Needy Customers

It is so funny how days have themes. Today's was : THE NEEDY CUSTOMER.

The whole string of shenanigans was kicked off by a couple who was paying off certain pawn loans in order to redeem specific items while just paying the interest on other loans in order to extend their pawn loan contracts. Things were complicated for numerous reasons which I will now list: 1) The man's driver's license was expired. This trips up the system when we try to do transactions in the computer. When I asked the man if he had renewed his license, thinking that he should have done it by then because it had been expired for over two months, he became very upset and said he used to have a CDL license but couldn't renew it until he paid $1,200 in fines. What these fines were for, he did not say. I quickly changed the topic because he kept talking louder and louder and gesturing wildly and I thought he was going to snap if I didn't distract him from the traumatic topic of his expired license. 2) The man and the woman both had numerous loans under each of their names in separate accounts. So, in order to serve them, I had to do everything twice instead of just once, this obviously required twice the amount of time it would have taken if it had all been under one account. 3) A rush hit during the middle of this painstaking experience. This caused an even bigger line of customers to form because of how long it was taking to serve them. 4) The items this couple was reclaiming were either difficult to find (imagine finding a few specific fishing rods that were mixed among dozens of fishing rods) or difficult to physically maneuver (they reclaimed three bikes, one of which was an enormous three wheeler with a huge metal compartment on the back of it. We actually had to lift it and carry it through the back rooms because we were reorganizing things and this bike wouldn't have fit through the narrow passage ways of random stuff that were growing their way out from the walls and shelves). 5) I screwed up a transaction and had to have the owner go back into the computer and fix it. 6) The copule re-pawned a bike they had just redeemed from a previous pawn loan. Luckily, it wasn't the enormous three wheeler.

The second needy customer was a woman who was looking for a small video recorder for her son. This son had previously been in the shop, had seen a specific type of recorder he had liked, and then sent his mother back to retrieve it. This dedicated mother was beyond concerned about getting the best deal. There were a couple different versions of the video recorder her son wanted and she asked me if I could find out exactly what the differences were between the two. This required looking up information about both models on the Internet, and even at that point, some of the details were a little fuzzy. These fuzzy details became monstrous concerns of hers and she spent a great deal asking me questions I had no answers to. However, she found a way to get around those concerns by asking me if I would be willing to charge both video recorders and then test each of them out to see which was of better quality. This would serve the purpose of finding out what each of them did and making sure that each used item worked properly. She wasn't terribly fond of the idea of buying used electronics, which is understandable, but this was getting ridiculous. I told her that I would be happy to charge both video recorders but she would have to come back and test them out on her own. She agreed and said she would be back tomorrow to test them both out. I, however, had more work to do. I first had to hunt down the proper charger for these recorders and then find a plug where I could leave them  to charge without getting stolen or broken. That took several more moments of frustration.

The third needy customer was a woman who was accompanied by her surly teenage son. These two had spent more than a half hour searching through our DVDs and then brought several to the counter to buy. The mother spread her selection of movies across our wide counter as if she there was no chance of another customers needing to use the other portion of the counter which was dedicated for the second register. She began to carefully look at each disk, commenting on how dirty DVDs were and how much the thought of what germs were on them disgusted her. She repeatedly asked me if I thought various disks were scuffed and scratched beyond playability. Two of the disks looked like they had been sneezed on. There were dozens of dots which looked like dried splatters of some unknown liquid on them. She didn't buy these two, but the other 15 she did. At this point, she asked if it would have been better to go along with the current sale price or if she should pay full price for some of the DVDs so she could use her DVD hole punch card and get three free DVDs. Of course, the current five for ten dollar deal was much more economical. I told her so and she quickly agreed. Then, when she handed me a VISA card and I asked if I should process it as a debit or credit card, she told me to run it as a credit card because it was "better for me, but not so much for you." She was referring to certain fees merchants pay for credit card transactions. At this comment, her son shook his head and asked in an unamused and surprisingly deep voice if that was "really necessary?" The mother, looking embarassed, began to ramble out a justification for her comment. Priceless.