Help be the Solution

I will start this blog out by saying that this may turn into a rant, so if reading ranty blogs isn’t your cup of tea I would recommend clicking away now.

I have a job at a drug store near my home where I stock food onto shelves (that is how this relates to food) and at my place of employment I occasionally have to deal with customers who are extremely angry for what ever reason. Normally this doesn’t faze me, but today it was different.

I had taken part of a dear friend of mines shift in addition to my own giving me a ten hour work day (I know that for someone with a real job that doesn’t seem that bad, but it is for me). So I’m on the last half hour of a shift that had everything go wrong in it. Then this woman comes in with her five or six incredibly rude children. They are all very angry that we are out of a certain item that has a particularly good sale, when they ask about the item not being in stock. I could sense that it would be an interesting confrontation because of the way the mixed English and Ebonics to ask the question. When I very politely told them that we were out of it she and all of her children began verbally assaulting me using second grade sentence structures and vocabulary as well as many profanities that a second grader wouldn’t know. This continued on for what seemed like fifteen minutes but in actuality was probably closer to five minutes, all the while I was apologizing (as I am required to do) and asking if there was anything I could do to make it better for them (also as I am required to do, but at this point I didn’t even want them to get anything they wanted). Keep in mind that I am not allowed to correct them or point out the flaws in their reasoning.

So now that I have a place to discuss this, I though that I would. DO NOT yell at the stocker for something that they have no control over. Did they really thing that I was the one who didn’t order enough of the product to put out on the shelves? The answer is no, I am not in charge of that. Even if I had been in charge of the ordering process, which just to say in again I’m not, yelling at me like that wouldn’t have solved anything.

So if you ever find your self shopping around for something to eat and the item that you want isn’t on the shelf, don’t take it out on the poor stocker who had nothing to do with it. If you know someone who does this then send them this and together we can stop this problem. Thank you. (494 words)