I have worked at customer service at Target for ten years now. The stories I could tell...
Most people are polite, understand that there are limits to what we can do, and that most of the time it is their own fault that we can't help them. But there are a few people who, if I had been allowed to talk straight with them and not give the constant, "I'm sorry sir/ma'am," line, they would have left the store in tears. The logic that these people use has no weight to it, and as they stand there and yell at me about it, my mind picks it apart and begs me to point it out to them. Sadly, I'm not allowed.
One lady I will always remember. Target has those electric mobile carts for handicap people. My store only has four, and they are in constant use. So, toward the mid-point of the day, they start dying. We do our best to charge them, but seeing as it seems like every tenth person coming into the store 'needs' one, a lot of the times the carts go out with only half a charge. And then they die. One woman had her cart full and her cart died right next to a cashier. She yelled at the cashier, demanding to know why the carts were always dead. The cashier responded correctly by apologizing and offering to get her a new cart--which was literally ten feet away and plugged in. The woman responded by standing up and saying, "Forget it," and proceeded to storm off. The cashier asked if she was coming back, seeing as her cart was still filled to the brim with stuff. The woman spun around (again, this is a lady who is suppose to need one of these carts to get around) and yelled, "I don't now!" and stormed off. She left her dead cart in the middle of the walkway, blocking traffic. After thirty minutes, I walked over and asked the cashier what the cart was. She told me the story, and I asked how long ago it had happened.
"30 minutes about," she said. So I started pulling stuff out to put it back. There were frozen items in there, after all. I came across a prescription back filled with meds from our pharmacy. I stopped and asked the cashier if she was SURE that the lady hadn't said anything about coming back.
"No, she didn't. She stormed off without saying anything like that."
"She didn't say she'll be back, or for you to watch her cart?"
"No." Well, I decided to leave it alone for another fifteen minutes just in case. I figured she'd at least come back with her tail between her legs to get her pills. So, FORTY-FIVE minutes after this woman has disappeared without a trace and not a word, my manager brings the cart over and tells me to start unloading it. I do so, and put everything back. Ten minutes later, the woman comes up demanding her stuff. She's very upset that we put it all back.
"No effort was made to find me. No one tried to track me down. No one tried to page me. I mean, I shop her all the time. (God, I hate that line). You guys didn't hold on to it. Now I have to waste my time getting all that stuff again, and I have to wait for the pharmacy to reopen to get my pills back." Because only the pharmacy is allowed to hold that stuff, and they were at lunch.
I nearly lost it with her there. Contact her? Track her down? Page her? What the hell were we supposed to say? "Would the woman who threw a fit and abandoned her cart at checklane 2, if you're still in the building, please let us know so we don't put away your melting ice cream."? I nearly pointed all this out to her, saying that she had left without informing us of her plans, and had made it very clear that she probably would not be coming back. And it's our fault that we couldn't read her mind? To top it all off, I suddenly recognized the woman. It was someone I had passed not twenty minutes ago, cruising through the CD section on another electric cart, which was now empty by the way, with her children. She had gone off shopping again and had expected us to hold her stuff after she had said she wasn't even sure she was coming back for it.