When I worked in a pub, this young lad came to the bar and asked for a pint and a few bottles of alcopops. I poured the pint first, placed it in front of him, and then went to get the bottles.

While I had my back turned, he picked the pint up, put it on the floor, and then had the nerve to say:

Customer: “You forgot my pint!”

Me: “There’s a camera just up there watching over everything that happens behind this bar. Smile!”

He then sheepishly picked the pint up off the floor. His face was a picture!

I work in a team store for a major university. This is THE official store for apparel and everything related to the school. Of course, other big box retailers in town carry much of the same stuff, which annoys us because it isn’t business coming to our store, but what are you going to do about it?

One day, an older guy comes in with a jacket — an expensive one.

Customer: “I bought this jacket here and I want to return it.”

That’s all well and good; it still has the tags on it.

Me: “Do you have the receipt?”

Customer: “No, I don’t.”

That’s not a big deal really; we can still work something out. I go to look at the tag to scan it and see what the system says. I don’t get as far as scanning it because the tag that is on this jacket is NOT one of ours. It is for one of the big box retailers in town, and the tag still has the name of that store on it.

Me: “This tag is from [Retailer]. I can’t take this jacket or give you a refund because you didn’t buy it from us.”

Customer: “What?! That’s ridiculous! I’m going to have you fired! In fact, I’m reporting you to the cops and the Better Business Bureau!”

He just kept yelling at me and threatening me. Eventually, he stormed out.

I still think about that very obvious attempt at getting extra money out of something.

I am working in Guest Services one day, and a lady comes up with a stand mixer.

Guest: “I was charged the wrong price for this!”

This usually comes down to a couple of factors. It could be an online-only item that was returned in-store, which has a 33% discount in order to clear it off the shelves faster. It could be an opened return that was inspected and in proper working order, also usually discounted at a similar rate for the same reason. Most often, however, the reason usually boils down to a clearance tag being placed on the wrong item, in which case, we might offer to grab the actual clearance item if we still have any in stock, or, with Team Lead approval, we might “make it right” for the guest.

This time, however, is not one of those times. She comes up with a very top-of-the-line stand mixer, worth well over $300, and I scan it with my device to confirm that it is, in fact, ringing up for the full retail value.

Customer: “But what about this price tag?”

The guest pointed to the “clearance” tag on the item, corners peeling away as if it had been removed from something and affixed onto the mixer in a hurry, reading, “Was: $7.99 Now $2.40”. I checked the item number on the tag to confirm what I had suspected; the clearance tag was for a pair of socks.

The discount was not honored, and she left the store without the mixer.

A customer came to the register with a crate of a few bottles of wine, and he handed me just one. This is pretty normal for people who are buying a lot of one thing so they don’t have to put everything on the counter. I put it in as eight bottles of that wine, which were about 6€ per bottle.

A few days later, when the wine department was doing inventory, they noticed a number of bottles of more expensive wine (about 30€ per bottle) were missing, but the register system didn’t show any being sold. They reviewed the security footage and found my customer in front of the shelf filling the crate with one bottle of the cheap wine and the rest with the expensive one, which looked identical. It was the same brand and vineyard but different years or something. Of course, he told me they were all the same cheaper wine, and I blindly trusted that because, A) people do this all the time, B) I didn’t know there were identical-looking wines with such a huge price differential, and C) he was a somewhat regular customer; I’d definitely seen him before, and the people who stole from us or scammed us usually only came once.

We’ve also had people trying to scam cashiers by asking them to exchange large bills and break them up into smaller ones and then constantly changing their minds on how they want the bills broken up to confuse the cashier into accidentally giving them more money than they were asking to exchange. It did work on a few people, and that actually led to a policy change; we’re not allowed to exchange anything above ten bucks now. Initially, it was actually no exchanges at all, but that led to a lot of customers getting upset at us when they’d try to get a coin for a cart or change for the copy machine and be told no.

I worked at a coffee chain inside of a retail chain. Because it was in a retail chain, we didn’t have our own phone line and we didn’t do online orders.

Customer: “I got a bad drink last time I was here. I called and a guy here said I could come in and get a free drink.”

My coworker overheard this.

Coworker: “A guy specifically?”

Customer: “Yes.”

Coworker: “That’s interesting. I’m the only man that works here.”