Imagine working retail as a cashier when a customer has multiple refunds that are taking quite awhile. If your next customer insisted on speaking to your manager, would you be worried?

In this story, one cashier is in this exact situation, and yes, she’s worried. Not only does the customer insist on speaking to her manager, but then her manager also insists on speaking to her.

Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

The dreaded words: “I want to speak to your manager”.

This happened yesterday during a quite busy shift where I was solo on the CSD. I had two customers in my line, one I’ll call ‘refunds nightmare lady’ or RNL and the other I’ll call ‘Mr Nice Guy’ (MNG).

To cut a long story short, the RN wanted four refunds doing (why she hadn’t done them before I don’t know) and I knew I was in for some fun.

Now our returns policy means that if you pay by card, any refund will be put on the same card. This is printed on the receipts and is also displayed in store.

The lady was impatient.

The first two refunds, no problem, they went through straight away. But even though I was working as fast as I could, RNL was massively impatient.

She kept making comments like ‘I can’t believe this takes so long, I’ve got to pick kids up from school soon!’ and other similarly annoying remarks.

I gritted my teeth and kept quiet, apologising to MNG in the process.

It should’ve been easy but wasn’t.

Then came the last refund. This is where it went wrong.

The RNL didn’t have the card for one of the refunds, so I’d had to give her store credit vouchers for that. I suggested to her that as she was doing this refund and buying items which would add up to just over the balance of her store credit voucher, she could use this towards the balance and then pay a tiny difference of something like £1.

She seemed happy to do this and so I did my bit with the refund, put the new items though and then tried to scan the voucher through to adjust the balance.

It didn’t work, and regardless of what I did to see if it would work (typing in the voucher number manually, different scanner angles, even lying the voucher completely flat on the counter top and then scanning it to see if it was due to the paper curving). Nothing worked and the RNL began kicking off, saying I was terrible at customer service, how this shop was terrible and all the usual stuff.

Eventually she decided to use a credit card, paid and left. I was just glad she was gone.

The next customer transaction was much easier.

I then started serving MNG whose query, thank , was really easy.

I apologised profusely for the wait and he was seemingly perfectly cheery about the whole thing, waving my apology away. Then he asked:

I want to speak to your manager.

At this point I was panicking as I couldn’t think why he’d want to do this. I was really hoping it wasn’t something I’d done.

She was really worried.

I phoned the manager, who was at the back of the store helping out with a delivery, and she told me to send him down her way and she’d speak to him.

5 minutes later, and I got a call to my internal phone, asking if I could come down to the desk.

I got cover for the desk and went down, panicking about whether it was some sort of disciplinary (usually the manager doesn’t call you like this unless it’s something wrong).

But it turned out to be a good surprise.

When I went down, the man and my supervisor were sat at the desk.

When the man saw me, he got up, pointed to me and said to my manager “look, you’ve got a darn good cashier here, she’s got the patience of a saint. I know I wouldn’t have been able to do what she did with that woman”.

Turns out the man had been singing my praises about how I dealt with RNL, saying how professional and calm I’d been.

It made for a euphoric rest of my shift for both me and my manager. 🙂

What a great way to turn a bad experience into a good one. That man really was a nice guy!

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person has no compassion for busy parents.

This is true!

This person tries to be like Mr Nice Guy.

I was wondering the same thing. This would be maddening for any customer.

Some customers are the sweetest!

If you thought that was an interesting story, check this one out about a man who created a points system for his inheritance, and a family friend ends up getting almost all of it.