Retail employee recounts the unholy trinity of clueless, entitled customers via 3 different customer horror stories: ‘There's a saying: "Help me help you," and these people are not doing that’

Author image for Lana DeGaetano
Lana DeGaetano • "Show me to me please."
Dec 24, 2025 10:00 AM EST

Working in retail spaces means you have to plaster a smile on your face even when entitled customers try to get on your every last nerve. In customer-facing roles, you don't have enough time to worry about your comfort; upper management is solely focused on your output, how you approach customer satisfaction, and keeping you in your place. If customers and management don't degrade your morale, they have less power to exert over you. We all know that customer service is about give and take, but most customers prefer to take without giving back anything, even baseline moral niceties.

If you've ever worked in a customer service role, specifically in the retail or restaurant sector, you are well aware of the fact that the customer is always right, even when they aren't. Forget about putting your best foot forward and standing up for yourself; you have shelves to stock and customers to apologize to for no reason, silly! Sometimes, it seems like certain customers purposely take "the long way home" so they can make your life more difficult. "The long way home" includes asking questions that don't make sense, complaining to you about something you can't change, and ridiculing you when you're not a robot with access to all of the information in the entire world.

This retail employee recounts what we call the "unholy trinity" of entitled customer hardships in customer service roles. No matter how hard you try, you will be faced with one, two, or all of these scenarios, wherein you'll be expected to keep a straight face the entire time. Last time we checked, we are human beings, not robots. If they want an employee who will be a bystander to customer nonsense, maybe they should work more quickly and find an AI to do it for us…

What does the employee consider the most common scenarios in the customer service realm?

"One part 'customers don't read,' one part 'customers expect us to know everything/be psychic.' [Or] expecting us to memorize prices."

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  • angry customer complaining about employee
    via Getty Images For Unsplash+

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • "One part ‘customers don't read,’ one part ‘customers expect us to know everything/be psychic.’ Or given the sub's character requirements, expecting us to memorize prices."

    Years ago I had someone call the store wanting to know if we had the "$89 Motorola" available.
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  • Couldn't tell me model. Couldn't tell me carrier (assuming, for sake of argument, he was talking about a phone and not one of the baby monitors over in infants...
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  • as it happened he never specified that, either). Couldn't tell me where he found that price.
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  • No matter what question I asked him, he just expected me to know based solely on price and brand if we had the one he wanted to buy.
    via SideQuestPubs
  • At the time we had 25 different Motorola phones (I counted later in the day because I had a lull in customers and I'm too curious for my own good) spread out among, if I remember right, 9 different carriers, and none of them were that price...
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  • but any one of them could have been eligible for a price match if I knew which one to check.
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  • Suffice to say I wasn't going to take time away from other customers to check all 25 against our website so without more distinguishing details from this customer I couldn't help him.
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  • (I also later found one on our website for that price... on clearance and online only.) There's also the inevitable "where's x item that costs $y" when they're referring to a clearance item that's sold out.
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  • Or the ones who rush to the store to buy whatever and then claim it's "weird" that it rung up for...
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  • the price on the price tag. Without first telling me they found it online for cheaper so I'll even know to check if it's eligible to be matched.
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  • (People, what do you think is the point of a price match policy if there are no different prices to be matched?
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  • We're not talking a local business here, we're talking a website that serves probably thousands of stores across the US and then some.
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  • Different states, hell different neighborhoods, have different prices. And it says "price when purchased online" because these types of customers exist, yet they still expect the match to be automatic.) More recently I had someone wanting to buy an iPad, and when I asked which one he said "the one that costs x." Now unlike the Motorola situation above we only had a handful of models to choose from (and only one actually in stock) but still nothing for that price.
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  • He had to go through our displays to identify the model so I could check the one he wanted for a price match.
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  • Finally (for now) after finally getting rid of so many Black Friday leftovers (this happened the week before Christmas I might add), someone called wanting to know if we had a particular TV.
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  • Gave me size and price yes, but no brand or model, just expected me to know if we had that size for that price.
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  • If we still had it for that price, when for all I know it could've gone back up to normal, dropped further to get rid of it, or sold out on day 1 of the sale.
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  • SALE BLACK FRIDAY
    via Tamanna Rumee for Unsplash
  • He even started to describe what the box looks like... but he couldn't tell me the brand?
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  • I'd offered to transfer him to the service desk before he began describing it (his original question being about home delivery when he lacked a big- enough vehicle or getting the in-store price if he ordered it online, both of which are their domain) but he ended up hanging up because it was "not very helpful" for me to be unable to identify which TV he was talking about.
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  • Like, people, I do want to be helpful, I'm not just ignoring your requests. But there's a saying: "help me help you." And these people are not doing that.
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  • On the flip side we have people giving you as much information as possible even when you can easily help with less.
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  • There was a time when I found "Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for the Nintendo Switch" amusing because "Mario Kart" told me all of that.
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  • FYI while "English as a second language" exists these are all people who at least sound like they've got the command of someone who grew up speaking it.
    via SideQuestPubs

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Tags

customer service workplace-stories retail entitled people toxic-work-environment
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