I am an assistant manager at a pharmacy. We’re just a few blocks from a small retirement community, so we have quite a few senior citizen customers.

I have just finished a midnight shift and I am getting ready to leave when one of our elderly regulars wheels a cart full of merchandise to the front register. I have spoken to this particular customer many times, and she has always been very courteous, even going so far as to bring us baked goods around the holidays.

The cashier who’s working today is one of our best employees. He always goes out of his way to be nice to our customers, and he is mentioned by name on customer service surveys several times a week. He is Black, which is relevant to what’s about to happen.

Loss prevention has a very strict guideline that the register has to be manned at all times, so the cashiers are supposed to call another employee if a customer needs help finding something.

The cashier is about halfway through scanning this woman’s order.

Customer: “Do you have any more of the cases of water that are on sale?”

Cashier: “I’m not sure, but I can have someone check for you.”

He starts to call for someone on the intercom, but since I am right there, I say:

Me: “I’ll check for you!”

I head for the stockroom. As soon as I turn away from the register, I hear the customer speak in a very loud and angry voice.

Customer: “Why can’t you go look, you lazy f****** [N-word]?”

I freeze for a few seconds. I’ve heard plenty of racial slurs growing up in a rural area, but they’ve usually been whispered, and only after the speaker made sure the coast was clear. I’d never heard someone go full pre-Civil Rights Deep South before.

Then, I come back to life.

Me: “You need to leave.”

Customer: “What? No! I need my stuff!”

Me: “No. You have been asked to leave, so now you are trespassing. If you don’t leave immediately, I will call the police.”

She finally leaves, but not before she tells us that she is going to get both of us fired.

Sure enough, she calls the corporate office and complains. I have already emailed the district manager and the regional vice president in anticipation because I know she will leave out the racial slur from her complaint.

That leads to the most awkward conference call in history. The cashier, store manager, and I are on the call with [District Manager] and [Vice President]. [Vice President] says, in the most uncomfortable voice I have ever heard:

VP: “So, it’s, um… my understanding that she called you the, uh… the N-word?”

Cashier: “No, she called me a n***er.”

Talk about tension you could cut with a knife.

To their credit, corporate actually banned the woman from the store. That surprised me because brick-and-mortar retailers are so desperate for customers that they’ll tolerate all manner of despicable behavior to keep a customer from giving their business to a competitor.

I never had to enforce the ban because the customer never came back. In a way, that made her an even grosser excuse for a human being. If she came back and tried to shop like nothing had happened, then her outburst might have been attributed to a moment of senility, but the fact that she never came back tells me she knew what she said and how horrible it was.

I have a “customer” who has stolen from us in the past, and then tried to return things without a receipt, including an entire cake!

This customer brings up a $30 pharmacy item to return.

Me: “Do you have a receipt?”

Customer: “No. I’m returning it on behalf of an old lady I work for.”

Me: “I can’t do no-receipt returns, especially for pharmacy items.”

Customer: “She’s 78!”

Me: “That doesn’t matter.”

Customer: “I hope you don’t make it to 78!”

Me: “I hope I don’t either.” 

She did not like that answer.

I take Ritalin for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). 

Me: “Hi there. I’m here to refill my prescription for Ritalin.”

I provide my personal details, and the pharmacy clerk accesses my file.

Pharmacy Clerk: “There are no further renewals on your prescription.”

Me: “Oh, that’s disappointing. Well, I’ll call my doctor and ask him to submit a renewal. I’m surprised because normally when it’s my last renewal, you put a sticker on the pill bottle to remind me.”

Pharmacy Clerk: “Well, we don’t do that systematically.”

Me: “I see. Could you please put a note on my file to ask the clerks to do that systematically for me? I find it really helpful in reminding me to make sure my prescriptions are renewed.”

Pharmacy Clerk: “Well, sir, you have to take some responsibility for your own treatment and pay attention to these things.”

Me: “…Do you recall what condition Ritalin is prescribed for?”

We are having a 75% off Christmas sale. I go to the register with my loot and apparently there’s a 25% and 50% off button, but not 75%.

Cashier: “I’ll take off the 50% and then the 25%.”

Me: “No, that is not 75% off, you’d have to do the 50% twice.”

Cashier: *Confused.* “No, that would make it free.”

Me: “If you have a dollar and you take 50% of that, it’s fifty cents. If you take 50% off of that, it’s twenty-five cents.”

Cashier: “No, fifty plus fifty makes a hundred.”

He was still confused but called a manager and she let it go through. I still feel, twenty years later, that they still thought I was cheating the system or something somehow. 

Related:
Not Even Fractionally Getting It

I was going to refill my prescriptions. One of them was more urgent than the other, and of course, that one was not in stock anywhere, nor were any of the recommended substitutes.

I booked an appointment with my doctor who, just like me, started looking through stock. Eventually, she found one that had the same medicine in another dosage, which could be adapted to what I needed, so she wrote a new prescription.

Doctor: “You know, they recommend you to build up a stock now because of situations like this.”

Me: “But I can’t take out that much.”

Doctor: “I’ve written prescriptions to last you for half a year.”

I went to the pharmacy and checked how much I could take out and, as usual, I could only take out medicine for one month and get more when that month neared the end.

Me: “My doctor said she wrote a prescription so I could take out more.”

Pharmacist: “I’m sorry, but the prescription is for one month, and then it can be refilled. But it only says one month at a time.”

Me: “Isn’t it the state recommending that we build up a supply?”

Pharmacist: “Yes, that is correct.”

Me: “So, how am I supposed to do that, then?”

Pharmacist: “Well, your doctor could prescribe you for three months at a time, but then you’d have to wait three months before taking out more, so I honestly don’t know.”

Me: “Could my doctor write that I should have more than three months?”

Pharmacist: “Perhaps, but we aren’t allowed to hand out for more than three months, as that would be illegal.”

Recommendations are good and all, but please make sure we are allowed to follow them.