to have wanted to tell this woman to...

[TheChicOfIt]

fuck off leave me alone?

I was in Early Learning with ds and about 4 boxes of fuzzy felts fell on his head from a high shelf. They obviously weren't that heavy, but I imagine it would still hurt a toddler. He started crying and was really quite upset.

The shop assistant came over as she saw it happen, and said "Oh what's the matter"

What's the matter? Four cardboard boxes just fell on his frickin head!!

Then she said, "Oh well they're not heavy are they, he probably just got a fright".

Then he started coughing, and she said "Oh, he's got a cough, that's what's wrong isn't it?"

By this point I was getting a bit , but then she started following me round the shop, going on about 3 for 2 on craft items.

I was trying to distract my son by showing him the toys and saying "what shall we get then", and she was answering, "Why don't you get this, it's for age 3 and up but that doesn't really matter."

Am I wrong in thinking that an apology for their shoddy shelf stacking would have sufficed?

she really didn't get it did she??

yanbu. she should have apologised straigh away and moved the boxes so it didn't happen again, checked that ds was alright and then left you to shop in peace.

actually she should have checked ds was alright and then moved teh boxes.

it wasnt elc in preston was it? cos we went in there before xmas and the shop assistant was very openly flirting with dp, as you can imagine i was very very far from impressed!

I think I would have suggested to DS that we didn't want to stay in a shop where the goods aren't stacked properly.

Aha ELC staff here!
Correct procedure is to establish if child has any injury, if no injury and just a bit of shock then my rule is to give the child a balloon and leave the parent to give child a cuddle,who wants a stranger dancing about and talking at you when allyou want is a cuddle from your mum/dad.

Those fuzzy felts boxes are a bugger, the plans are always to put them on 6ft shelf, every year. We ignore them and tend to put themon bottom shelfwhere they will do the least damage! Thank god they arnt in the metal tins anymore!

Gotta say the girl is enthusiastic trying to do the sell when you obviously wanted her to piss off, bet the area manager was in store or something!

she sounds unproffesional

No it wasn't Preston, but that would have pissed me off too biddysmama.

I used to work in retail, and if that had happened in our store, we would have been trained to check that everything was ok ie no injuries, then it would have been recorded in the accident book.

It was as if she was trying to absolve all responsibility from them by making out that there was some other reason that he was crying .

I am thinking of sending their head office a letter enclosing a picture of the big scratch down his nose.

Ooooh injury! I would inform head office then because she should definitely logged your details on the computer, does sounds like she was trying to shirk (sp?) the blame a bit. Go on tell me... what store?

AmazingBouncingFerret - she did offer him a balloon actually, but he was so worked up that he pushed it away.

ABF - It was Maidstone

Heh my idea has been filched! (it wont of been me, im on maternity leave... phew!) See the pushing away of balloon would of told me that he was obvioiusly not happy about it and something needed to be done. When a child gets injured instore the most important thing a member of staff can do is apologise over and over and rectify the hazard in front of customer.

Seriously now, you should inform head office and say that your child was injured in store and the member of staff was completely unprofessional about it and didnt even make a log in the accident book. They have ways of checking because its all done online.

You are mostly likely to receive a £15 giftcard that you can spend in a different ELC store.

I'm really iompressed that ELC have policies on this, even if you can't tell in my nearest store, where chatting to each other seems to be the main staf fpriority. If I ever go in an ELC again I will bear this in mind.

We have policies on everything, unfortuntely some staff seem unprepared to acknowledge them.

Well I have sent an email to customer services, so I will wait to see what they say.

She probably didn't know what to do. If you don't have children yourself it is always hard to understand how to deal with them.

I think she probably had kids and grandchildren as she was about 60ish.

Plus she works in a toy shop so she probably encounters many kids on a daily basis.