My family is originally from upstate New York and moved to Florida about nine years ago. I feel this part is worth mentioning because up north, I never really heard people use “sir” or “ma’am”, it was often “hun” or “bud”, at least in my small town.

When I first moved down here, I myself was chewed out by a customer when I said, “What can I get for you, hun?” …and she thought it was incredibly rude of me and told me I should address her as “ma’am”.

Then, when I briefly moved back up north, I had a different woman get mad at me for calling her “ma’am” because she felt it was the same as me calling her “old.” You just can’t win.

Normal, decent human beings don’t get their panties all in a bunch over something so small (I suggest customers like this start wearing their own name tags so we can know what they want to be called), so this isn’t a common occurrence.

Anyway, on to what happened to my mom. 

She works in Online Grocery Pickup at Walmart, and for the most part, she likes her job. She’s been doing it for two years and is now a team lead, and she loves her staff, and they love her. Unfortunately, with the higher position, she’s now the one who has to deal with the terrible customers.

One day, a man came to pick up the groceries his wife ordered. He was very nice but didn’t understand the process, so he had his wife on the phone. She had placed two separate orders (one for her and one for a friend of hers), but my mom could only find one order under the wife’s name.

My mother explained that she couldn’t find the order and asked if it was under a different name, but the customer kept yelling at my mom and insisting that it wasn’t under a different name, and kept implying that she was too incompetent to do her job. 

My mom asked for the order number, and again, the woman refused to give it to her. Both my mom (and the woman’s husband) were trying to explain that there wasn’t anything they could do if she wouldn’t give them any information. She kept yelling, and when she finally paused, my mom said:

Mom: “Hun, I’m trying to help you, but I can’t do that if you won’t help me.”

And the woman lost it all over again.

Customer: “I can’t believe you just called me hun! That is so unprofessional!”

She continued tearing into my mom for another minute before she demanded to speak to a higher-up. So, my mom transferred the call to her boss, who got to hear this woman freak out even more, and she escalated it to the store manager.

My mom comes in the next day and is informed that the customer has brought it all the way to corporate and that they’ll be doing an “investigation on the incident.” For the rest of the week, that woman called the store to see what was going on and to complain more.

My mom came home from work at the end of the week and was fighting back tears and said, “This woman ruined my whole week over this.” I spent a lot of years working in retail myself, but I’ve never hated a customer as much as I hated that woman. 

And the real kicker to all of it, that second order was placed under the “friends” name. All that woman had to do was tell my mom the name. Instead, she spent a week of her time being miserable. I hope she steps in a wet spot every time she puts on fresh socks…

Prior to my retirement, I worked a retail job with a quasi-state agency that controls retail stores in my state. In our old store, we had a buzzer at each register that rang in the warehouse in case we needed help, or a customer needed a case of something.

Then the powers that be decided to move us to a new, bigger store. Of course, this being a state operation, while the store is much bigger, the staff is exactly the same. We now have four times the warehouse, four times the retail space, and the same number of people and hours.

Everything is always ‘you need to do more with less’. I got sick of this, and I’m a vindictive SOB by nature. I’ve been called the ‘Iceman’ because I can ignore anything. So, if I were on the register, I would stay at the register until I was told to do something else.

The managers were not happy. Then they started playing a game, one of the two managers on the shift would go back into the warehouse, to ‘check things’ aka vape (vaping is not allowed in the stores). In short order, the other manager would join the first, and then the other two clerks would head to the Warehouse, leaving me alone in the store.

Now, at this new store, the powers that be had the buzzer to call the warehouse placed in the office instead of at the registers. Managers put out a memo stating that employees are not allowed in the office without a manager present.

I keep ringing up customers, and other customers come to me asking for products that are in locked display cases. I inform them that they need to stick their heads in the door at the rear of the store and call for a manager. A manager comes out, talks to the customer, and goes to the office to look for the keys, then has to go back to the warehouse to get the keys from the other manager.

Customers are not happy, and I proceed to tell the customers to complain to the state complaint office.

The managers go ballistic, demanding to know why I didn’t ring the buzzer, and I simply point out that their memo says I’m not allowed in the office without a manager present.

Bottom line, there wasn’t a thing they could do about it.

Loss Prevention apprehends a shoplifter in our store. She had grabbed two large 25″ spinner luggage from the travel section that she cut the sensors for and then filled them both up with designer bras and panties, Spanx, numerous designer shoe floor samples, dozens of men’s designer wallets and belts, and several perfume gift sets.

Loss Prevention watched her, and when she was getting ready to leave, they caught her as she exited, and she was apprehended. During questioning, she admitted to several other thefts as well. Local police were called, and she was questioned and then subsequently arrested.

The police walked her through the entire first floor, handcuffed, to get to the door, while she was crying hysterically. 

Loss Prevention said it was nearly $6,000 worth of stuff that she took. The suitcases alone were $1200.

A family member of the woman came to the store the next day to the service counter.

Family Member: “I want the charges to be dropped. [Shop Lifter] is the sole breadwinner in our family! We don’t have the money to post bail, and her being in lockup is causing us a hardship!”

Me: “She shouldn’t have been stealing from us, then she wouldn’t be in such a situation.”

Family Member: “The charges won’t stick anyway, because your guys manhandled her! They pulled her hair, and then the police paraded her around the store as she was having a mental breakdown! Her civil rights were violated! The police never Mirandized her!”

Me: “This is outside of my expertise. You’ll just have to let the wheels of justice turn. I’m sorry, I just work here.”

Sadly, while the charges against the shoplifter did stick, the loss prevention guy was suspended due to the charges of manhandling…

The city I live in has extremely inflated vehicle values compared to the surrounding areas. If you buy the same car from a neighboring state, you can often save $3–4k without really trying. When I buy a new vehicle (which happens every three to four years), I always look in the surrounding states to compare pricing.

I was shopping for a new car (brand new) and found one that matched my specs about twelve hours away in a neighboring state. It was priced about $5,000 below comps.

After looking up flights, there was a one-way direct flight that took me to their local airport for around $175. Plus, the gas to drive back, I was looking at a total of maybe $275 to save $5,000. Absolutely worth it in this situation. 

I reached out to the dealership, negotiated a bit, and agreed on a price. I let them know that I would be flying in to pick up the car and offered to pay in full in advance of the flight. They told me that all they needed was a $1k deposit and that the car was considered mine.

We signed a contract, and I paid the deposit.

And then I booked the flight for three days later.

First sign of things gone awry:

When I showed up at the airport, the dealership was supposed to pick me up. This had been arranged in advance. A quick phone call later, I grabbed an Uber to take me the twenty miles to the dealership, with the promise of them covering that cost. No big deal either way.

Second sign of things gone awry: 

When I showed up at the dealership, the salesman I had been speaking with asked me if I wanted to walk the lot with him to look at a few cars. 

Yes. Cars. Plural.

Questioning what he meant by that, we walked into the lot to see these “cars” he was talking about.

Were these some special type of gold-inlaid, full self-driving, full self-flying amaze-mobiles? No. They were not.

When I asked point-blank to see the car I was buying, the one with VIN XYZ listed in the signed contract with a deposit on it, I was told it was no longer available. 

The salesman offered to show me similar cars, which would have been fine if we could have come to similar pricing terms. But all of these cars were outrageously priced (think $2k over MSRP instead of $5k under MSRP).

There was never any mention, paperwork, signage, or otherwise, of incentives for giving five-star reviews.) 

Fast forward two to three hours. 

I was now convinced the dealership never had this specific car on the lot and that this was a 100% bait-and-switch gone wrong. The dealership was unwilling to sell me a similar vehicle at a similar price (we were over $5k apart) and unwilling to pay my flight costs for this scenario.

A heated discussion ensued between the general manager and me, who told me:

General Manager: “Go ahead and leave a bad review.”

He also made it clear I wasn’t getting any “free” money from him. I took an Uber to a nearby hotel and booked a flight home for the next day.

Total cost: Around $750.

This dealership had an average Google rating of around 4.5 stars with about four-hundred total reviews. Pretty solid for a dealership. 

That night, sitting in the hotel room with time to burn, I spent a couple of hours creating new email accounts so I could leave multiple reviews. By the end of the night, I had left around twenty one-star reviews. Then I stopped caring about the reviews and shifted my focus to recovering my travel expenses.

A few days after getting home, I sent the dealership a demand letter for $750, which they ignored. Since the original contract was executed in both states, I was allowed to file small claims in my home state, which I did.

The dealership never showed up. I received a default judgment for $750. I got my $1k deposit back. I paid with a credit card, and it was refunded without issue. I couldn’t sue for time spent or force the contract to be honored because I filed in small claims court (the case was winnable, but legal fees and time made it not worth pursuing).

It took certified letters, phone calls, and about a year, but yes, I collected.

I was still not a happy camper. What they did was wrong on so many levels. All my friends knew the story. Many left a bad review or two, but nothing out of the ordinary.

At some point later, I left one bad review. Just one. I noticed all the original reviews I had left earlier were gone, likely flagged as fake. The one I just posted stayed. So, the next day, I created another account and left another one-star review.

Fast forward two to three years. This became a habit. Any time I had a few minutes, I created a new account and left a one-star review.

Their current rating: 1.9 stars. Total reviews: Nearly 3,500. I am personally responsible for at least half of them.

When you open the dealer’s website, one of the rotating banners advertises:

Website Banner: “$50 for a five-star review.”

It explains that if you show the review to your salesman, you get a $50 Visa gift card. This policy appeared around a year after the bait-and-switch, right when the one-star reviews began piling up.

Assuming I’m responsible for half the reviews, and they’ve paid for at least a thousand five-star reviews, they’ve spent $50,000 buying reviews.

And their rating still keeps dropping. All after telling me to “go ahead and leave a bad review.”

We have to enter birth dates for anybody purchasing any sort of alcoholic beverage, including any zero-alcohol version as per store policy. It’s been that way for at least four years (maybe longer). We also have to ID everyone, no matter how old/young they appear to be (another coworker f***ed up, now Illinois is up on our a**).

I had a closing shift on Wednesday, stuck on the same register the whole shift, when a guy in his 40s or 50s walks up with two cases of a non-alcoholic beer and milk. Obviously, the register asks me to enter a birthdate when I scan the beer cases, to which I ask for his ID.

Customer: “There’s no alcohol in it.”

Me: “I know, but in order for me to check them out, I need to know what your date of birth is.”

Customer: *Pointing at the box.* “Non… Alc… o… hol… ic… Brew.”

Me: “But I still need to see your ID.”

Customer: “That’s only for stuff WITH alcohol! This doesn’t have any!”

Technically, there’s still alcohol in non-alcoholic beer.

Customer: “There ain’t any alcohol in water, is there?”

Me: “No, bu—”

Customer: “THEN I DON’T NEED TO IDENTIFY MYSELF! SO, RING UP MY STUFF SO I CAN LEAVE!”

At this point, my manager comes over to see what’s going on. I explain my side, and the customer is just screaming about why he has to show his ID. Manager agreed with the customer and entered a random date of birth (I’m assuming it’s her own) without actually ID-ing the customer. He paid, left the store, along with the classic “I’m reporting this to corporate!” line. I just shut down the register (the manager told me to) and took my break a little early.