Working in retail is not for the faint of heart, and if you’re in a tourist area, you can double the trouble by at least two.

When a large group of loud old ladies blow into town, you should just batten down the hatches.

Don’t believe me?

Check out this guy’s story of the day they came to see him.

Red Hats and Purple Dresses

Background: I worked for about six years in a Southern tourist town that has a lot of museums and a shopping district that has a pedestrian only road. Four years were during my time at a local college and two years were after.

For the first three years I did specifically retail in a variety of shops owned by the city, for two following that I was essentially a handyman, wandering around the city doing oddjobs, as I was the only person under the age of 50 who worked in our department and somehow the only person capable of doing any heavy labor.

There’s a lot of fun and/or hilarious things that happen with customers in a tourist retail environment, and I have many stories, but this one is the worst.

I worked in retail for three years in high school at a national pharmacy chain, and thought I had seen the worst that retail had to offer.

I was wrong.

If you know, you know.

The Story: Typically speaking, the worst retail customers are the ones who are on vacation, especially foreigners who don’t actually understand or know local customs.

Still, the single handed worst experience I have ever had in retail came at the hands of a group called the Red Hat Society (wiki it). The Red Hat Society is mostly 50+ women who travel in large groups and assume the entire world is there for their pleasure.

They’re always irritating customers, asking for any sort of discount they can get, and 50% of the time, they would come back later in the day and demand a refund for whatever reason.

They would mess up the store in small ways and be incredibly high maintenance when they’d be browsing through our fairly standard assortment of tourist goods.

Word was out.

The day was September 2, 20– and is now seared into my mind. It was a nice enough day, and in the offseason, so it actually was pretty quiet in terms of customers. I had been able to park on the first floor of the new parking garage, and managed to get a free lunch from a nearby sub shop.

All was well. Then the phone rang.

For your geographical reference, the store I was working at that day was at one end of the pedestrian only street, attached to a historical reenactment “village.” At the other end of the street was another shop and museum owned by the city.

The person working there that day was the person calling and she gave me a warning. This lady was in her mid to late 70s, and she was a sixth generation Southerner with impeccable manners who never swore, even finding “gosh” to be a little too much.

Therefore I was shocked when she told me on the phone, “Get ready, there’s a whole wave of ******** coming down the street.” She already sounded as though she had just returned from the frontlines in Vietnam.

I tried to get more explanation, but she had to go because customers were in the store.

No one escaped unscathed.

The phone rang five more times in the next two hours, as friends who worked along the street gave me similar calls. One girl was actually crying when she called me, she had been through so much.

A guy at the local college store actually told me that after he was off the phone, he was locking up and quitting. The story became clear with each successive call.

Over one hundred members of the Red Hat Society were in town, visiting, and they were working their way down the street, leaving a wave of retail destruction in their path that would not be rivaled until Hurricane Matthew.

I took a look down the street, and while they were still out of my view, you could tell that something was coming. The streets had cleared out of all but a handful of other tourists, and I was not the only employee looking down the street anxiously.

I must have cleaned the whole store three times while I was waiting for the tide to come in. Eventually they came into eyesight, and the callers had not lied.

A whole flock approached.

Easily over one hundred ladies, all 50+ in age came down the street in a wave of purple and red. You could hear them chattering from three blocks away.

They would stop in front of a store, swarm in and take turns if the whole party didn’t fit inside (which was typical) and then swarm out again, sometimes with bags, often without. They were moving towards me, and I am ashamed to say I panicked.

I was the only person working this store today, and the store could easily fit thirty customers at once. There was an attached bookstore with another employee that could maybe fit fifteen more customers at once.

I gave her a heads up that something wicked this way comes. All we could do is brace for impact.

Just reading about it stressed me out.

What followed was the most chaotic and insane hour of my life. As the “official” giftstore of the city, we had pretty much a little bit of everything: T-Shirts, snowglobes, all of the various tourist stuff. We also were the only store in the area that sold sodas and bottled water.

If I could have put up some strobe lights and so forth, the store could have quickly become a rave, and there was standing room only as dozens of these ladies were shopping, and each of them would pull me aside for personal assistance with whatever they were looking at.

I was physically pulled and pushed across the store, and dragged to all of the displays and customers who were in desperate need of support. One actually pulled me by my hair.

Several literally grabbed me by the ear.

Eventually the “play tug of war with the cashier” game ended as a line of ten of these ladies had formed up at the register, and they were angrily demanding service.

I excused myself from the lady that I had been helping against my will, and managed to avoid any other grabbing hands to make it to the register. The line begins piling up, and none of these ladies are buying anything for more than $5.

I rang out over sixty transactions, and of these only ten were credit or cash. The other FIFTY+ were paid for by checks “because they needed to track their finances.” For those on the retail scene in early 20–, you know this was not a fast process, and our systems were antiquated by 20– standards.

Each successive customer became angrier and more frustrated. Not at each other of course, but at me. After the purchases were completed, about five ladies came back and returned items for refunds, including one for a $0.50 postcard (yes, paid for by check).

Oh, and there was fallout.

Then there were a handful of other transactions, and the tide finally began to subside.

There were only a couple more stores down the street, and I had already passed on earlier warnings to them. In the aftermath I found that our entire drink cooler had been emptied (only rang up three drinks during all of the transactions I had done), and our postcard rack had been similarly looted.

The store was a complete mess, with T-shirts strewn about the place, cheap plastic and wooden swords scattered all over (were they fighting? Heck if I know!), and nothing was in its designated place.

My coworker who had been manning the bookshop came over shortly after, and she had an somewhat easier time of it (the books were too pricey apparently), but she came over to complain about how much of a mess they left.

When she saw me she gasped and asked if I needed the first aid kit. Apparently I had a number of bruises up and down my arms and face, and was bleeding at a few points where fingernails had cut me.

She helped patch me up and straighten up the store, which kept us well into the night, even when our boss came in to help out.

At least his boss was understanding.

A lot of stock was missing after all of that, and technically I should have been fired. However, after hearing the story and experiencing some of it for herself, my boss gave me a day off with pay, which was unheard of for that position.

My coworker who had been in the bookshop retired for good the following week.

It’s been over ten years since that fateful day, and I actually still have the scar from one of the fingernails that reminds me of what happened. I’m no longer in retail, but every time I see a red hat and a purple dress, my only desire is to get as far away as possible.

Let’s read what Reddit thought about all of this!

I would have cried too.

They could at least be nice about it.

No one forgets their red hat encounters.

Honestly my toddler is better behaved.

It definitely sounds like they crossed a line.

Something wicked this way comes.

It turns out he wasn’t even exaggerating.

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