

As the name implies, the Pro Desk is where professionals (carpenters, plumbers, electricians, etc.) come to do business and check out. It was constantly slammed, and customers often purchased thousands of dollars of merchandise in multiple carts per transaction. If you were a cashier at this register, customers often expected you to have comprehensive professional knowledge in each and every construction-related discipline, and ring everything up faster than the Flash. It was especially busy in the early morning, when many contractors would get their supplies to use at their jobs later in the day. 

And of course, when it came time for me to have my first solo assignment, barely-sixteen year old part-timer me was assigned an eight-and-a-half-hour Saturday morning shift at the Pro Desk register.

The shift is a panicked blur in my memory. At one point, I had to stop checking out customers in order to do a cash strip, and in the time it took me to count and send up the $3,000 in spare bills I had accumulated, my line grew from two to over ten customers, each with at least a single full cart. 

Right at the end of this rush, the final customer had four full carts, which totaled over $1,500 in plumbing materials. He muttered under his breath about how long I took the whole time and insisted I move faster.

I rushed through until I was stopped by a single PVC plumbing part, which didn’t scan properly. I tried typing in the code by hand, scanning it from different angles, but no dice. I asked him if he knew what the part was called, and he simply began cussing me out for not knowing it already, and then admitted he didn’t know the name of it either. I paged my manager as I began to frantically search our website to see if I could find it online.

Customer: “Are you f****** kidding me? They put a r*****ed kid on the register just in time for me to come through. Figures.”

He continues in this manner. Finally, after minutes of spouting verbal abuse at me, the now-crying cashier…

Customer: “I can’t believe this s***ty service! Over at [Competitor], they’d never—”

The customer froze. Then, he rifled in his pockets before pulling out a crumpled receipt from [Competitor].

Customer: “Oh, I bought that part at [Competitor]. Forgot I brought it in to make sure it’d fit.” *Laughs.*

He then finished checking out in silence as I continued to cry quietly, then left.

What a warm welcome to retail that was. I still remember it close to ten years later, so clearly it left a positive impression.