Blog Gold

There are just some people out there who like to be difficult, and today provided me with the pleasure of dealing with one such person.

It all started when a very tall man approached the pawn counter and asked me how much we offered for VHS tapes. I have been trained to ask how many VHS tapes they have because we base the price off the quantity. For example, if they have ten tapes then we offer twenty-five cents, but if they have three hundred tapes we offer five cents. Clearly, one main reason for this price tiering is to discourage customers from selling mass quantities of VHS tapes to us because no one wants them anymore. So, when the man told me he had about 90 tapes, I responded that we could give him ten cents for each.

At this point, a woman butted into the conversation, asking the tall man how much we were offering for the tapes. He told her and this woman was not pleased. She began ranting about how we used to give a quarter per tape and that she'd rather donate the tapes then sell it to us because we were ripping her off. This may make me horrible person, but I kind of enjoyed this. I hate dealing with VHS tapes. They're old and crappy and hard to sell. Please, keep your tapes. So, if I don't have to look through dozens of tapes and then find a place to store them in our already overflowing storage room where I know they'll end up rotting away, then I'm a happy pawn broker. I didn't expect to have much more interaction with this ridiculous woman, but I was wrong.

After raising a stink about the price of the tapes, she pulled a pawn contract out of her purse. I tried to look at the contract so I could use the transaction number to pull up her account, but she must have thought I was up to something much more devious because she snatched it out of my sight and put it back into her purse. I asked if I could see the ticket, just so I could make sure I was pulling up the correct loan, but she refused my request and told me to just pull up her account with her name--which she then provided. Her original intent was to pay the interest she owed on her loan, but when I pulled up her account and provided her with the amount of the interest, she wanted to know how much it would be to redeem her item. And this is when the real struggle began.

Now, the only way we can give out information about a pawn loan is if the owner of the loan shows us their ID or if they have written and signed a note giving someone else permission to pick up their possession(s). Normally when I ask a customer to see their ID, they produce it without hesitation because they understand how our system works and appreciate the precautions we take to keep their information private. But when I asked to see this woman's ID, she told me she didn't have it on her. She even looked through her oversized woman's wallet and was unable to locate it. Long story short, she argued with me that it was her loan and that I should be able to just give her the information. She wouldn't listen to me when I mentioned protocol or customer confidentiality and insisted that I just give her the information. In the end, she paid the interest and signed a new loan contract--which actually gives out a lot of information about the loan itself--what is in the loan, the amount due on it, the interest, the due date, etc. Upon seeing the wealth of information on this contract, she began to rant about how ridiculous our system of confidentiality is because I couldn't give her that information without seeing her ID but she got it in the end because she paid her interest. I saw a shred of a valid point in this, but it's more likely that if someone is paying the interest of a loan that they're more trustworthy versus someone who is trying to snoop around into people's accounts.

After this fiasco came to a close, she said that she would go ahead and sell us the VHS tapes at ten cents a piece. Apparently, she changed her mind about donating them to Goodwill. The tall man asked if we had a cart he could borrow to bring the tapes into the store. We do have such a cart, but if someone is going to take the cart out of the store unattended then they are required to give us their ID to hold while they do so. It's not a big deal for most people, but the man didn't have his ID on him and the woman began to rant about how ridiculous this store policy was. At this point, we were in the middle of a rush and I would have preferred to have just given them the cart so they could bring in the tapes by themselves, but I had to go outside with him to load up the cart. Furthermore, I told her that without her ID, she wouldn't be able to sell us anything because it would have been required by law for us to see it. And then the woman flipped open her wallet and showed me her driver's license. So, when I had asked for her ID earlier, instead of showing it to me, she lied about not having it, put on a show as if she had tried to find it, and then argued with me for several minutes about not needing her ID when she had it right there the entire time. Why she did this I will never know and hope to never know. When I asked if I could take the woman's ID, she refused to take it out from behind the clear shield of her wallet, forcing me to accompany the man outside with the cart.

When we got to his vehicle with the cart, there was clearly more than ninety tapes. There was more like two hundred and fifty. Once we got the tapes into the store, I informed them that since there was a much larger quantity than they had informed us about that we could only offer them five cents a tape. As you could imagine, this set the woman off again. I tried my best to look sympathetic but doubt it was very convincing. She pointed out that our price tiering was immoral and didn't make any sense, but what didn't make sense to me was how she could think we wanted to buy hundreds of VHS tapes that 1) we would probably never sell OR 2) if we did by some miracle sell them to someone still interested in using such archaic technology--that they'd be bought for next to nothing.

So, what the woman did next was both shocking and impressive. She said that she wouldn't sell all of her tapes to us but just ninety of them so she could get them for ten cents a piece instead of five. Touche. Touche, ranty lady.

This sent me on the task of looking through the trash bags that had been filled to the point of bursting. Most of the tape we actually wouldn't have been able to buy off her, anyway. We require that they 1) have a running time of 90 minutes or longer, and 2) come in their original boxes. Many of her tapes failed to fill one or both of the requirements. But as I was sorting through the ones we could actually take in, she began to give me orders on which ones she wanted to keep--children's movies, for example. In the end, I found ninety tapes, gave her nine dollars for them, and then helped them load the excess tapes back into their vehicle. While I was helping them do this, the tall man muttered "I hate them" under his breath. Unsure if he was talking about me and my fellow co-workers, I asked him what he'd said. He responded with another "I hate them" and then nodded towards some people down the row of cars. He then told me he would have really enjoyed physically assaulting them with nonchalance that did not match his gruff language or attitude.

Wheeling the cart back into the store, I considered wishing these demanding customers to have a good day. The key word of that sentence would be "considered". In truth, I sent them off with no such wishes even though I appreciated their quirks. I may have been frustrated for a moment or two, but I realize that when the frustration fades that I'm left with blog gold.