@ January Rose
Corporate doesn't care how their employees are being treated by their customers... Hell, corporate doesn't care if our managers are treating us terribly. They only want their money and nothing else; we'd probably be the ones getting in trouble if we complained about anything to corporate because we're affecting their money. *sigh* My managers can unfortunately do so much. When a customer is getting loud, I do offer to call up my manager so they can speak to them. Some take the offer and my manager takes care if it. That's about all anyone can do with rude customers. We can't exactly fight back without losing our jobs, you know? Unfortunately, retail employees don't have a lot of respect or freedom. v.v
Today, I learned that customers can always get worse.
For most of the day, I was doing go-backs but had to take over the register to give someone their lunch. Like five minutes into that, our registers began acting up and wouldn't run debit or credit cards. The entire system was also running slow; things like stock searching and returns were near impossible to do because the system was so slow.
I called up my manager to ask her about it and she restarted one of the machines but it didn't fix anything. So she got a hold of corporate or... She tried to. They had apparently set up a voicemail and stopped answering calls coming from their stores because it was a chain-wide problem and store managers from across the country were all calling corporate to get answers as to why we're unable to run the cards. Once my manager figured it out, she did come over and apologized to the people in line (which was a long one at that point) and explained that the entire POS was down.
Most customers were completely understanding of the problem. They weren't happy about the wait but most understood that it was a corporate problem and nothing our individual store could fix. One woman though didn't seem to understand that. The problem started with her actually. She was the customer who's card started to fail and who I called up the manager to fix. I do feel sorry for her because she was there for a while as we tried to get things sorted out. But really, there was no reason to tell us we're 'stupid and useless' because we couldn't get the system back up.
Like... I'm sorry...? I know it's an inconvenient to you but it's also inconvenient to us. Think of how much money we lost today by customers walking out because we couldn't process their cards. We're doing our best but we can only do so much when it's
not a problem we can fix.