People who manage to work in retail for any amount of time are a different breed.

Not only do they have to deal face-to-face with customers day in and day out, they have to handle management who often doesn’t have their back.

This clerk tried to hold her ground with complaining employees because she was following the rules.

I Feel like anyone who has ever worked retail can relate to this.

You go in the job and they tell you all the rules and things you can and can’t do.

Until a customer gets upset and gets a manager and then the manager comes over like “oh how could you not allow this sweet lady to not do this?” and uses their manager override to allow the customer to do whatever they want.

Making them look like the hero and you look like the angry employee that didn’t let them do what they wanted.

When they asked for a manager, hers would always give them what they wanted.

Back when I worked retail I had this happen countless times.

“This meal doesn’t come with cornbread, that’ll be an extra dollar fifty” manager comes over and gives them cornbread.

“The discount you are talking about was a for a sale that ended two days ago sorry.”

They get pissed at you and the manager comes over and gives them the discount anyway.

So, she started keeping track.

I got super fed up with this and kept track of EVERYTHING a manger let happen.

If a manager one time let a customer buy this for this amount of money.

Every single time a customer asked about it I would call the manager over and get him to override it.

I guess managers expect you to try to enforce the rule on the occasion they get pressed, they just fold and make you look like a jerk to a Karen customer.

Well I got tired of it.

And eventually just telling customers that he would override the system for them because he “always” does.

The moment a Karen came in and asked for something clearly against policy I would just call that manager over and make him override and say “he does this all the time” to the customer.

He got in trouble and tried to throw her under the bus.

It happened to often that he had a meeting and got reprimanded by corporate.

He mentioned me by name as the one who does it and when questioned I told them the same thing.

“He did it all the time before and I just assumed that he as the manager was doing the right thing.”

It didn’t work.

He wasn’t fired or anything but he stopped folding in front of customers and making me look like the jerk.

I’ll never understand why managers never backup their employees on store policy.

Reddit always has big opinions on retail stories!

It’s definitely a rare thing.

But it’s not like this everywhere.

Good managers don’t scapegoat their employees.

I thought you needed a backbone to work in management.

But I guess you need some way to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I am so happy she stood up to him.

Someone has to fight the good fight.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.