When a family member doesn’t know English very well, it is great to help them with translations when they need it.

What would you do if your mother only spoke broken English, and she wanted you to help translate her irate yelling at a store employee because of a stupid return policy?

That is what the daughter in this story was dealing with, but she refused to help with the translation because she was embarrassed by the actions of her mother. Now her mom is mad.

I certainly can’t blame her for wanting to stay out of it. Read through the full story below and see what you think she should have done.

AITA for not wanting to help translate her argument against an employee at a Nike store

My mother doesn’t speak much English. She tries to learn, but I still regularly need to translate for her when in stores.

Kind of a weird policy, but no big deal.

Recently, I just bought a pair of shoes and pants using my own money at this Nike store along with my mother. The next day, my mother told me to return the shoes and get a refund because I had too many shoes, and to ask if I could exchange the pants I got as well for a larger size.

We arrive at the store and I ask the employee if it were possible to return the shoes and exchange the pants for a larger size. The employee told me that I could not return the shoes and exchange the pants as it was against store policy and I could return both items or exchange both items.

Mom isn’t wrong. The policy is dumb.

This was fine with me I and told the worker that I just wanted to return the shoes.

Then my mother told me the worker had a bad attitude and that the store policies made no sense to her and were wrong.

Who cares if the policy is dumb? It isn’t worth arguing about.

She said the employees were clearly just lazy even though on our receipt it showed exactly what the worker had told me. She wanted me to translate this to the worker, but I refused as I did not agree with what my mother was saying, and I did not understand what arguing with a clerk was going to help my situation.

As far as I could tell, the employee was just following store rules and did nothing wrong.

How embarrassing.

This made my mother extremely angry and she decided to start arguing and yelling with the worker about how unfair this policy was.

Soon the entire store was there and my mom was still trying to argue her case against the store rules.

She may be handling this poorly, but she isn’t wrong. That is a dumb policy.

Eventually, after enough yelling, the store supervisor makes a compromise and tells us we can refund all items and then buy the pants at a larger size the next day as store policy did not let us immediately return the item and just buy a larger size.

This still didn’t sit right with my mother. She still continued arguing with workers that this policy from Nike was “garbage” and she wanted to be able to buy the pants right now.

Stores should not give in to customers who act like this.

More arguing later, the employees basically give up and let my mother do what she wanted. This entire time, I stayed out of it because I felt embarrassed with my mother arguing with an employee against store policy.

She’s been mad at me for the entire day now saying things like “I have no sense of justice” and that she did nothing wrong.

I certainly can’t blame her for not wanting to get involved.

I understand that I should help her because of her bad English, but I didn’t feel comfortable translating an argument that didn’t sit right with me.

AITA?

Whether the story was right or wrong, there was no reason for the mother to act like this. Stores can have stupid policies if they want.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about what happened.

This commenter thinks the policies are nonsense, but it isn’t the employee’s fault.

There is no reason to help Mom yell at an employee.

Here is a commenter who says mom was wrong, but the policy is stupid.

The mom was way out of line according to this commenter.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about siblings who don’t think they should have to give up their own sports’ seasons to help with their younger siblings.

This commenter agrees that it was an embarrassing situation.

The policy was stupid, but the mother was embarrassing. She was right to stay out of that argument.