Imagine working at a retail store, and a customer asks you if you carry a certain product. If you weren’t sure, would you be honest, find out, or lie?

In this story, one new retail worker tries to help the customer, but their supervisor doesn’t seem to care about helping the customer.

Let’s read the whole story.

Getting in trouble with customers thanks to my supervisor on my second day of work

A few years ago I was starting my first ever retail job in a store that sold all sorts of things cheaply.

This was my second day on the job and I was stocking the shelves with toothpaste when a customer came up to me and asked if we had measuring tapes.

As the store is rather large and I had no idea where things were at the time, and as I only had an hour to finish up the shelves I didn’t want to waste too much time running around the store. I turned to my supervisor (who was a few metres away) to ask her if we had any measuring tapes.

The supervisor simply answered “no we don’t have any” (out of earshot of the customer) I relayed the message to the customer, apologised and carried on with my shelves.

But the supervisor was wrong.

5 minutes later the customer came back to me quite annoyed with a measuring tape in hand saying “what type of worker are you? You don’t even know what you store sells!”

I apologised saying that it was only my second day there so wasn’t a 100% of what stock we had and that a colleague had said we didn’t have any (I wasn’t going to make out that I’d answered ‘no’ because I didn’t know and wanted to get rid of her).

When the customer walked off I informed my supervisor that we did have measuring tapes and her answer was “Freaking customers are just too lazy to look around the store themselves, I can’t be bothered with them so I just tell them we don’t have whatever they’re looking for”.

Here’s the lesson OP learned…

I learnt a lesson that day:

Unless you have no idea, just go look for yourself.

Never ask THAT supervisor where something is as a customer.

I didn’t work there very long.

Some employees at stores can be very helpful, but as in this story, sometimes they’re not.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person shares a funny story about helping a customer find something.

The supervisor does sound lazy.

A retail worker at a clothing store shares their experience.

This sounds like the best way to handle situations like this.

You can’t always believe what retail workers tell you.