Get The Hell Out

I, and many of my fellow employees, find the pawn shop's closing policies to be very annoying. For one, we don't lock the doors and officially close until ten minutes after our supposedly closing time. For two, we are not allowed to ask customers to leave the store, thus allowing them to look around for as long as they like without realizing that we are closed and that they should get the hell out. For three, while our oblivious customers are roaming the store after we close, we are unable to begin our closing procedures--putting the jewelry into the safe, sweeping and mopping the floor, and bringing in the bikes, ladders, etc in from outside--which results in having to work longer than any of us would like.

Why do we not lock the doors until ten minutes after our posted closing time? Why can we not tell people we are closed or drop hints that they should leave? There are theories, but none of them justify such annoying practices.

Theory #1 -- We do these things out of courtesy.

Disproval of Theory #1 -- It may be a courtesy to the customers, but it is a great discourtesy to the employees who are often kept at work thirty minutes later--or longer--than was planned, oftentimes causing problems with the plans they made for the evening. Yes, it may be a courtesy, but our hours are posted. If someone doesn't make it on time, who cares? I'm sorry, but if you don't make it, you don't make it.

Theory #2 -- We do these things to make more money.

Disproval of Theory #2 -- Most people who roam the store after hours do not buy a single thing! They browse and browse and browse until the word "browse" loses all meaning and the employees are ready to take a samurai sword from the shelf and assault them, and then they slink out the door without purchasing anything. Sometimes, people do buy something, but that is a rare occurrence, and even if they do buy something, what they spend is usually not enough to cover the costs of keeping all the employees there, especially towards the end of the week when most of them are working on overtime.

Tonight, we locked the doors at ten past five and had several customers still in the store. This always puts me in a horrible mood. I curse a lot under my breath, say horrible things about the customers to my co-workers, purposefully find ways to shirk my duties, and scowl like scowling is the only thing I know how to do. In the past five months, there have only been a few times when we've locked the doors and had no customers in the store. I hate it. I absolutely hate it. I would love to storm over to them and tell them to get the hell out. Maybe I'll do that when I quit. It would feel so good.

Of course, most of the customers don't deserve my hostility. They legitimately don't realize we are closed. In their defense, we do close pretty early (6:oo pm during the week and 5:oo pm on Saturdays), and we don't tell them we're closed unless they ask. And when customers realize we are closed, most of them hurry up and try to leave as quickly as possible. Although, there are a lot of customers who don't care and continue taking their sweet time.

When we closed this evening, there were multiple people still in the store. There were two men who were looking at a cellphone. After several minutes of debating it over, they decided against buying it and left the store only to return two minutes later to knock on our door (which is glass) and ask if they could be let back in because they decided they wanted the phone after all.

I would have told them to come back when we were open. In my mind, when we're closed, we're closed. They had their chance to buy the stupid phone. Sadly, I wasn't the one who responded to their knocking on the door. My manager beat me to it and let them back in. He probably thought they were just going to grab the phone, pay for it, and then go--since they had already been looking at it for so long. But if he had expected such an outcome, he was mistaken. These two men looked over the phone and carefully tested out the touch screen and various functions for fifteen minutes before they finally completed the purchase.

I know I'm horrible, but I hope they have a car wreck while using their phone.

But I suppose these two very thorough men didn't really matter in the long run because of the old man who was wandering throughout the store during all of this and then for twenty minutes afterward.

I was furious.

He looked at everything, and I mean everything. He cocked his head sideways and I swear he read each and every one of the DVD titles we had on display--which was around six hundred. He went over to our guitars and looked at each one individually. He perused every single purse. He looked over all of our game systems. He just wouldn't stop! He just kept looking and looking and looking! I swear. It was like he had dementia and had no idea what anything was!

And then when he finally did leave, he went away empty handed. What a surprise.