My company has a hard policy of absolutely no discounts; all customers pay the list price, period. This really peeves some purchasing agents who are used to bullying or guilting other distributors into discounts, but it’s easy to stay cheerful and keep your “customer service” voice on when you know you can’t give in even if you wanted to.

Caller: “I’m checking pricing on your [part number].”

Me: “Sure, that’s $134.47.”

Caller: “That’s what it says on your website.”

Me: *Cheerfully* “Yes.”

Caller: “But what’s my price?”

Me: “$134.47. All our customers pay the same price.”

Caller: “Are you firm on that? Can’t you do any better on the price?”

Me: “I’m sorry, but there’s no price break on this item.”

Caller: “Well, that’s stupid.”

Me: “We have them in stock. Did you need a formal quote?”

Caller: “I can get it cheaper somewhere else.”

Me: *Still cheerfully* “Okay.”

He pauses, clearly not expecting that reaction.

Caller: “I could probably buy two from your competitor for that price.”

Me: *Even more cheerfully* “Okay.”

Caller: “I’d probably call back screaming that I’m having a heart attack if I paid that much and got just one.”

Me: “I’m sorry to hear that. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”

Click.

Just because I was curious, I looked up the part he was asking about with our competitor. They were charging about $100 less… with a four- to six-week lead time. Ours was in stock and would ship the same day. You get what you pay for, folks.

I was running a small cafe in a wee seaside town for what was SUPPOSED to be a month. It turned into nine months because of complications with the owner’s surgery, but it was mostly fun, fine, and a little eye-opening… until this woman came in.

[Woman] had decided to make her own business from home selling vegan-meatball-type things.

Me: “That’s lovely, but we make everything in our kitchen and cabinets ourselves, and we are proud of it.”

She would not accept this as an answer and actually threw two of these balls over the counter at me to give to the owner. I knew now why my friendly waitress called me from the back to deal with this woman.

After assuring her that I would pass them on, she demanded the owner’s personal number. There was no way in h*** I was about to give that over. [Woman] argued, and argued, and then argued a bit more, getting a bit louder in the process. Finally, I told her:

Me: “What about your rude bulls*** attitude makes you think we’d even consider working with you?”

As she was standing there with her mouth open, I saw, tucked under the till, a single blue card: one of our not-used-in-over-a-year business cards that had been discovered in an old folder a few days earlier.

I handed that over without a word. [Woman] snatched it like a child and stomped out and waited by our wall-length windows. The look on her face when I answered the call from inside the shop was the best part of the week. I’d already said she wasn’t getting anyone’s personal number, so why she thought I had broken and given her anything other than the shop number was beyond me.

Client: “We would like to get notifications for unplanned outages 3-4 days in advance.”

A woman wants to open a student account because she’s going for her PhD. I make small talk as I’m bringing up the procedure for account opening pre-checks. All is well until she mentions that it’s going to be a joint account with her husband.

Terms of the account state that it’s only available as a sole account because the usual holder is eighteen to twenty-one years old and not married.

Me: “If you’d like, I can open the account as a secondary account, and you can use Internet banking to send money between the accounts as needed. You’ll still reap the benefits for yourself.”

Nope. She goes on a rampage.

Caller: “I want to speak to your manager!”

My manager comes over, I explain, and it’s a new one to my manager. She explains to the woman what I’ve explained, tries to find a workaround, and even tries the account-opening team for their workaround, and gets nothing.

Caller: “In that case, I want to complain.”

That was okay — quick and easy and would get her off the phone quicker. She was still ranting and raving, trying to make it seem like the banks didn’t want married women going into science, proper head-bashing stuff.

I hope the complaint team had fun with that case.

Client: “What?! What do you mean you haven’t even started yet? A brief? A brief is just a courtesy!”

Reply from a client when we informed them that we hadn’t started – let alone finished – a highly complex digital tool they needed as we hadn’t been briefed on it.  The first we heard of it was a week before when they casually said ‘oh by the way, we need a new digital tool’ at the end of a conversation about something else and we said ‘great, happy to look into this, let’s set up a briefing’.