Horrible retail experience and question for those in retail

[Newyearkiss]

I took something back to a well-known high street store yesterday, and the young girl behind the counter had to call her manager over. There was a slight query on my return and her manager was totally hostile, to the point that I actually walked out of the shop shaking after (eventually) getting a refund. I don’t know if she was running on the adrenaline of the sales and was taking a ‘no-nonsense from customers’ approach (it was heaving in there and had a jumble sale in January type vibe), but I don’t think anyone has ever made me feel so awful. I was mortified as well in front of this young girl. The manager was just so abrasive and aggressive. I’m normally quite able to hold my own but she totally blindsided me.

I was actually thinking I might put in a complaint although I signed my name on the returns receipt. Does anyone know what happens to those bits of paper at the end of each day? I would prefer this woman not to be able to access my name and potentially trace me online.

It sounds like OP's anxiety has been triggered by the encounter. As a fellow sufferer, I understand how that can happen.
I don't think there's anything more to the story than a bad tempered manager and an anxious customer.

I don't think @Newyearkiss sounds unwell!!

I think she is worried that if she makes a complaint and the manager gets into some sort of trouble, then the manager might look up her details and take some sort of action, like putting up an anonymous post about her on social media or signing her up for magazine subscriptions and the like.

That's not an outlandish scenario, especially if the manager has been complained about many times and @Newyearkiss 's complaint is the final straw for her bosses and she gets the sack.

That is why she wants to know if the details she gave the store will be available to the manager or are sent off somewhere.

Don’t be daft!
OP, are you going to come back and tell us what happened?

How bad was it that you think she might trace you online?? The manager will be dealing with similar situations multiple times a day I'm sure. She won't be stalking people afterwards.

I once had a customer try to return a linen suit because it had creased so much. She wore it to a wedding and was embarrassed at how she looked after the church because of the creases and wanted to return it for being faulty. I'd imagine she had complaints about me for not taking her query seriously or being empathetic enough when I said absolutely no.

Personally i’d hate to work in a customer facing role. It must be awful having to deal with people, some of whom are aggressive and confrontational. Maybe the two customers before you were unpleasant, and she was just at the end of her teacher with it all. Who knows. I’ve worked in customer facing roles and it’s an often crappy job because humans can be pretty crappy.

I was in a shop yesterday, just behind a lady asking for a refund.

She was being really rude and the manager was very reasonable. She wanted a refund without a receipt, when he said he couldn't give a refund without a receipt she got very cross, said he was accusing her of stealing it - which he absolutely wasn't.

Then I left the shop and she was outside saying to her husband that the manager had accused her of stealing the item and wouldn’t give her a refund. That's absolutely NOT what he said.

And she was telling her husband that the manager was really rude when he wasn't. He was very professional.

This anecdote is just to illustrate how difficult retail - and customer service in general- can be.

I have definitely been on the opposite end of shockingly bad customer service, which makes me record everything that might even be slightly difficult from now on on my phone......

Often only managers can authorise refunds.

The customer details on the refund slip is to protect against fraud- usually perpetrated by employees. When I worked in retail one of the managers was found guilty of falsifying refunds- putting false names/addresses on refund slips and keeping the money. Oddly, his return rate wasn’t any higher than other branches. When the staff were interviewed as part of the investigation they said he never refunded anyone.

In this case, I’d put the poor service down to stress and pressure. It’s so depressing to come back to work after good sales over Christmas to see your store figures hammered by refunds - a good percentage of which can’t go back on the floor. Retail is a tough world, and the store managers are heavily judged on their weekly results.

(not that there should be any excuse for rudeness)

I'd chalk it up to experience OP, the manager was probably overwhelmed, stressed and dealing with a lot of people trying to return things without receipts/damaged etc. Once you walked away from this manager, your moment to say something was gone.

Actually, I was just in Tesco there because we'd run out of coffee. I also picked up some pretzels from the bakery. When I got to the selve serve, pretzels weren't on the bakery list. The Tesco guy had to get his supervisor over to look out a code, which involved the finding of keys and the unlocking of a cupboard to rummage through. She eventually ambled over to me, avoiding eye contact with a face like a smacked arse, used a device to put something in, heaved a huge sigh, then responded to my thank you with a "guh" type noise as she shuffled off resentfully.
I was amused today.
Another day, when my anxiety is at play, I might have felt differently.

As PPs have said, without context as to what actually happened we can’t tell you whether you were being challenged appropriately.

Accessing your personal information and tracing you online would be a breach of GDPR and business conduct - thus a sackable offence.

I must say though, as a retail manager coming across hundreds of difficult interactions, you would have been forgotten about very quickly and they wouldn’t give it any more thought.

Having worked in retail in various stores as a student I can assure you she absolutely will not care about finding a receipt with your name on it because you complained about her.
You get a thick skin working in that environment, especially at Christmas. It doesn’t excuse her being rude to you, but she has probably dealt
with hundreds of customers speaking to her like shit for the last few weeks, and trying it on with returns they’re not entitled to (I’m not suggesting this is you), as well as having less experienced staff defer to her all the time. Added to the fact she probably only got Christmas Day off to spend with her own family, and if she’s a manager has likely had to try and cover staff shortages due to all the sickness at this time of year… No, she should not have been rude, but honestly she’s probably totally jaded and at the end of her tether.
Yes, if you feel she was rude and gave poor customer service then you can absolutely complain to the company, but I can promise you with some certainty she won’t remember your name or look for it on a slip of paper. She probably won’t even recall the interaction.

You don’t need to worry about the return slip you’ve signed - it’s a legal requirement and we’ve had to sign them for decades. They will go into the till with hundreds of others at this time of the year and the Manager will not be able to identify yours should she chose to go through them.

If this is the reason you are reticent of complaining, I would not let it hold you back. I totally appreciate that it s tough time of year, that there are chancers and scammers that are running these store workers raged, but if you felt you were treated so badly that you became distressed I would definitely complain. You may not be the only complaint they receive about this store or individual so they may find it useful to see a pattern of dysfunction.

I once worked on returns for a high street retailer. Returns slips were put to one side and collected when the tills were cashed up.

Most people were completely genuine and there were no issues. That said, a not insignificant minority were trying to return items fraudulently, so you did have to be alert to the usual scams.

New Year was by far the worst time for this, with lots of sale items and the store being extremely busy — it was a real eye-opener for me.

What was your query? I wouldn’t have needed to involve a manager if a return was straightforward. It would usually only be necessary if someone didn’t have a receipt or the item was damaged.

That said, she still shouldn’t have been rude to you — there’s no excuse for that.

Unless you have a very unique name the chances of tracking you down seem slim and that’s if anyone could even be bothered. You will be one of hundreds of people she dealt with that day and there will have been lots of refunds so she’d need to remember what item you returned and roughly what your name was to even find your receipt in the pile of refund receipts. If your fear is that she’d track it down after finding out you’ve made the complaint the add in several days/weeks between yesterday and her becoming aware of the complaint so she’d have potentially weeks worth of receipts to pick through. It seems logically unlikely that this would happen.

she will have forgotten about you, you were one of many customers that day with “slight queries”. How reasonable/unreasonable she was will depend heavily on your “slight query” - I was working in a shop yesterday and I had 4 people try to return things obviously worn on New Year’s Eve (could smell perfume on the neck, make up stains etc) so yes by the fifth return I was pretty skeptical!

Why would she look you up online ? You returned an item the staff was a bit off with you probably run off their feet, you are not a thought in her head once you have left the till. The return slips I am not sure but nobody is looking you up online, unless it is to direct market your email address.

OP, are you going to come back and tell us what happened?

But the OP isn’t asking for a verdict on the interaction, she is asking about the slips. Is it really that hard to understand?

Agree with those who say that the person won’t be interested in tracing you. And actually I think it’s quite odd to even consider that she might think of it.

I used to work in retail many years ago. One time a customer complained about me. The thing that really got me was that when she complained, she blatantly lied about what happened. This wasn’t an incident where someone might have had a different perception than someone else - it was quite simply a lie. And of course, I got into trouble based on what she reported.

But, I was more pissed off with my manager than with the customer. What kind of a manager just takes the customer’s word for it, without bothering to look into what happened? It didn’t even occur
to me to be pissed off with the customer.

About what?

I agree with @TappyGilmore that it’s weird to think the manager would trace you online. What did the OP do 😂

Returning things has become a hostile experience in many places.

I returned something a new dress within the 28 days period to a supermarket that doesn’t have fitting rooms and the assistant was very abrupt and short with me and said that returns after 8pm were a problem because they couldn’t be taken upstairs to be retagged until the next day.

The next time, weeks later, I returned something else and arrived at 6pm, after work. It was the same assistant, and I mentioned to her that I hope returns weren’t a problem at this time, and she had no idea what I was talking about. I reminded her of what she said and she had no clue what I was on about. So she had completely made up the bit about 8pm just to be hostile.

I get returns are annoying but what do they expect customers to do if there are no fitting rooms?

I assumed that if the young girl had to call for help from the manager that there may have been a problem with the item the we’re trying to get a refund for.

Retail staff can't even contact someone who's lost a purse/card by searching the name on it. It's against data protection laws. No one's going to cause you trouble in this way, it would get them into significantly more trouble than the behaviour you're complaining about would.

You were shaking? 🤦🏻‍♀️