True Grit

I work in the paint department for a major hardware chain. I come back from my break to find my coworker dealing with a customer he apparently helped earlier. I step in to see what the situation is and to see if I can provide maybe some kind of insight or solution to the problem at hand.

The customer bought a special type of deck paint we sell. It has a type of sand or mud in it so when you apply it to your deck, your feet, clad in shoes or not, will have something to grip on to despite most weather conditions and you won’t slip. It comes in “Smooth” (which still has grit in it for the same reason), “Textured” (extra grit), and “Extra Textured” (same amount of grit as textured but there’s a special roller with little hooks in it to pull it up more as you apply it).

This man tried to run it through an airless spray gun. These things generally struggle to spray our most basic paints without cutting them with water or a flowing agent, and this bonehead tried to effectively run colored mud through it. And now he wants a refund.

After some fighting (thankfully no screaming or demanding a manager) I manage to tell him:

Me: “No, you cannot return it. It’s already been tinted and that makes it impossible to resell.”

Customer: *Points to a bucket* “Well then, give me some free paint so I can run it through my sprayer.”

Me: “No, I’m not going to give you a free five-gallon bucket of stain so you can run it through your sprayer.”

While not the happiest camper, he agrees to buy a whole new bucket of stain, but as he’s leaving, he has the audacity to tell me:

Customer: “You should have told us that it had grit in it.”

A week later, I found out he had come back and gotten an assistant manager to do the return for him, even though I explicitly told him HE COULDN’T, forever placing him on my s*** list.

Wherever you may be, I hope your sprayer broke and you had to buy a new one.