Man complained about me re yoghurt brand stopped doing a flavour

[Auburngal]

I was at work. Man (early 80s) asked me why we stopped doing a certain flavour yoghurt and the other two supermarkets stopped selling too.

Had my work’s handset on me and went onto the brand’s website and there wasn’t the flavour listed. Brand have dropped the flavour. On hearing the news - he flipped

He then went to the CSD asking for a manager. Manager said the same thing as me.

Do people realise that behaving like this is making staff leave retail?

I am feeling very angry with the dwp staff at the moment but as a doormat I probably won't do anything about it. My brother died a couple of weeks ago and because of that and him being very ill I didn't work as much as usual. I had told them that. Anyway I had to have an appointment with them - my first in a couple of years - as my earnings were too low. They firstly made a face to face appointment for a time when I work ( they know my hours) and then changed it to a phone appointment for 10 minutes after I finish! I was stressed about it because sometimes it is difficult to leave work exactly on time. I rushed home and waited and waited. No phone call. Looked at my journal online said appointment at 1410 still no phone call. After an hour I wrote in the journal how long should I wait - very politely and about an hour after that they put a message on the journal that some of their staff were sick and I'll have to have a face to face next week. If I had missed the call I would have faced sanctions but it was okay for them to mess me around.

If I were prime minister …. National service options would be 12 months working in retail/with the public in a service role, a care home, some sort of public cleaning/maintenance job as well as actual military type stuff.

The worst jobs I have ever had, retail and waitressing I have never forgotten. They have been character forming in a way that I think it is the lowest form of bad manners/bed character to take your bad mood/planning/intellect out on the person who can’t tell you to ff off.

At the end of the day, everyone we deal with face to face, arent the ones who make the rules, we at the customer face are just the ones trying to work policies into real life happenings

Im so sorry that whilst you are extremely stressed, you are having more stress added. But thems the rules that you have to abide to ( im not having a pop just saying ) and its bloody crap when no one is saying " oh there's been a loss , lets wise up". The system doesn't allow for personal circumstances

If I were prime minister …. National service options would be 12 months working in retail/with the public in a service role, a care home, some sort of public cleaning/maintenance job as well as actual military type stuff.

Sod the military stuff, I would just have them work in any customer-facing role!

@TreadSoftlyOnMyDreams make the call ups random like jury service but you are called up some point between 18-65. Same exclusions apply to jury service - carer, receiving cancer treatment and other illnesses, severely disabled. If you on holiday, you get called up within the year.

Like jury service, you must attend at the times on your letter.

If making people work retail doesn’t change their attitudes, then they are just nasty nasty people.

Those who work/worked in retail in the past ten years don’t get called up

Those slagging the bloke of need to calm down as clearly the man is suffering from some medical truma

Yeah, folk are barking. Absolutely barking mad! I voted YABU because working in retail I feel you should have noticed this by now. My colleague and I have a saying (not in retail but also public facing), 'Smile and nod, smile and nod'.

@Auburngal what flavour yoghurt was it

Reminds me of this prick old man saying to.my supervisor in sainsburys restaurant..."tell your chefs..chicken tikka masala is not a whole chicken breast in sauce!!"

As if the minimum wage youngster's having a nervous breakdown in the kitchen had anything to do with menu planning!!! I was so fucking happy when I found out the shitty restaurant was permanently shut down so the miserable that's could whinge Elsewhere

Have some resilience, and just consider it part of being employed.

Sainsburys do them in their posh range, I buy them every week. M & S discontinued their salted caramel flavour - now that was unforgivable.

What a ridiculous response 🙄

Why?

One of my relatives used to work in Asda, we live in a super rural area and during bad winters we can get cut off for a few days until the roads are cleared. It's been like that for 100's of years and we all know to stock up for the winter.

One particularly bad year, we had no milk deliveries for a few days and my relative was assaulted at work due to Asda having no milk.

A big intimidating man around 40 year old physically slammed my college student nephew into the shelving after being told the lorries couldn't get through due to the snow.

People are horrible and I feel strongly that the courts need to do more before we have no one willing to work in our retail sector (are care sector which is a whole other thread).

I'm very disappointed. The thread title in trending reads as 'Man complained about me re yoghurt bra...'
I clicked hoping to find out about yoghurt bras.

My daughter works part time in Next in the men’s department. The abuse that she regularly gets from men is appalling. Honestly makes me so angry.

Some people are just really unreasonable, and he made it look like it's your fault for not having that. That's just crazy.

This is actually so bizarre as our lottery machine is broken due to printer too with signs up and one of our colleagues is retiring next week too this is so strange 😂😂

Yup. Once had a man really aggressively shout at me when I was aged 21 and waitressing in a restaurant because his toddler tripped over a step. Was shouting at me 'why is there a step there?!' um I dunno ask the architect who designed the restaurant? Not sure what it had to do with me but obviously I was an easy target to take out his ire. Honestly Joe Public are tw@ts

You know you are not responsible for the discontinuation but you are the only person there to ask.
His flipping was has reaction to not getting the flavour - he probably had dementia - realistically, you are not to blame, as you well know.
Don't take the reaction to heart. He expressed his grief too loudly...his problem.

So you're saying that teachers/health care professionals, in fact any job, should just "put up" with abuse because we should have factored that into our job choices???? There would be no body doing ANY job then, surely. You're not willing to partion ANY blame to anyone else? Just the people who choose these jobs. Wow.

I worked in retail.

Some customers behave rude!

Sounds to me like you’ve been working with the general public for sometime and it’s just grinding you down.
I get it, it’s awful, I was the same.
So many people are lovely customers but sadly it’s the awkward and rude ones that you remember days/weeks/years later.

depending on the situation if they begin swearing - and especially if I see young children around watching / listening - I usually tell them off and ask them to apologise.
“Excuse me there is no need for that language, I don’t want to hear it and other customers also don’t. Your upsetting children, I think you need to apologise to them and their parents.” - honestly it works, I had one bloke apologise to a 3 month old baby he was that shocked he got called out.

you need to be firm, clear but not shouting: it’s hard at first

also mental health wise have you tried the retail trust ? - and find out your policy on refusing to serve abusive or aggressive customers

if your managers don’t back you then move companies.

my managers thankfully always backed the staff (except for one and i just walked off and said you deal with it then - he never did it again!)

I went beyond what was needed and got that nasty response. Why?

Some customers enjoy being angry at retail staff. They know they can't really answer back so it is a good outlet for their anger.

I work for a high street bank and the level of abuse the staff get on a daily basis is insane.
People that refuse to use the machines to pay in £100 because they’re “saving our jobs” (you’re not, that’s not how it works) and then start shouting that they had to wait in a queue.
Absolutely fine, if you want to stay in the 1900s and have someone put a magical stamp in a book rather than get a printed receipt, however don’t then scream at the person serving you because they dared take more than 30 seconds with the previous customer who actually needed their help. 🙄
Or the ones that kick off because we can’t help them when they have come into Bank A to pay a bill and hand over a card for bank B… Why are you clogging up my queue and you don’t even bank here?!