The 50 cents post card and the wedding

[Kreeshak]

When you want to buy something of zero monetary significance as a 50 cents postcard, dont waste the employee's time by browsing for 40 whole minutes. A post card is not like choosing who to marry and spend the rest of your life with. Also some people buy and sell stocks worth thousands in a matter of seconds. Others buy apartments and houses faster. Sorry mmo champ for the rant but i hate time wasting customers and i am supposed to remain calm and polite.

[Deleted]

I dont get the point of this thread apart from the fact that you had a bad day at work and just wanna rant, complete waste of time.

[Deleted]

While postcards may not have much monetary significance, they can have a lot of emotional significance, which explains the difficult in choosing one. Also, the front of postcards could be considered art in some cases, and art is there to be considered, which takes time. It's not a descision which you can make using logic, like selling stocks and shares.

[Kalis]

Yeah, I hate those pesky customers helping to pay my wages. Bastards.

[Gheld]

If the worst thing you have to deal with at work is witnessing a person take 40 minutes to decide on a post card then you have no right to complain about anything. Ever.

[Poopymonster]

A friend of mine while touring Europe sent me some postcards. It wasn't the cost of them, nor the images they portrayed. It was what he wrote on them.

I'll always remember it, it was a picture of a large house, black and white, he got it in Germany. He wrote the following on the back.

"In picture: Anne Frank, World hide and seek champion. She never knew when the game was over"

I realized then it was supposedly the house they hid in.

It wasn't the pic, or the cost, it was that he took the time, to write something that both he and I found hi-fucking-larious in poor taste on the card, and sent it to me. THAT made it special.

[sugarlily]

While postcards may not have much monetary significance, they can have a lot of emotional significance, which explains the difficult in choosing one. Also, the front of postcards could be considered art in some cases, and art is there to be considered, which takes time. It's not a descision which you can make using logic, like selling stocks and shares.

Erin is perfectly right here. I have collected postcards over my years & pretty much none of which I treated like a throw-away cheap piece of paper. They have all meant something to me or to whoever I intended to send them to; did something significant or funny or memorable happen @ sunset or near a lake or under a blooming tree? Then I'm going to try & match that w/ a post card's art or picture. If this post card is going to go into my collection its going to damn well signify what it is that I loved about visiting this place or a happy reminder.

I love looking @ old post cards I've collected & the memories that go along with them & especially love seeing one @ a friend or relative's house from me in their collection. In an age of electronic communication, an actual item we can hold seems that much more special. When's the last time you got one? Maybe that's more the issue here.

Thank God I never felt pressured or treated as a nuisance while finding trinkets & post cards while travelling by some asshole minding the register such as yourself. Also sorry you have no sense of wonder about what to some is a little paper treasure but to ppl like you is a cheap throw away.

[Orange Joe]

When you want to buy something of zero monetary significance as a 50 cents postcard, dont waste the employee's time by browsing for 40 whole minutes. A post card is not like choosing who to marry and spend the rest of your life with. Also some people buy and sell stocks worth thousands in a matter of seconds. Others buy apartments and houses faster. Sorry mmo champ for the rant but i hate time wasting customers and i am supposed to remain calm and polite.

How are they wasting your time? Are you hovering over their shoulder the whole time waiting for them to pic something? Is there not something you could be doing while they pick something?


This sounds to me more of a bad employee issue, than a bad customer.

[Deleted]

I can totally understand the OP is annoyed that the customer spent 40 minutes buying a postcard. As someone who works retail, I can tell you we get instructed to stand behind the counter when a customer is in the store, and wait till the customer approaches. That means you can't do other stuff that you would normally do. Servicing customers is only a part of the job of being a retail clerk in smaller stores, you have to do lots of other things aswell.

[Kalis]

I can totally understand the OP is annoyed that the customer spent 40 minutes buying a postcard. As someone who works retail, I can tell you we get instructed to stand behind the counter when a customer is in the store, and wait till the customer approaches. That means you can't do other stuff that you would normally do. Servicing customers is only a part of the job of being a retail clerk in smaller stores, you have to do lots of other things aswell.

Your number one priority should always be servicing the customer.

[Daez]

Your job is customer service. If the customer wants to browse from the time the store opens to the time it closes for a $.50 post card than that this their prerogative. Your job is to help them if they have questions. If you don't like your job, quit and find a new one. Until then, don't complain about what is basically the major aspect of your job. Now, if the store was closing and they kept you over for forty minutes for a $.50 sale I can see a possible complaint, but that is not what you referenced. Also, it would be different if you had other customers that you missed out on or if you made commission and missed out on other customers.

[Deleted]

Your number one priority should always be servicing the customer.

It is, but there are other priorities aswell. And if the number one priority uses all the time you have available (without increasing sales) then you can't forefill those priorities, and then the boss will ask questions why you didn't do this and that, like the other clerks normally do.

[Daez]

I can totally understand the OP is annoyed that the customer spent 40 minutes buying a postcard. As someone who works retail, I can tell you we get instructed to stand behind the counter when a customer is in the store, and wait till the customer approaches. That means you can't do other stuff that you would normally do. Servicing customers is only a part of the job of being a retail clerk in smaller stores, you have to do lots of other things aswell.

This must be unique to your store/company and its a horrible policy by the way. There is no reason you cannot be straightening up the counters or near the front of the store instead of just standing at the register waiting.

[Deleted]

It is, but there are other priorities aswell. And if the number one priority uses all the time you have available (without increasing sales) then you can't forefill those priorities, and then the boss will ask questions why you didn't do this and that, like the other clerks normally do.

I get that, but if one customer is ruining your day that much that you can't do anything else, even if they take an hour to buy a postcard, then you arn't working efficiently in the rest of your time. If it's more than just a very occasional one off, then your boss is going to expect this sort of thing to happen, because it will have happened many times before to other staff members and they will have seen it themselves.

Honestly, you should just be glad you're not working in something like recruitment. Yes it may be a pain when a customer takes ages to choose what to buy, but at least the postcard can't protest. There's nothing more frustrating than having a candidate apply to one of your jobs, the company putting them through 2 or even 3 interviews, tests, you've interviewed them yourself, spent hours working on that job, the company finally decides to make an offer, and the candidate is like "Actually, I think I'm going to stay where I am at the moment, I've been thinking and I'm not really okay with the travelling distances to get to the new job so I'm not gonna take the offer"

[Kalis]

It is, but there are other priorities aswell. And if the number one priority uses all the time you have available (without increasing sales) then you can't forefill those priorities, and then the boss will ask questions why you didn't do this and that, like the other clerks normally do.

So what?

Your number one priority is your number ONE priority, which means they supercede everything else, and if they take up all your time then tough titties.

[Daez]

It is, but there are other priorities aswell. And if the number one priority uses all the time you have available (without increasing sales) then you can't forefill those priorities, and then the boss will ask questions why you didn't do this and that, like the other clerks normally do.

To which you respond... you know that one customer with that one post card... 40 minutes. In which case the boss, who probably started on the register since most retail tends to promote within at least to the area of store management will probably laugh because they most likely went through a similar situation and then you will probably get help finishing up what you didn't get done. If that is not how it goes down your boss is a dick and you need a new job, but it has nothing to do with the customer.

[Poopymonster]

To which you respond... you know that one customer with that one post card... 40 minutes. In which case the boss, who probably started on the register since most retail tends to promote within at least to the area of store management will probably laugh because they most likely went through a similar situation and then you will probably get help finishing up what you didn't get done. If that is not how it goes down your boss is a dick and you need a new job, but it has nothing to do with the customer.

Nowadays very very few companies promote management from within. So said boss most likely has zero clue about what the person on register went through and only sees "over on labor costs, inefficient, wasting time".

[Daez]

Honestly, you should just be glad you're not working in something like recruitment. Yes it may be a pain when a customer takes ages to choose what to buy, but at least the postcard can't protest. There's nothing more frustrating than having a candidate apply to one of your jobs, the company putting them through 2 or even 3 interviews, tests, you've interviewed them yourself, spent hours working on that job, the company finally decides to make an offer, and the candidate is like "Actually, I think I'm going to stay where I am at the moment, I've been thinking and I'm not really okay with the travelling distances to get to the new job so I'm not gonna take the offer"

No offense, but if you think that is bad try counseling. We work on a quota system with an average of 6 hours a day every day when we are full time. That includes 6 hours a day in our vacation time (which is a mandatory 3 weeks). So, we have to make up 90 hours (from the vacation time) along with those 6 hours a day. Given a no call/no cancel/ no show rate of about 40-50% it means we often end up working 12 hours a day to hit those 6 hours a day. Meanwhile, we get paid salary so we only really get paid about $30 an hour for the time we are in front of clients and the company we work for (meanwhile) is billing about $90 an hour to those clients. Grand!! Not to mention, we are required to have a 60 hour master's degree in order to start work and then we have CEUs every year to stay working (along with national licensing examinations of course). The plus: its so crappy that you are almost guaranteed a job because no one else wants to do it.

[Deleted]

Nowadays very very few companies promote management from within. So said boss most likely has zero clue about what the person on register went through and only sees "over on labor costs, inefficient, wasting time".

That's not such a bad thing in all cases. Internal promotions like that are usually a bad idea.

[Revi]

How can this annoy you? surely them browsing for a card requires zero effort on your part other than being present like you'd be doing regardless of their presence.

And as other say, it's not the price of it, a card usually carries some emotional significance which quite frankly makes the decision more important than whatever monetary value judgement you usually make in a shop.

Also, if you buy a house in less than 40 minutes of browsing you're an idiot.