Unless you have worked in retail, you’ll only know of Christmas shopping from the customer side. Whether you’re shopping in a department store, a toy store, or a grocery store, you’re quite aware that it’s very busy – and sometimes it can feel like a battle to actually get your hands on the products you want. Because suddenly this year, it seems every other household in your town wants the same profiteroles you want, or every kid is being gifted the doll that your kid wants too.

It’s stressful, no question about it. It’s also busy and expensive – not the most cheery part of the holidays for sure. But while you’re fighting through customers with your grocery cart, spare a thought for the retail workers who have to do this day after day, all while listening to the same holiday songs on repeat. Because if you’re frustrated that the potatoes you want aren’t in stock, believe that the fresh produce staff have heart about it tens of times already. If the queues are too long? The cashiers are having to deal with customer after customer with no break. There’s a mess in Aisle Five? Someone has to clean that up.

The staff at the store in this story were having to deal with the Christmas rush, and for obvious reasons, they kept running out of cash at their checkouts, with the high volume of customers using up the change way quicker than usual. It was nothing a quick dash to the office wouldn’t fix – but that concept wasn’t something that every customer could get their heads around.

Read on to find out why.

She thought we worked 24/7

There was once a woman who came in to the store I work at. It was almost Christmas I think, so obviously very busy.

The cashiers had to go to the office if they ran out of change, which on that day was happening quite a bit.

Well needless to say, the cashier ran out of change for this woman who paid with cash, and that gave me enough time to finish bagging groceries, as this woman has a lot of groceries.

After like a minute the woman looked at me and asked why the cashier just upped and left.

Let’s see how this employee explained the situation to the confused customer.

“She’s going to get change because she ran out.”

Her face was the description of confusion. It was like she was reacting to me talking about quantum physics. She goes, “Isn’t this store open 24 hours?”

“Yes,” I replied, and she responded, “Then why is she out of cash?”

I was confused at what she meant. Like, did she think we worked constantly and like lived at the store, or did she think that the 24 hours automatically regenerates cash instantaneous?

I don’t know, not really something that frustrated me or was annoying, but just a strange thing.

Sometimes the human brain can come to the strangest of conclusions, and this woman clearly wasn’t getting it.

Perhaps she thought that the cash kept regenerating until the end of the day, or that it was constantly replenished or something.

Either way, she clearly couldn’t figure out this ‘reset’.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a customer who complained about an employee, not realizing they were talking to that same person.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.

This person tried their best to figure out what was going on in the woman’s mind.

While others joked about the situation.

Meanwhile, this Redditor discussed other frustrating customer expectations.

Genuinely, if you’ve never worked in retail, there’s probably a lot that goes on that you don’t understand. But that’s the same with everything – do you know how the WiFi actually gets to your house, for example, or how your shoes were manufactured? Unless you actually work in those areas, the answer is ‘of course not’. But because we all go to the grocery store, there is plenty more opportunity for us to get baffled by all the systems and protocols that we don’t know exist.

For the shopper in this story, it seems they were genuinely confused about why the money wasn’t in the till, since it’s likely logical that they would expect that a 24/7 store would have cash in their tills 24/7 – completely disregarding the process by which it gets there. Because the cashier’s till might have been full of notes, but because of the change they’d been giving out all day, they were out of coins for example. It’s perfectly normal, but not something a customer would ever think about unless they’d worked in retail.

But shhhh! Don’t tell them how it works – it’ll ruin the retail magic.