I’m not quire sure where to begin. I used to have faith in humanity, that is quickly being taken away from me. I used to not be racist, that is quickly being taken away from me. I used to have trust that people would want to do the right thing, that was gone long ago. I used to think that people had some self respect, self control, and compassion for their fellow man. I used to have compassion. That too is being taken away from me.
Don’t get me wrong, there still a lot of good, smart, not crazy, people out there with some common sense (I hope). When you have to deal with the public on a daily basis, it’s the other ones that stand out and make life hard, and unfortunately it seems that there are more and more lazy, ignorant, crazy, dishonest, incompetent people out there.
While most of these words are an introduction to my crappy day dealing with these types of people, I think it is unfortunately a peek into what is happening with this country today. Dumb everyone down, because we can’t have smart people and dumb people, so we’ll just make them all dumb. Stop people from having money, sure many people with money have worked very, very hard for it, but lets take it and give it to someone who hasn’t worked a day in his or her life. While we’re at it, lets make everything in both English and Spanish, and lets throw some other languages in there. We wouldn’t want to make people who came here from other countries have to learn to speak our language, lets make our own citizens learn to speak their language.
I’m pretty darn sure my great grandfather didn’t arrive here from Italy only to find all of the signs well marked in Italian. No, they weren’t he had to learn English. People are going to get away with whatever they can, and we are apparently going to just sit back and let them.
On to my day [this is going to probably be right up there for the record of longest post]. Lets rewind to yesterday. There is a customer (term loosely applied) who often barrows money from both my Dad and one of our managers. They do this to be nice to her, and to reinforce our policy of not giving out temporary charges except in emergencies. This would include forgetting a checkbook one time, or something like that, but I don’t feel that “I’m out of cigarettes” is quite an emergency. Anyhow, she calls yesterday looking for my Dad, and tells me outright she was looking to borrow $20. Now I’m the first to help out my friends and family with money and even the rare stranger once in a while, but I have absolutely no patience for people who are always begging for money. I told her my Dad was on the phone. She wanted him to call her back, I don’t remember what exactly I told her, but it was something to the effect that I doubted that would happen. Not 30 minutes later, she calls back looking for him again. I told her he left, and that he probably wouldn’t be back. To me this means he left and won’t be back, but apparently to her it meant, well I bet he’ll be back. 30 minutes later, she call again, and I’m getting very impatient with her at this point. This time she wants to get a temporary charge (and she tells me this) for cigarettes and pop. I told her like three times that wasn’t what temporary charges were for, and that is why my Dad gives her money personally, that he’s doing it to be nice and it has nothing to do with the store.
Moving on to today. She calls again, and I get the phone because Dad is on another line. I explain to her that Dad is on the phone and she will have to call back. She has the nerve to say “Couldn’t you just ask him real quick”. My response was “No, that would be rude, I won’t interrupt him on the phone.” Then she asks, “Do you think if I came down here he would talk to me even if he was on the phone.” I said, and I’m getting quite annoyed by this point, “No, he won’t, we won’t interrupt him while he is on the phone, that is just rude.” Then she asks, “Can you have him call me back.” I’m just pissed off at this point, so I say “No, I won’t. He has more important things to do than call you back over $20.” I tell her that she can come down to the store and if he isn’t busy, she’s welcome to talk to him but I can’t guarantee anything.
She did end up coming in, and he did let her have the money, but attached it with some conditions, and he did one of his famous long speeches he does when he wants stupid people to understand things. He asked her when the last time she bought groceries at the bank was. She was really confused, but said never. He said that’s because it’s a bank and they don’t sell groceries, they give out loans. He asked her when the last time she got a loan at the gas station was, she said never, and he said that’s because they sell gas, not give out loans. He said this was a grocery store, we sell groceries, we don’t give out loans. His conditions were that she had to buy real foods, no junk food, no cigarettes, etc. He also said that if she was going to call for him she couldn’t be calling every 5 minutes bothering 3 people looking for money.
Then we had an issue with an upset parent who I don’t think had all of her facts straight, or wasn’t given straight facts, but I won’t post too many details about that one to protect those involved.
The straw that broke my back happened just before leaving. Tom informed us that someone just “wiped out the milk.” Dave and I were curious, so we pulled up the cameras and the transaction and found an Indian woman had bought 20 gallons of vitamin D milk and used 20 coupons. Pretty strange, and I was kind of upset because I knew she was just taking it back to resell at her convenience store somewhere. Plus I was starting to doubt that I would have enough milk for the weekend. I called the cashiers and started asking about her and no one knew much. Then Karisma called me and told me she was back buying more. Apparently they called me too late because she had already paid for 20 more, which I didn’t know at the time. Dave and I went up to tell her we can’t be having people buy all of our milk. I started out asking her what she was going to do with the milk, and she didn’t give much of an answer at all. I don’t remember her exact words, but she clearly had no intent to drink all of that. I tried to explain, that while I enjoyed the business, I couldn’t have one customer buy all of the milk that I had all weekend for the rest of the customers. I wouldn’t have gotten another milk delivery until Tuesday, and she was apparently going to buy all of what I had. She really didn’t seem too interested in listening on what I had to say, she kept turning it back on me like I was insulting her as a first time customer. She kept going on about there not being any limits, which isn’t true, because it clearly states in our ad we reserve the right to limit quantities, and even if it wasn’t stated, it’s still our store and we can limit what we want. She was acting like it was her right to buy as much milk as she wanted, she just wasn’t listening to my reasoning.
Anyhow, I told her no more milk and she turned around and pushed the cart out the door (which I didn’t know was paid for). I was like she already paid for that! I was furious. They just let a single customer buy 40 gallons of milk (almost my whole supply of vitamin D for the weekend) and didn’t tell me until it was too late. I just lost it and stormed back to the warehouse and started shoving shopping carts around to help vent. After I calmed down, I decided to go outside and see if I could tell where she was going. She was just finishing unloading her cart so I (reverting back to my training of customer service), offered to take her cart in and decided I should try apologize, even though in my gut I knew she was going to resell it, from a customer service standpoint I thought I should. So I told her I was sorry if that was confrontational, but if she needs that kind of quantities, we need to work together so that she wasn’t taking my whole supply. That I was more than happy to get it for her, but she couldn’t just walk in and take what I had. Once again she didn’t seem to care about anything that I had to say, and she started this fake crying routine and went into about how this was her first time here and this is how we treated her. It was bull shit. I was tired of it, I had tried very hard to be nice to this lady who just took my entire supply of vitamin D milk, but she was just turning it back on me. I told her “forget it” and walked away. I still can’t believe the freaking nerve of that Bitch (yes it’s a capital B), buying all my milk for obviously no other reason than to resell it (if she had a better reason, she would have told me). Then to top it all off, we went and got one of the coupons out of the drawer. They were printed on computer paper, and I don’t think Smith has online coupons (we will find out tomorrow), so that lying, scumbag Bitch, who tried to make me feel bad for stopping her from taking all my milk actually stole $14 from us (if indeed the coupons are fake), so now not only is she intending to resell it, but she is committing coupon fraud at our expense.
I would love to get her busted for coupon fraud, but in all my anger, it didn’t even dawn on me to get a license plate number until it was too late. It pisses me off even now, that I didn’t think to even glance at it, granted I didn’t know about the coupons then, but I knew she was up to no good, and I still didn’t look. As I said in the beginning, I used to not be a racist person, but if you’ve been a read of this blog, you know this isn’t my first dealings with Indian convenience store owners. I hate to say they are all that way, but unfortunately all the ones I’ve or anyone I know have ever had to deal with are dishonest and have no concept of how we do business in this country. This incident tonight just pushed my racist feelings one more notch to the dark side.
I hate that I think that way about all of the things I mentioned, the racism, how people in this country are stupid, lazy, and ignorant, and whatever else I mentioned, but you know what I wasn’t raised that way. I used to think better of people. Personal experiences alone have pushed me to think the worst of people, and they only have themselves to blame!