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You can't really say you worked retail until you've had to play Social Worker for 15-30 minutes and talked to an old person who has nobody to talk to.
If you're lucky the old rascal will tell you something unhinged but it'll be weirdly charming and not racist or sexist (it's a throw of the dice but that's life)
You can't really say you worked retail until you've had to play Social Worker for 15-30 minutes and talked to an old person who has nobody to talk to.
people will still really call it "unskilled labor" when the percentage of the population that can gracefully deal with this is infinitesimal and you can't learn it from a bootcamp
And they generally have no context of personal space
Oh aren't you a sweetheart! nudges you
I have literally taken a step back from a customer each time they took a step forward into my personal space and wound up half way down the aisle before they acknowledged that I was keeping polite distance while they were talking at me.
Customers are literally throwing a temper tantrum when you simply state "no, we can not do that/have not in stock, etc..." - people sometimes will just trauma dump randomly. It is a job that is requires skills found in social workers and therapists. It is exhausting. I remember the summer job, I had as a teen and oh god - never again.
my wife's got a weird old man - he doesn't have any friends or family, so he goes into every store downtown to talk at people. it's a bit sad (the consequences of not having third places, etc) but also he says some really weird shit so the goal is always to be kind but not so nice that he'll be weirder at you personally (which happens)
Some guy I was helping years ago went on a rant about how Japan secretly won WWII and now an order of samurai are running the US through the national parks service based out of Alcatraz.
national park samurai please take the wheel tbh
Monkey’s paw: They destroy both the US and China so that the Japanese emperor oak may reign for a thousand years
Honestly, I think a tree would do a much better job than anyone in the US government.
Yes, but only because this would allow President Xi to follow his master plan of 
That would make for a hell of an alt-history Man In The High Castle sort of fiction
He kept telling me to google "radio towers in national parks"
I mean, yeah I assume most national parks have a couple radio towers in them.
That's all just a cover plot. Their real aim is to use the resources of the United States to develop time travel so they can help the samurai win the Boshin War
oh man, i would take that in a heartbeat over my usuals
Holy shit that sounds way more interesting than having to figure out what a customer is trying to ask when they say, "For coffee enemas, is one bean or two bean better?" All the while my face is 
Hot damn I would love to meet that guy.
you, the whole conversation
So much cooler than actual US history.
Basically yes
I have worked retail for 20 years and I have known so many of these people lol
If these people aren't the ones coming in then they're the ones your working with
One time my partner offered to drive this older lady who lived nearby to do some errands. Turns out her errands were basically going to a bunch of retail stores to complain at them about the silliest things, like how she let her store credit card expire or something like that. Shit they can't even really do anything about in the store. Partner didn't even know because they just sat in the car at first, but went inside and one of the workers explained the old lady does it a lot.
Sad, but also fuck her for manipulating my partner into helping her harass retail workers
One old lady started coming in once a week or so to rant at me about all sorts of stuff happening in her life. Every single time I would nod along wordlessly until she wandered off. Every single time she would find my manager and file a complaint that I was swearing at her. My manager let two of the complaints stick so she could deny me raises, but would never file the third. It felt like a conspiracy sometimes, but it never happened to anyone else as far as I could tell and the lady never stopped coming in.
No it's actually the same old lady.
Doesn't sound like a bad premise for an SCP actually
Doesn't sound like a bad premise for an OAP actually
OAP?
OAP OAP, OAP, OAP, oppa gangnam style
(I don't know either and hopefully you get a real response)
Are you and dirt_owl the same? 
That's speciesist.
So is Ur mum lol
Old Age Pensioner
Thanks, but then how can an old age pensioner have a premise? I think there's some syntax here I've misread
it's just a silly bit
Thanks 
Yes absolutely
Old folks will hang out for lengthy periods of time at the post office and chat endlessly with the guy who works there, who is also ready for retirement and constantly putting other people’s mail in our box.
One of those old ladies came up to me the other day and was talking about how her landlord was bringing in Columbian drug dealers, but "Trump will fix it!"
from long experience (unfortunately), yes
it's the lead
I worked at a grocery store once and had an old lady come in and throw an absolute tantrum because we were out of a certain cookie.
She literally stomped up and down like a toddler throwing a hissy fit and shouting "I WANT IT!" "I DROVE 30 MINUTES FOR THESE COOKIES!"
I think my manager just gave her some uncooked dough for free.
Had a lady argue with me about the pronunciation of “Skechers”. She was convinced it was “skeechers”.
i hope you died on that hill and owned her ass with facts and logic
All I remember was her unshakable confidence in her assertion
"Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are clones. Check out this streaming site" from the 80 year old gram-gram at the dollar tree
My current job is run by an older man, and I swear, a solid 25% of the people that come in don't even buy anything, they just come to talk with him and whoever happens to be present any given day. It's even odds whether the topic of the day will be an unhinged, right-wing conspiracy (points to the guy the other day who said bird flu can't be driving up egg prices, because Covid is actually the flu, and chickens don't get Covid, apparently, so it must have been Biden and the Chinese), someone having recently died, reminiscing about back when they all still lived in Ireland, or the various medical issues they and their relatives have.
Had a guy in the other day who, in the span of a 20 minute conversation, covered transphobic conspiracy theories about the recent crash at the airport in DC, how much he sucks at cooking, because he's relied on takeout and the women in his life to do a basic task for the past 60-something years, and how he made sloppy joes for his sick mother and it gave her the runs, and now he has no idea what to cook for her so she doesn't starve. It's absolutely unhinged, some of the stuff they spout.