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I have a very uplifting story to pass on -it's not strictly retail, but it's so nice I just have to. A few months ago I posted about how my mother had been in a local branch of a big insurance company and had been helped by a very competent and nice young woman. As as result, she wrote a letter to their head office complimenting them on their staff and singling out this person for special praise. A month or so later she (my mother) got a phone call from the head office, asking if she'd be willing to appear in a poster campaign, she said no thanks, so they asked if she'd allow them to use quotes from the letter and use the girl herself on the poster? Mum said that sounds great go ahead! Many months later, the house insurance needed to be renewed, and because of massive payouts earlier in the year to a lot of people who got flooded, the quote had gone up by more that 400 euro, shopping around made no difference  So my Mum headed off to her friendly local insurance office...and guess who was there! Yes our very nice girl, who recognised the name/address as the source of the letter that had gotten her: - a poster campaign, a long weekend in London for her and another person at a 5 star hotel, plus 300 euro spending money  So there and then she went over the house insurance quotation and by pulling a few strings, managed to knock it back down to the old cost. Karma really does sometimes have an observable result.
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Oct 7, 2010 13:45
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Solaris 2.0 posted:Yet another retail worker at the mercy of lovely customers making totally unfair complaints THIS MAKES ME SO loving ANGRY!!! gently caress having to hope that no bitch, bastard or lunatic makes a complaint against you in order to get the meagre little raise that you worked hard to get. I'm guessing the companies brought this kind of practice in in order to avoid giving out raises; comic book evil strikes again.  (I have only worked in retail in my own country and I can reasonably say that this just doesn't happen here.)
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May 12, 2011 11:18
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TShields posted:Nobody cares, but that interview was FANTASTIC. He took a lot of notes about everything, and we have a very similar background. Even though it's IT, he doesn't have any certifications himself, and he doesn't think that the piece of paper you get from a school makes you successful. All the degrees in the world would make you too expensive for the company from the get-go, but since my inside contact's sister works the front desk and makes $15 an hour, I'm sure I'll do well here. At the end, he asked when I could be available and underlined it twice and put a circle around it. Then, he gave me a 20 minute tour of the facility and introduced me to his team, which seems like a VERY good thing. He told me he won't leave me hanging and will let me know on Friday. Really, really excited, but not putting all my eggs in one basket. Well loving done dude. I just had my first interview in forever and it went super well and I got the job so the universe is clearly telling us that feeling awesome after the interview is good guidance. Seriously, rooting for you over here  Edit: he said he'd tell you on Friday? That's exactly what I was told. Now, I'm not normally superstitious, but after well over a year of unemployment, I got a good job offer on the same day that the government (for unclear reasons) stopped giving me money so I am feeling pretty drat witchy at the moment. Pookah fucked around with this message at 21:10 on May 25, 2011 |
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May 25, 2011 21:07
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The thing is, people working in McDs, supermarkets etc here don't get treated like this; I've worked in a supermarket and a bookshop in the past and NO-ONE ever spoke to me in the way that lots of people have described in this thread, and my hometown is a mixture of rough and a bit posh. I've heard it said that one of the bigger protestant sects (can't remember which) in the U.S. managed to associate material success in life with being a good and righteous person and therefore people who "failed" were de facto bad people, and that this attitude managed to spread throughout society. I don't have anything beyond a vague memory of some academic paper I read in the past to back this up.
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May 30, 2011 17:37
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TShields posted:Let me ask you this, though- Assuming that I still had the job, what is stopping someone from calling the manager and asking about my performance and whatever else, then my manager realizing "Oh poo poo, they're trying to hire TShields, but I really need him for that big inventory that's coming up, and I'm about to go on vacation next month so we need another manager for coverage and I don't have time to train anyone new and blah blah blah". So in this hypothetical situation, he lies and says I suck rear end and the only reason I'm not dead in a ditch is because he feels sorry for me or he can't find anyone else or whatever, just so he can keep me around and not have to worry about hiring someone else, all so he doesn't have to go through the hiring process for someone else. Realistically, other than personal honor, what's keeping him from doing that? I'd never find out about it. The conversation would be between the potential employer and the current employer. And you KNOW that there are spiteful piece of poo poo managers out there who would do that. Even then, if they say tons of nice things about you, but for some reason DON'T get whatever job they call about, they might think "Oh, so this son-of-a-bitch wants to leave, eh? What's so bad about working for me? I'll give him a reason to leave!" and starts treating you like poo poo or cutting your hours further or making you scrub bathrooms with your toothbrush or something. THAT'S why I assume that nobody would call a current employer. I'm pretty sure that would be very illegal, but in the land of "at will employment", who knows?
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Jun 11, 2011 19:06
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silversiren posted:We both made a mistake. I guess my mistake was not reading his mind and his mistake was not giving me the correct amount in order to get the change he wanted. But I didn't yell and cause a huge scene and call him stupid because I made a mistake. His mistake was in being an unbelievable oval office over pennies which resulted in you whipping out a flamethrower from under the till and reducing him slowly from a screaming blob of charred flesh into a small pile of filmy ashes, which scatter softly in the breeze from the open shop door. Your mistake was waiting until he made you cry to get the flamethrower.
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Jun 22, 2011 23:06
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Volcano posted:a friend of Rolf Harris. I wonder if this is actually a coverphrase for some kind of uncommon sexual preference, like the way "Friend of Dorothy" = gay
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Sep 13, 2011 14:06
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Robzor McFabulous posted:The kid was just having some innocent kid fun with the awesome magical moving shopping road(!)... If the cashier chooses to view this as some soul-crushing punishment and shake a fist angrily at humanity then that's their choice. They could just as easily have played along with the kid, had a giggle about it and let it break up the monotony a bit. It's not like they're paid by the customer. That reminds me, back when I had just started working in a supermarket, a little kid came up to me and after watching me scan the groceries for a little while, shyly asked:  Is that as fun as it looks?And I was was still new enough to be able to honestly answer: Yes, it really is, and let him scan a couple of things to try it out
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Dec 7, 2011 11:21
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The Lord Bude posted:You couldn't possibly pack someone's bags properly if you were sitting, not to mention how unprofessional it looks. Speak for yourself - cashiers in supermarkets here (Ireland) always get to sit, until the end of the transaction when they might have to stand up to help with the bagging. I did it myself for a year after college.
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Jan 8, 2012 13:19
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marshmallard posted:No it isn't. 'Mum' is the British equivalent of mom. [derail] Well now, I know a fair few people who have Mams or even Mammys, but I do doubt the Garda thought he was calling her his mammy, maybe she though he was making a thing of her gender - hence the "call me Guard or Officer" [/derail]
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Jan 12, 2012 18:20
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I've worked in a variety of different companies here (Ireland) - both retail and corporate, and I have never worked anywhere that didn't have paid sick days. The law is that for days 1 and 2 you can call in sick without a doctor's note, day 3 and over, you need that sick note. I worked (briefly) for a US company that had relocated to Ireland and which had brought US corporate culture over with it - I was told of the previous Christmas period when 1 person on the QA team had got down with 'flu: real, delirium, vomiting, can barely stand up -type 'flu. He was bullied into coming to work anyway, infected the whole department (20+) people, who were still made to work 'til they dropped and the whole thing ended with about 18 people being off sick for upwards of a week from the same department at the same time. In the U.S. they could probably have been threatened with dismissal, couldn't they?
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Jan 24, 2012 11:59
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A few days ago I was in a little local supermarket waiting while my brother was buying something small but paying with a twenty, and I overheard the girl at the till saying that she only had like 1 ten and no fives so sorry, but he'd be getting a lot of coin back. Luckily I'd just come from another shop which uses self-service tills which always spit out loads of fivers - I had ended up wth about 8 of them so I asked her if it'd help out if I swapped them with her for twenties? She was very happy!  I've done the retail thing so I always like helping out my former fellows.
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Jun 11, 2012 15:56
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I've just rememembered something from my days working in a bookshop. It was Christmas Eve, so our shelves were starting to look pretty bare. Anyway, I was tidying up the kids department and my manager came over and told me to hurry upa and make those shelves look full, nodding at a set of shelves with about 20 books scattered across enough space for 200 . I genuinely thought she was joking, so I waved my arms and said "  Shazam! "She was not terribly amused.
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Jun 14, 2012 12:49
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Cowslips Warren posted:3. And we have USB drives, 4 gigs for $15! Wowsers that is a terrible deal. I just got a miniscule 16gb usb drive for 11.99 in Lidl. (Serously, this thing is so small I have to put it into a DS game case not to lose it.)
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Aug 13, 2012 22:59
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Back when I had just started working in a supermarket I got taking to another girl (who worked as a bagger) in the locker room about the work dreams I was having; nothing strange, just mundane work stuff, but it was exhausting to effectively being doing the same thing for 16 hours a day. She told me her thing was worse; she'd always been a bit of a sleepwalker and she kept waking up to find that she'd gotten up in the night, hung a bag from the end of the bed and neatly packed several pairs of shoes into it. 
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Oct 5, 2012 20:22
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Mountaineer posted:Reminds me of when I worked at a toy store one Christmas season. I was regularly scheduled for closing shifts where we usually wouldn't get out until after 1AM, then scheduled to be back at 6AM later that morning. They could have easily scheduled me just mornings or just evenings or separated the shifts so that wouldn't happen, so why they chose to make me sleep-deprived and irritable all the time was beyond my understanding. That's still disgraceful - I just had a quick check on labour law here (EU/Ireland) and it is required that all workers get a minimum of 11 hours off between shifts. http://www.employmentrights.ie/en/media/Code%20of%20Practice%20on%20Compensatory%20Rest%20Periods.pdf The U.S. seriously needs to have another revolution - as an outsider "Right to Work" seems like it was specifically designed to strip workers of virtually all rights .
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Nov 12, 2012 18:55
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Correction: They are in U.S. retail; in the rest of the developed world, workers have actual honest-to-god rights and are not treated like indentured servants. (P.S. You are a dick and are proooobably in the wrong thread - this one is here for people to vent about managers like you)
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Nov 18, 2013 18:25
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Fil5000 posted:I dunno, I'm half with him and half against. Retail DOES mean lovely hours at the holidays, and acting like it isn't is just silly. On the other hand, the other guy said his availability was 8-6, and just posting up a schedule without even saying "Hey, this is outside your availability but it's the holidays and we need all hands on deck" is also silly. That's a U.S Thing, it really really is. I've done my time in supermarket retail here in Ireland and we just do not do the "Work these hours or you're fired/a lovely employeee" thing. It's not the base state of retail working; it's a terrible, anti-worker mindset that seems to have slowly but surely developed over there in the last 50 or so years.
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Nov 18, 2013 18:37
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Pekinduck posted:Did you ever try to get a job with that POS company? I don't mean to badger you but from your posts you're like 200% qualified to be a POS installer/administrator. I did it for a while, its not bad and something you can parlay into another IT job. I always read POS as 'piece of poo poo' and whenever it pops up in this thread it makes me giggle like an idiot.
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Sep 19, 2018 17:06
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dovetaile posted:We once had an old guy walk towards the back on a Sunday night and we never saw him come out. Since then So is he a ghost who is haunting you, or did he just move in to your store? Actually, which would be worse? - a ghost is probably harder to get rid of but is quite limited in how annoying it can be, whereas a live person can be arrested and thrown out but they can also call corporate.
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Sep 28, 2018 16:46
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poo poo happened (heard noises in the cash office when no one was in there, footsteps heard near the bathrooms/breakroom, poo poo falling off shelves).
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dovetaile posted:Oh we were pretty sure he up and died in the store. So I guess he's haunting us? He also had a few preferred employees. I'd like to see a well-made low-budget horror film based around this exact premise, but it would have to be played entirely straight-faced. Just imagine the scene where they use a ouija board or something to find out who or what is haunting them, and how their faces fall when they hear it's that rear end in a top hat Harvey.
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Oct 1, 2018 10:37
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Only ever tasted a starbucks coffee once, and that was a from a booth handing out samples of starbucks-branded pod coffee and it was extraordinarily nasty. I mean, I'm no coffee snob -I like aeropress coffee but I'll happily drink instant if that's all there is, but this starbucks stuff was just undrinkably bitter and burned.
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Sep 24, 2019 18:03
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A pretty big supermarket near me got a complete layout redesign. It went from being a simple pattern of straight aisles, to an uncomfortably claustrophobic sort of labyrinth of small intersecting corridor-like aisles. I've only been in once since, and, after spending 10 minutes searching for something, I asked a staff member where it was. Poor guy just looked sorta panicked for a moment, and said he wasn't sure, but it might be down that way? *gestured vaguely towards the back* I never did find it.
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Feb 28, 2023 19:10
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Volmarias posted:If I've learned anything, it's always in The Back. In retrospect, the impression I got was that the last few staff members who'd ventured too far into The Back had never been seen again.
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Feb 28, 2023 19:58
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The Lord Bude posted:There’s a chain here in Australia called Harris farm (think of it like a whole foods I guess) that lays out their stores like an ikea. You get forced along a linear path from start to finish and have to go past everything to get to the end. They’re great though, the cheese section is incredible, they have an in store proper butcher, fishmonger, salumi maker, donut maker etc. you can pour single herd milk from a tap. I went to an Ikea once, just for a look-around, and the whole system of forcing you to look at everything before you can leave, plus the complete absence of windows made me never ever want to go back, not even for the meatballs. I just really hate being 'guided' around a shop - just let me free-roam dammit! edit: I've done my stint in retail, both supermarket and in a bookstore. The funny thing about the bookstore, is that years after I'd worked in one, I was shopping on another one, when an older man came up to me to ask where he could find books on topic X. I thought for a moment and gave him directions, but also said. "what made you think I work here?" He looked a little puzzled for a moment, and said " you just looked like you knew exactly where you were going" Pookah fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Mar 1, 2023 |
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Mar 1, 2023 22:04
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By blocking access to the compactor, they are literally preventing shrink. I wonder if it's all a misunderstanding?
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Jun 26, 2023 18:56
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Coasterphreak posted:There’s listenable Christmas music? There's an amazing collection of fairly early Christmas music called "Make we Joy" - recorded by Christ Church's Cathedral Choir. samples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQcCKNyYnNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7vFoEhUars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9zZxuq3yx4 It's the sound of Christmas for my family
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Aug 18, 2023 16:22
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Sundae posted:At the "Make We Joy" title, I was certain I was about to click into a Goon Christmas Album level of parody. I was very wrong. Its not the cuddliest music, but to me, it is ridiculously magical, beautiful and ancient. It's credited to Holst and Walton, but most of them are only arrangements by them, the melodies are mostly much, much older..
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Aug 19, 2023 23:19
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Sundae posted:It sounds very good. It was just not what I expected at all from "Make We Joy." I'm really glad you like it. It's one of those things that either people love it, or think you are weird for even thinking they might like it. Just a whole lot of cheery Christmas songs from back when Christianity was fresh and new.
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Aug 20, 2023 00:15
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