For many people, the best part of the working day is the part where you get to go home. Because despite what you might hear, a lot of people in the world don’t actually love what they do – they work as a means to an end, to support themselves financially and enable themselves to – well, eat and suchlike.

Of course, you know you’re going to be busy during your working hours, and for most people that’s the majority of their waking hours too. So naturally we schedule our lives around our jobs, packing the things we actually want to do – hang out with our kids, see family and friends, go on vacations or cinema trips or dates and even evening classes – into what little time we have left.

So it’s extra annoying when, without warning, we end up having to work late. It affects our plans and steadily snips away at the time we get to spend doing the things we want to. If we’re lucky, we’ll at least get compensated, but in some workplaces that isn’t always the case. Imagine the frustration of the hardware store employee in this story when a customer is taking their sweet time and, long after closing, turns up at the checkout with an array of small items. But that wasn’t even the most annoying part of what they’d done.

Read on to find out more.

That’s not how it works, sir

I work at a hardware store, and tonight a gentleman who had been in the store for hours finally came to the register five minutes after close with a cart full of smaller items.

Trying to put aside my annoyance, I started trying to scan the items as quickly as possible, since everyone else was waiting on him and on me.

The last two items I came across were adapters from the plumbing section.

They did not have barcodes or any type of identification on them.

But there was more to this less than ideal situation than met the eye.

Knowing how our adapters are typically sold, the following conversation occurred.

I asked him, “Sir, were these in a package?” to which he replied, “Yes.”

So I said, “Well, where is the package? I can’t scan them or ring them up without it.”

The customer told me, “It’s in the aisle. I only wanted two of them. They’re in bigger packs so I took them out.”

Uh-oh. Read on to find out how this employee dealt with this weird problem.

I said, “…Sir, that’s not how this works. If they’re in a package, they have to be sold in that package. We can’t take them out, you have to buy them all together.”

The customer replied, “Well are there any sold individually in this size? I didn’t see any over there.”

One of my managers went over to the aisle to check on the item.

She found the bag he took them out of and came back with it, telling us that we only have the packs of ten and they are not sold individually at our store.

But the customer wasn’t happy with that.

He asked, “Well how much is it for the 10 pack? If it’s too much I don’t want it.”

I scanned the item to check, and let him know it is $36.99 for the pack.

He said it was too much, and I was finally able to finish the transaction.

He said no to $36.99 for a ten pack, but his total still came out to almost $300 exactly just on small items – that was how much he bought right at closing.

Man, customers can totally lack self-awareness sometimes.

It wasn’t just his insistence that he could take one of something that was obviously part of a multipack (of course you can’t).

Worse is the sheer audacity of bringing loads of small items for checkout, way after closing time.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman at a ceramics study who is mistaken for an employee and asked about party bookings.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit had to say about this.

This person had a clear answer to situations like this.

While others shared in the frustration of tardy customers.

Meanwhile, this Redditor pointed out this problem wasn’t specific to hardware stores.

Sure, in some stores you can buy, say, one large bottle of water from the big store multipack. But that doesn’t mean that it extends to every single item – as one Redditor explained, you can’t simply help yourself to a handful of cereal because you don’t want the whole box. The clue is in the barcodes – if a single item doesn’t have a barcode of its own (and you’re in a store that uses them) then the product is probably not for individual sale, unless you see signage that tells you otherwise.

But this wouldn’t be such a problem in itself. The real issue is the fact that it was after closing time and the employees were waiting to go home – but couldn’t until all of the customers were out of the store. This guy was holding everyone up, and he was doing so in the most annoying way. He clearly had no respect for their time or their lives, not even apologising or showing any awareness of the fact that he was causing them to have to stay back.

He clearly cared little about anyone but himself.