Isobel Asks The Internet

IV - The Clothing Department

I kicked an angry customer out of the store today. Did I do the right thing?

Hey everyone!

So, I was at work earlier (I am a part-time deputy manager of a grocery store while studying for  degree in physics) doing some paperwork in the office. The interior design coordinator is having the restrooms painted melon green and he needed every manager who worked at the store to add their comments and sign off on the changes. I was about to provide a dissenting opinion when a call came in for me to go down to the clothing department.

I did NOT want to go.

Usually Sandy is the manager of the fashion department would be here, and she's SO good at dealing with customers. She doesn't even listen to them, so they know that they can't mess with her. Every week we get SO many complaints about how she treats customers which we're supposed to fax to head office but I just put them in the paper shredder because she always gets the job done. However Sandy had to take a few weeks off because she was in an avalanche and this lady called Vix who's from another store was acting in her place.

Vix is about as useful as a stick of butter that's been left on the radiator. She HATES talking to customers, but not in a productive way like Sandy. It means she'll call me literally every time a customer asks her a question. The other day, someone came in to ask her where the necklaces were, and she put an EMERGENCY call out to get me to come down and explain that the necklaces were RIGHT in front of her. 

I rolled my eyes all the way down to the clothing department to see Vix sitting on the counter reading a magazine, and standing next to her was some sort of ambulatory slug of a woman looking like she was ready to emit steam from every pore. I walked up to her and told her that I was the deputy manager; her expression softened somewhat as she was in the presence of authority.

The woman showed me her phone and said "this shirt is on your website but I can't find it ANYWHERE here" in such a rude and disrespectful way. The shirt was SO dumb. It was black and white striped and said "bonjour" on it, except that the o was a cup of coffee and the u was a croissant. I made sure not to allow this to rise to the surface, and told her that she would be more likely to find the shirt in a store with a bigger clothing department, or alternatively, she could order it off of the internet. 

She got SO mad after I said this and yelled "that's not good enough, I'm going on a business trip to Paris tomorrow and I need to wear this shirt when I arrive". I said that there was nothing we couldn't do if she wasn't willing to put in the effort to achieve her goals, and she GRABBED a rack of dresses and threw it to the floor, before accusing me of purposely trying to ruin her trip. Vix was being SO unhelpful, she just kept reading her magazine while this was all happening. 

I was sick of this stale baguette of a customer, so I grabbed my radio and paged security. As soon as they answered I said "I need backup at the clothing department, I have a customer that needs to be restrained by force" which the guys at security know I just say to scare customers into submission; I've literally asked them to knock people unconscious before and it always stops people from pulling their dumb shit. Security came to drag the woman out of the store, and I told Vix that she was only allowed to call me (or any other manager) if customers were threatening violence.

I walked back off to go and finish the important paperwork I had started before being distracted before Marceline on customer services stopped me to say that a customer had left their wallet and passport and someone had handed it in to lost property. I looked at it and saw that it was the SAME woman who had just been kicked out after screaming about the croissant shirt. I told Marceline that I knew this woman before taking the wallet and passport and throwing them in the cardboard compactor. I then returned to my paperwork where I decided that melon green actually would be a good colour for the restrooms, as long as it was accompanied by a lime green feature wall.

Were my actions appropriate for the situation? I feel strongly that this woman should not be able to visit France.