Working in retail often means staying calm while customers test your patience.

For one teenage cashier, a single penny turned into a shouting match and a whole lot of second-guessing herself.

Read on for the full story!

Customer demands I give her the incorrect change, and then complains about me.

I am a teen girl who works at a candy store. So I am working the cash register and this lady comes up to pay for her candy.

She’s a regular, in her 40s, and overly tan. Her total was $9.81, and she handed me a $20.

But here’s where things got messy.

Ok, cool. I run it through the register and gather all her change, $10.19.

As I’m handing her her change she says, “Oh, wait, I have a penny.”

Ugh. Normally I would just say, “Sorry, it’s already processed,” once I’ve already picked up all the change, but I was having an off day and was very tired, so I grabbed the penny from her without thinking.

Then the worst case scenario happened.

Shoot. My mind goes blank, and for some reason I cannot think that I just need to give her one more penny, or $10.20.

Then, she starts shouting at me.

Overly Tan Lady: “NINE DOLLARS AND TWENTY CENTS.”

Me: “Um…” (grabs calculator to check)

Overly Tan Lady: “NINE. DOLLARS. AND. TWENTY. CENTS.”

Me: “Um okay… here you go…”

All this yelling threw the cashier off her game.

And I gave her $9.20 with an uneasy feeling that that was definitely not right.

I checked the calculator and, of course, I should have given her $10.20.

Luckily, the manager was on her side.

I told my manager and she said it was okay because we were a dollar short in the register anyways, and it wasn’t nice for that lady to be screaming at me.

But the nightmare customer wasn’t going to let it go.

My next shift, when I was telling my shift leader the story, she told me that the lady complained about me.

Apparently, she said that there was a new girl (I’ve been working here since the store opened??) that did not know how to use the register and had no idea what she was doing.

Her manager backed her up, luckily.

Both my manager and shift leader said it was a her problem, not a me problem!! :))

But I just don’t understand why some people feel the need to make the world a more negative place and complain about retail workers.

Like, seriously. We’re such easy targets.

I want her to know so badly that she was wrong about what her change was, but I obviously can’t tell her because that would probably get me written up.

She made an honest mistake, but in the eyes of this nightmare customer, that wasn’t acceptable.

What did Reddit think?

This user is 100% on the cashier’s side.

Some customers can be just plain cruel.

This fellow cashier has their own way of going about things.

This commenter has two things to say in defense of the cashier.

The customer may have left feeling smug, but the cashier had with both the manager and the truth on her side.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.