If the customer is right, what does that make me?
In which people are miserable and have no problem taking it out on you
I hadn’t worked in customer service until I was 29. I moved to London in 2017 for a masters programme and wanted to work part-time because although my parents had agreed to help me out financially, London is still an expensive place to live, particularly if, like me, you’d only worked in a place that had lower wages.
Not that my retail job — a sales advisor at COS Regent Street — was well-paid. It was just above the National Minimum Wage, which was quite a leap from London Living Wage (which, if we’re being honest, is not even really an accurate rate). In any case, I was working the number of allowed hours weekly for a full-time student (20 hours a week) at a dismal hourly wage (like, £9 an hour or something stupid like that) and constantly dealt with a flurry of rude and entitled customers.
I once served a D-list actor who took two pairs of socks (on sale) in different sizes for his mum on Christmas. He asked me what size was “normal,” which, I still don’t know what that means. He then wanted me to just scan in the items, then he can change the sizes afterwards. As he was waving his credit card in my face, I told him he had to pick the correct size from the shop floor and only then can they be scanned, as their SKUs were all different and would screw up our inventory. He ended up just picking one pair and leaving in a huff, and it made me feel bad for his mum, both for getting only one pair of socks and also for having reared a child who would speak to unimportant people like me the way that he did.
A Korean colleague and I were repeatedly asked if we were Chinese by the same woman, even after we had told her we weren’t. Some woman got mad at me for H&M’s sustainability practices, or lack thereof, because we told her we couldn’t sell damaged items at a lower price. “Where do the clothes end up, then?” I don’t know, ma’am, but I can tell you right now I would not have any power to change these systems anyway. I literally make £9 an hour.
Much later on, I worked for a small, independent brand, both as a retail consultant and as a production assistant. Each day would be a mix of making coffee, making candles, servicing the customers, and packing up wholesale orders. If you were thinking, “Hang on, Carina, that sounds like four different jobs,” you would be absolutely right!
My wages here were closer to LLW, and the work was strenuous, but it was fun. And my colleagues were fun. And the things we made were good.
A shop located on a side street in Hackney, however, attracts a specific type of clientele. Many of these people seem to think that we are friends and that I have no other purpose in life than to listen to their life story. Once, I had to stop in the middle of pouring candles (we made between 400-600 candles a day by the time I left) and humoured a customer.
Most people feel bad about taking up your time and will eventually buy a coffee, a matcha latte, or even a bar of Tony’s Chocolonely, if they didn’t find anything else they liked but took up too much of your time with idle chitchat. This woman spoke to me for about forty minutes and left without buying anything. Not even a matcha! By the time she left having bought nothing and wasting my time, all my candles had set with their wicks off centre.
(Eventually, I negotiated to a pay rise that actually went over LLW, which doesn’t sound like much of a win, but, for better or worse, I’ve just learned to take what I can get. I think I had also started an internal riot by asking people’s salaries. I thought, “pay transparency,” and they probably thought, “What a nosy fucking bitch.”)
Towards the end of my time at The Candle Shop That Shall Not Be Named, we had moved production into a warehouse in Leyton, so I didn’t have to deal with any sort of customer-facing work. I think this may have dulled my senses to them and made me forget how much I actually hate it.
I started working at a jewellery store in Shoreditch towards the end of November. Despite my reservations about working in another smaller brand because of management issues at my last place of employment, I accepted the offer. Officially, it’s a “Marketing, Sales & Brand Assistant” role, which as you can see, is three different job descriptions.
It was sold to me as more of a content producer, marketing person, with watching the shop on the side, but it’s been pretty much “watch the shop, and do these things on Photoshop and Canva, please.” My original contract was for two days a week and the occasional third one, as needed. I’ve actually been working four days a week, essentially. It’s not awful, but my enthusiasm for it — whatever little of it I had — has pretty much run out.
This letter, I’m writing because I am at work on a Saturday and it’s cold, and I’m on my period, and I’m angry. I have only been at this job for a month and a half, really, and yet, I’ve had the following happen to me:
Theft — which, fuck you, whoever you are, lol. Steal from big corporations, if you have to, but there’s something really slimy about stealing from a small brand.
A few people have gotten mad at me because we didn’t take cash. One person kept asking about what the jewellery was made of. He started negging the sterling silver and saying it made people look poor, but ended up trying to purchase a silver ear cuff with cash. He said we were pathetic for making so much money (we don’t) that we reject cash (I just work here).
One person asked for “bellybutton rings” (?) and settled for herbal toner (???) and was probably going to give me a fake bill, because when I said we didn’t take cash, he said that he was told we did and told me to wait for him to come back. I left because it was past 6 p.m. and he had disappeared into the night.
A man wanted to know if we could copy a Cartier piece for his girlfriend, because he brought her there and can’t afford it, but uh, actually, he can, he just doesn’t want to spend that much on jewellery.
A woman got really upset because we couldn’t repair a necklace her friend had gotten her from the shop. It was not one of our pieces, but a guest jeweller’s, and so our policy is that we can’t repair it. She said my colleague and I gave her bad customer service, even though we tracked down the original designer and their contact details. Would she have gone into Selfridge’s and demand that one of our pieces repaired? Surely not.
Today:
Someone left the shop a 2-star Google review (!) on a Saturday morning (!) because I didn’t know the answers to her questions on the phone, lol, and she said I was short with her, but if I was (I wasn’t) it’s because someone had walked into the store and was watching me finish up my conversation on the phone. She wasted no time posting that. I’m sure it’ll be funny later on, but I’m fuming.
Someone picked up an earring she ordered online and got really upset that it wasn’t secured with a butterfly back. I assured her that we didn’t have any butterfly backs for our sterling silver jewellery, and she just would not believe me. I showed her our stock behind the till, and all the backs of the ones on display. She said: “I don’t mean to gaslight you…” and trailed off, because she one hundred-percent meant to gaslight me. “Who even uses these anymore?” Clearly, we do.
Anyway, that’s like… life now, I guess. I don’t think I’m going to be able to stick it out in this role much longer. I’ve kind of set my heart on handing my notice in, but I’m looking for “the right time”, whatever that means. I know I probably shouldn’t be writing this, but today has pissed me off so much, I have given up on caring.
My boss lives in Ibiza for most of the year, so she’s literally not here, but at the same time, it feels like she is, because she can be such a micromanager. It’s really bad for my anxiety. I’m not going to elaborate, but I have not had one fun day at work, lol. Maybe that’s not the point of a job, but having had many experiences where I’ve felt both happy and fulfilled, I suppose I can say it’s possible.
I hope your weekend has been much more pleasant. Happy Lunar New Year!
Love,
Carina