When businesses choose to run short-staffed, the employees on the floor are often the ones who have to deal with the consequences.

So, what would you do if you were the only cashier working during a busy sale and customers kept lining up with no backup coming? Would you just calmly help each customer as fast as you can? Or would you find a creative way to keep the customers happy as they wait?

In the following story, one cashier finds herself facing this decision and opts for the latter. Here’s what she did.

“There is no backup cashiers, your on your own, deal with it.”

A couple of years ago, I worked at a department store. One of the main problems with the store I worked at was that the managers were mainly concerned with looking good to corporate, and they did that by short-staffing the store to keep costs down.

We had 8 departments and 2 sets of registers.

Each department was supposed to have 2 people to close the store, and each set of registers was to have 1 person at close (if it got busy, register associates would call for help from the floor associates), so at a minimum, we were supposed to have about 18 people on the sales floor when closing.

On this night, the store was especially short-staffed.

With the managers trying to lower cost an average night would consist of about 8-10 people.

Also, the manager on duty (store or assistant) would usually spend the whole night in their office, only coming out to criticize employees for how long they were taking to clean their areas, not paying attention to us being half-staffed and busy.

So on this one particular night, I was on the registers for a closing shift. Once again, we were short-staffed, but it was particularly bad because the store was having a big sale.

The manager made it very clear.

Well, I guess the assistant manager had plans for the night because she pulled the other cashier off the register and had them help clean the sales floor. So I was the only one on register, and eventually I had about 5 customers in my line.

Following protocol, I called for backup. 10 minutes later, and with 10 customers waiting in my line, I called for backup again.

It was at this point that my manager called my phone from her office and said, “Look, there is no backup, you’re on your own, deal with it,” and then she hung up (she didn’t like me that much lol).

She decided to give everyone a nice discount.

It was at this point that I looked at the line full of angry people and said, “Hi, everyone. I’m sorry for the wait. As a way to compensate you for your time, everyone currently in line will get 20% off their purchase.”

We were only allowed to give 15% at most if customers didn’t have a coupon, and if we gave 15% we were supposed to have a really good reason.

In the end, all the customers in line thanked me, and I never got in trouble for it. I’m sure LP understood the situation, and my assistant manager was too self-involved to ever notice all the discounts I gave that night.

She was eventually transferred to one of our stores in the middle of nowhere.

Yikes! That manager sounds terrible!

Let’s see what the people over at Reddit think about what happened.

The story brings back memories for this person.

Here’s a reader who had an AM like that.

According to this comment, some department stores have gone downhill.

This sounds like a company worth trading with.

Let’s hope she got fired, because no manager should act like that.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.