To wonder who decided that customers want small talk at the till in a shop?

[YouWonJayne]

Seriously I want to know their names. Which suits sat in a boardroom and said “Do you know what customers really want? When they’re stressed and frazzled trying the find a plain black shirt and black skirt for a 9 year old’s school play, which BTW are nigh-on impossible to find, when they get to the till they want the assistant to ask what they’re up to this morning and if they’re busy? That will keep customers happy!”

The poor girl on the checkout was trying her best not to look bored as she asked the woman in front of me “Have you got much planned this morning? Do you have a busy day” especially when the woman have details of all the wedding outfits she needed to buy for her grandchildren.

I hope the assistant was relieved when I just gave a “No” when she asked me the same. I really couldn’t be arsed.

I noticed this everywhere now. Is it just me who doesn’t actually want small talk, who just wants to buy my stuff and get on with me day without being a conversationalist extraordinaire? Don’t get me started on upselling! Or the people in Lush who pounce when you’re through the door. It’s completely insufferable.

The worst part is these poor people (probably on minimum wage) get bollocked if they don’t behave this way. I can’t imagine any of them want to behave this way.

I feel like it needs a serious platform, a campaign called Leave Shoppers Alone (half joking) 😂

In the grocery nearest me, most of the till operators are aged 70+. Working at that age, they can talk or not talk to me as much as they like.

This is horrific and sadly, it does happen a lot at Currys/PC World. (I think it's just Currys now.)

I went to get a new laptop in mid 2017. I picked one, and the man I spoke to and asked if we could have one please, said we need to go up into 'PC Help Corner.' He said 'we'll have one of our PC experts set it up for you.' My husband said 'I work in IT. I know exactly what to do. And we have been using computers since before you were born cheers anyway. We know everything we need to know and can do it ourselves.'

He said, 'oh, but we can't really sell it to you until we have showed you everything we need to show you, and set it up for you, and applied the warranty blah blah blah, please go to PC Help Corner...' He wouldn't even put the sale through. It was really bizarre. We were gobsmacked.

We went into this 'corner' and 5 other people were sat there, whilst 2 people were being dealt with. We waited 15 minutes for somebody to come to us/call us over and nobody did. In that 15 minutes the couple at the table were still there, as were the 5 people waiting before us.. We decided to leave.

We went to the woman at the customer services at the front, and said 'we're going. We're not buying this laptop now. We wanted to buy it, and you've kept us waiting 15 minutes, and we will very likely be waiting much longer as the 5 people in front of us haven't been seen yet. All you will do, is tell us a load of stuff we already know - and will charge probably fifty quid for it, along with extra cover we don't need.. Stick your laptop!'

Amazingly, the woman at the till just put the £299 laptop straight through and didn't even try to sell the extra insurance!

Got another one last year, 2022, when the other one packed up. Took an absolute pleasure in getting it from ARGOS. Just ordered and paid for it online, picked it up at the counter, they said 'you want any extra cover?' I said 'no thanks' and she said 'OK thank you. Here's your item - have a good day.'

Thank fuck for Argos.

Up selling and trying to push things onto people they don't need, (as Currys and PC world and other companies do,) is absolutely horrific practice. It's really nasty for the shop assistants, and it's a really nasty way to treat their customers.

Buying a copy of the i newspaper today sir? Would you like an almost out of date Terry's Chocolate Orange that is half price?' that's probably cheaper in B & M?'

My mum worked in retail for about 20 years and it was upwelling that made her decide to take early retirement. She hated it, that’s not the job she originally applied for. It actually started making her miserable going to work

Every time I go into Savers for a pack of anti histimines or a bottle of shampoo or a pack of plasters, I ALWAYS get asked if I want to buy the latest perfume by Britney Spears/Beyonce/Rihanna and so on... A snip at £25. Errr, no ta, I just came in for a 99p pack of plasters.

I know the assistant hates it too. What 'boiled frog for a brain' pillock decided it's a good idea to tell the checkout operator to try and flog a £25 bottle of Beyonce's perfume to a middle aged woman buying a pack of plasters? What the actual living fuck! I do wonder if anyone actually HAS bought a £25 bottle of perfume they didn't go in for, because the assistant offered it???

I also wonder - if the assistant is getting into trouble if they don't flog a certain number of bottles of any given perfume on any given day? Still not buying it though!

I might say 'If I want to smell like cat piss my ginger tom at home will be very happy to do it for nothing'.

100% this!

I’m amazed at some of the dismissive posts on here, as though being kind and friendly, and recognising the shop worker as a real (and probably bored) human is a bad thing.

I always make a point of ensuring a 2-way cheery exchange with check-out staff, make them laugh, bit of a sympathise about how long they’ve got left of their shift, a shared eye-roll at the grumpy customers etc… I figure that seeing eachother as humans and sharing a smile and a laugh is never a bad thing.

There have been times I’ve been having a dreadful time of it and have really felt better for that shared connection with a stranger, so I always extend that to others.

@Noseylittlemoo

I find it really rude when a customer either continues a conversation on the phone or whoever she's come into the shop with, without making any eye contact or verbal communication. We're people not robots - altho some of the posters here would like us to be efficient mute robots!

That works both ways. Some shop/counter assistants do exactly the same!

Surely as human beings our default setting should be to be nice to each other, want to talk to people and show basic levels of interest? If you don’t really want to chat there’s plenty of ways to politely and easily make that clear. There’s been many a time when I’ve been stressed buying something and that little small talk actually helps that. I bet I could find posts moaning about rude staff not talking to customers so this is better than that.

@EbonyRaven

We went to the woman at the customer services at the front, and said 'we're going. We're not buying this laptop now. We wanted to buy it, and you've kept us waiting 15 minutes, and we will very likely be waiting much longer as the 5 people in front of us haven't been seen yet. All you will do, is tell us a load of stuff we already know - and will charge probably fifty quid for it, along with extra cover we don't need.. Stick your laptop!' Amazingly, the woman at the till just put the £299 laptop straight through and didn't even try to sell the extra insurance!

Well done. It's a matter of being assertive really. Make it clear you're not going to "play their games" and give them an ultimatum that you're walking out without buying if they continue to be stupid about it! But then again, the shop assistant should be able to read the signs so it doesn't get to that stage.

We bought a car a couple of weeks ago. It was an absolute pleasure dealing with the salesman, who literally got everything right. We'd been round lots of garages and were really fed up with most salesmen who pounced on you as soon as you walked onto their land, wouldn't leave us alone, didn't listen when we told them what we actually wanted, etc. The guy we eventually bought from was an absolute dream. We'd been looking at various cars for a few minutes before he just wandered over casually, just said "hello, I'll be other there if you want anything, want keys to sit in a car or want a test drive, just give me a shout" and then wandered away again. There were a couple of cars we wanted to sit it, so we went to find him, he was exactly where he said he'd be, and he happily handed us the keys for us to sit in. Neither were what we wanted, and we were ready to leave, so we handed the keys back, he just said no problem, and then casually asked what we were looking for - he listened! He said he may actually have something more suitable, not exactly what we wanted, but he thought we may like it, but it wasn't on site (it was being valetted), he offered to go and get it for us. He brought it back, and yes, it wasn't what we asked for, but it "ticked our boxes" - he'd understood our needs more than we did. We test drove it, and said we'd have it.

He then went onto the "hard sell" and we started rolling our eyes at each other - do we want to buy an extended warranty, do we want interior stain protection, do we want their insurance, do we want external special waxing, etc - but right at the start, he apologised and said unfortunately he had to give us the details and ask if we wanted any of it. We just politely listened and he went through as quickly as he could. Then we said no to it all, he smiled, and finalised the paperwork. No hassle, no pressure. That's the way it should be. By reading the signs from first stepping onto the garage and listening to us, he got a quick and easy sale! If he'd been pushy or arrogant or didn't listen to us, we'd have walked away.

@brunettemic

If you don’t really want to chat there’s plenty of ways to politely and easily make that clear.

Indeed, but there are lots of people incapable of reading the signs!

Some days I'm fine with it, some days not so much. I like a friendly checkout person. The best ones are those who can ready body language and mood and respond accordingly. Pretty much like life really. It's just all part of human interaction, being able to read whether others are busy, upset, annoyed, relaxed etc.

Or thinking regardless of whether we’re giving out these signs that we need to ‘suck it up’ and engage anyway otherwise we’re socially inept and should lock ourselves away from all human contact and wallow in our misery - apparently

It’s not a awful. If you don’t want to engage a simple no/ not really / other banal answer should discourage polite chit chat.

Most of the checkout staff in my local Waitrose don't go beyond "Hello, how are you?", which is fine, especially as I live in a small town where you sort of "know" people once you've encountered them a few times.

But one of the staff on the "baskets only" checkout seems to act like she wants to be everyone's best friend. I've been asked what I'm doing today (getting my fucking shopping, isn't it obvious ffs?), how I am, something about the weather (variable according to nature of said weather), is it busy in town, some inane comment about what I'm buying ("these are nice, aren't they?" - "No, they're really revolting, but I'm eating disgusting food as a penance").

It's even more annoying when there's a queue for that checkout, and the people behind are getting visibly irritated by how long she goes on for. And she often carries on chatting to customers when the transaction has been finished, even though she's got a queue. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's inwardly screaming "Fucking get on with it, ffs?" while she witters on.

I'd use the self-service, but self-service checkouts hate me and invariably refuse to scan half my sodding shopping and a staff member has to keep coming over to sort it out.

It even has that effect on the shopping of people near me. I was in the queue at the self-service once when a man at the nearest till had a multi-pack of pants in his shopping. Every time he tried to scan them, the machine said "Please place your produce on the scales", which had me pissing myself laughing.

I live alone and it often is the only social interaction I have in a day, sometimes in several days.

But I don't go shopping for social interaction, my purpose is to, you know, buy stuff, and get out of the sodding shops as soon as possible.

In the Waterstones I go to, there's a pleasant (but not pushy) bloke who knows the sort of thing I like and has recommended other authors to me a couple of times, and they've always been authors whose work I've really enjoyed.

I like that.

And it's infinitely preferable to my local Waterstones, which is trying to be a coffee shop as well, so you have to wait to pay while they make some complicated coffee order and can hardly get to the books for all the people sitting at tables drinking coffee and eating cake.

The town only has about a gazillion other coffee shops.

This whole conversation needs to be reframed from the perspective of retail workers. Seriously, who gets a job in retail if you don't enjoy talking to people?

It's the only part of the job that a self-checkout can't do.

But if you want to go down the road of less and less human specific interaction, then there goes all our jobs too...

Lots of people go into retail but have no social skills at all and clearly don't enjoy talking to people. Just been to our village post office. The guy in there never talks, never makes eye contact, no "hello", "please", nor "thank you". Just basically grunts and says the amount to pay.

As for loss of jobs to automation, that's been happening ever since the start of the industrial revolution 200 years ago. It's just evolution. Some jobs disappear, other new jobs appear. The days are long gone when someone can expect to stay in their current job for the rest of their working lives.

My mum said that when she was at school the thick girls (or those judged to be so by the teachers) were said to be destined for 'the sweet counter at Woolworths'.

Seriously, who gets a job in retail if you don't enjoy talking to people?

People who have no choice.
People who have no (or very few) qualifications.
Students
People who need to fit their hours around school or childcare or caring responsibilities

Very few people think "ooh, I love talking to people, I'll go and work in ASDA!"

It’s not the small talk exactly, it’s the scripted expectation that a conversation should take place. It feels fake and disingenuous. That is what I don’t like.

The more I read this thread, the more I think that people just want to 'talk at' somebody because they're lonely. So many seem to have misunderstood what is being said on the thread whilst loudly proclaiming that their way is the only way.

We're also at cross-purposes with the circumstances with some posters being checkout staff and forced to engage or talking about up-selling. Many of us are just customers nipping in for something with our minds on other things. That's not gratuitous rudeness it is just behaving as a customer with other things to do.

Some posters have really done their best to make those of us who don't have time or much inclination for random chat, feel as if we're somehow lacking. We're not. I'm polite and friendly to everybody, smile, p's&q's, all in place along with an agreement about whatever weather we're having. Check, check!

I cringed at the self-professed clown who makes it their 'policy' ffs, to make checkout staff laugh. I wonder how much of that laughing is even genuine? Imagine doing that to people you don't even know?

For some people small talk is actually a lifeline. I know people who only leave the house to go to the shop and the person behind the till is the only person they’ll talk to that day so it means a lot to them to have a little chat. In my local Morrisons they replaced most of the tills with self serve and locals were furious about it because there’s a large older population who A) can’t work the self service tills but B) really appreciate talking to someone because they don’t socialise much.

I use self serve tills where possible because I’m really socially awkward/inept at times so I sympathise but also understand why others enjoy this small talk.

Chitchat and upselling is the reason I'm glad for online shopping.

I guess your not a people personnel chatty.
Nothing wrong with polite conversation it is customer service.
Smile thanks, easy.
Shop online and save them!