The Psychology of the Customer
by John Themsmen
For the past year I’ve worked at a grocery store/ cater- ing company and there’s something that came to my attention long ago and has caused me a lot of grief ever since, and that is that customers are lazy bastards.
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The employees here are hard working and we give it our all. We stock the shelves with produce, make hot food and sandwiches in the deli, bake desserts and fresh bread in the bakery every morning. Meanwhile, the cus- tomers prance in, with no notice, and ransack the place. Then we have to come in the next morning and make everything again. It’s ridiculous. I will be stocking the shelves in the morning around 8:30 and these random people (customers) will waltz in without a care in the world and just start taking things off the shelves. They wander around aimlessly until their basket or cart is full of our products and then off they go.
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I work at least eight hours a day, sometimes ten or eleven if we’re busy. The customers don’t do any work around here. While we are working we can see them just standing around looking at the shelves or the bakery
case. One day my feet were so sore from working two ten hour days in a row and I was hungry too. A customer walks by me and picks up a potato salad and says to me, “mmm, this looks good!”, and heads to the cash register. Yeah, it did look good. I hope you enjoy sitting at home eating that while I am here busting my hide to replace that for the next day you ignorant moron.
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Another thing the customers do is clog the phone lines. We have phones all over the building. Eight lines avail- able. We need to make calls to order meat, bakery ingredients, chase up invoices, etc. but all day long, cus- tomers are calling, out of nowhere, asking questions and asking us to make food for their parties and events. We are trying to work here and random people are calling, making us stop what we’re doing to go and answer a phone call? It’s extremely irritating. Just leave us alone. This brings me to my next point.
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Customers are dumb. They don’t know what we sell, they don’t know the ingredients, nothing. “Do you have this?”, “Do you have that?”, “What’s in this?”, “Do you have cherry strudel today?”. We have cherry strudel every day. How about you learn a thing or two about this place before coming in here.
