Imagine working at a retail store when a customer comes in and offers to help you do something.

Now, this person doesn’t work at this store and most likely doesn’t know the job, so you’d probably be likely to tell them something along the lines of “no, thank you.”

In today’s story, one employee is in this situation, but the customer seems to ignore the word “no.”

Let’s see what happens.

“Here let me help. No? I’m going to, anyway”

For some context: store I work in only has one person per shift cause it’s so small and typically pretty slow.

We have a 1 hour overlap of shifts where there’s 2 ppl for a while, but that’s not important.

We have a fountain drink machine over by a wall, one we have to put the ice in ourselves. Which is the focus of the story.

As soon as he started to do something, a bunch of customers showed up.

So it had been dead at the time, no customers inside or outside, time to get work done, so I got the ladder out and several bags of ice and was working to fill the machine.

As is my luck, three bags in, I had half a dozen cars pull in at once, so I have to stop what I’m doing and return to the register.

As I do one guy comes in, he takes one look at the ladder and ice and goes “want me to help with that?”

I don’t know him, and I’m not going to put a customer to work for legal reasons that is I could lose my job if he gets hurt doing my work. So I told him “thank you but it’s fine, don’t worry about it.”

The customer was determined to help.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, please don’t worry about it.”

That should have ended it. But no.

He walks to the machine reaches up to start plucking at rim of the top of the fountain machine. I don’t even know what he was trying to do, grab a handful of ice straight from the machine?

“I’ve done this before. It won’t be an issue.”

The customer still won’t take “no” for an answer.

As if that should matter?

I don’t care if you’ve done this a thousand times. I said no and that means you don’t do that.

I told him no, for a third time.

He’s clearly not listening to me and so I’m hurrying from the register to the machine while he talks about how with him being so tall it’s fairly easy for him to fill these and not an issue for him.

The customer finally backed off.

I reached the area and maybe I was a bit sharp but by that point he was picking up and moving the stepladder that had both the bag of ice and a box cutter on it, so I told him “I said it’s fine, don’t touch any of it.”

He backed off, hands up and just went “sheesh fine. You don’t need to be so snappy, I was just trying to help.”

Yeah, well, I said no, multiple times. Had you listened the first time I wouldn’t be snapping at you.

He got his things he came to buy then kept hanging around the counter to talk with other customers, holding up the line, and then got offended when I told him he needs to take his conversations away from the register, as if I’m the rude one.

Maybe the customer was just trying to help, but “no” means “no.”

Let’s see what Reddit had to say about this story.

Sometimes it’s a good idea to say what you’re thinking.

This would’ve been a good comeback.

This person offers another suggestion of what to say.

Who else wants a “purge day”?

Sometimes being helpful isn’t being helpful at all.

That customer really needed to back off.

What is wrong with people?

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.