When you order something online from a store, sometimes it is more convenient to pick it up from the store than to have it delivered.

What would you do if, when you go to the store, the employee wouldn’t give you the item because it hadn’t arrived, even though they had it on their shelves?

That is what happened to the couple in this story, so they bought one from the shelf and then returned it when the online order came in, which wasted that employee’s time.

Check it out.

Can’t give me the product I ordered even if you have it on stock? No problem.

I was out of town with my wife on vacation and she forgot to pack her curling iron.

We’d been out for a couple days but she wanted to look nice for a dinner party we were going to (or something like that, which is irrelevant to the story).

She wanted to buy a new one anyways so I started searching for options online to see if a local store had one she liked.

What luck!

To our surprise, not only was the one she wanted in stock, it had a huge discount and was available for pickup at a nearby store.

I won’t get into details of where the store is or what its name is but it’s a large enough chain to have stores in all major cities across the country.

So, we place the order and drive to the store, go to the hair products section where we’re supposed to pick it up and this rude lady who seems to be in a hurry says (in a fast and annoyed tone) we can’t pick it up yet as they need to send it from the warehouse that’s exclusive for online orders.

Can’t she just give one from the shelf and replace it from the warehouse?

We can see there’s a bunch of them in the shelf next to her.

Also, I’m aware that some stores do work under this stupid process where they need to receive online product purchases first and give you those instead of what they have in stock for various reasons, but this wasn’t the case.

We’ve done this before and they’ll just grab one from a shelf and give it to us.

There’s no serial number or anything that could make this one different from what they would’ve received to fulfil the order so this lady was just being rude.

She said there was nothing she could do even though she could see our order as confirmed for pickup.

At this point, we would’ve cancelled the online order and purchased it in the store but this lady really made us mad and it didn’t have a discount there.

So, here’s the malicious compliance part.

We told this lady we’d cancel the online order and we wanted to buy one from the shelf.

She immediately changed her attitude and sold it to us without complaining.

This is a smart way to get what they wanted.

We went back to our Airbnb, my wife used it for that particular event and a for the next few days.

Then I called the store to confirm that our online order was ready and they said it was, so we went back to the store and guess who was there again?

So we go to the counter, ask for our order and she gets it for us.

She didn’t seem to recognize us so as soon as she gives us the online order package, I tell her that we need to return this too and give her the curling iron we bought from her.

She then recognized us and just stood there watching for a few seconds.

Then she goes back to her bad tone and asks why we’re returning it. “We don’t need it anymore.”

She calls her manager and tells him that we are asking to return a product that doesn’t have a problem and that we are returning it because we don’t need it anymore, like expecting him to tell her not to proceed with the return.

They have a good return policy.

He obviously tells her that as long as it’s within their stated 30 day period after the purchase, it’s returnable for any reason unless we damaged it.

The manager leaves and the lady doesn’t say a thing after that, but we can clearly see she’s mad. We get a full refund and leave with a brand new curling iron again.

We later found out that they can in fact just grab any product they have in stock if they confirm an order but they need to do some extra steps to match it to their inventory later and that they don’t get a commission, so this lady was probably expecting to pass it on to the next shift.

So, in short, there was no reason for her to not fulfil our order other than wanting a commission and being lazy. In the end, she wasted more time and didn’t get a commission from our purchase.

She just didn’t want to do her job, and it ended up backfiring on her. Well played.

Read on to see what the people in the comments say about it.

This would have been a good idea too.

Yup, she got what she deserved.

This person does the same thing.

I don’t know of any that still use commission.

Yeah, commission just doesn’t make sense here.

Some people work harder at fighting customers than just helping them.

Give it up already.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.