This Customer Giving You An Earful

Retail | Right | November 2, 2016

(My store mostly sells gifts, but we have a rack of jewelry pieces, as well. I come around a display to check on a customer, and realize she has her hand to her ear, an expression of pain, and there’s blood on her hand.)

Customer: “I used to have my ears pierced when I was a baby, but they grew shut when I was in college. I was seeing if I could open them again with these earrings.”

(The woman was easily middle-aged, so her ears had healed decades before.)

Me: *horrified* “We don’t even allow pierced people to try on earrings for hygienic reasons, but definitely not to pierce ears!”

(She asks to use the bathroom to wash the blood, while I wipe down anything she touched with gloves and bleach, and throw out the earring she used and anything that she touched. She comes out of the bathroom.)

Customer: “Where can I get my ears pierced?”

Me: “There’s a tattoo and piercing parlor a block over.”

Customer: “A TATTOO place! Do you know how unhygienic that place could be?!”

This story is part of our Tattoo roundup!