10% off if you strip in public and blame the store.

~ Hetty Eliot

Sometimes when I’m getting ready for work, I delay going to the bathroom until I get there so I can do it on the clock and waste a couple of minutes before I go to the office.

The other morning, I headed to the bathroom, whistling and thinking about ways to avoid my boss and do as little work as possible.

A quick picture of the restroom: when you open the door, to your left is a little area with two sofas facing each other, and a second left leads to the stalls. The sinks are straight ahead from the door.

So I open the door. The first thing that catches my peripheral vision is some merchandise lying on the sofas. I was about to open my mouth to say something sharp about that and then my eyes moved over to the individual standing between the sofas.

I was confronted by the sight of an elderly woman naked from the waist up, trying on bathing suits.

I said, both instantly appalled and furious, “Excuse me, this is not a fitting room, you can NOT bring merchandise in here and try it on. This is highly inappropriate. You—”

“There wasn’t any fitting room open,” the woman replied, not even hiding her annoyance. She didn’t even look at me, just went about her business like everything was normal.

“Yes, there are fitting rooms open, you need to ask a sales associate where one is! You can’t do this here—”

But she just reiterates that there was no fitting room open and she wasn’t going to walk around looking for one.

The bathroom is probably twenty times further away from the swimsuits than the register where associates were standing around ten feet across the aisle.

I told her if she got dressed, I’d walk her to one. Nope. Wasn’t having it.

I stepped away from her for a minute to do what I came for and thought about what I was going to say to the old woman next. Something about decency and scandalizing children and my human rights.

It probably would have been not much more than a funny incident except that my boss, the store manager, walked in while I was washing my hands. I angrily bugged out my eyes and kept jerking my head in the direction of the old woman until the idiot got the hint and looked over.

She started in on her too until the woman repeated her fitting room line.

Then my boss’s natural fear of bad press kicked in and she started cravenly apologizing and offering a 10% discount for the inconvenience. Yes, friends, that’s all it takes. Strip down and complain and you get a whole 10% off your purchase. (Does not combine with other offers. Would you like to open a store credit card?)

When we left the bathroom, my boss laid into me because she said the old woman saw my dirty look and I was very rude to her and we need to have fitting rooms open and blah blah blah. I didn’t get a chance to say that I had been getting ready for round two with the woman when I was finished going to the bathroom.

Then the manager of the receiving dock walked by heading to the men’s restroom.

Immediately she begins to yell at him, “Why aren’t there fitting rooms open? Customers need to be able to try things on. We just had a woman who couldn’t find a fitting room! Why aren’t they open? What’s wrong with them?”

In my head I’m saying, it’s by your orders that they’re closed because of the covid rules, you moron, the same rooms that have been closed for the last nine months.

The man is completely confused by this drive-by attack and my trying to cut off the store manager to explain that a naked old lady was trying on swimsuits in the bathroom. This guy has no clue which fitting rooms are open or closed because he stays in the underworld all day long to avoid HER. If he were smart, he’d install a commode down there. He’s already got a microwave and a fridge. While she was screaming at him about why they were closed, I took the opportunity to slip away from her.

The moral of the story is that I’m the bad guy because I didn’t want to see some old lady’s saggy tits and give her a discount for showing them to me.

However, I do feel a little horrible now because the woman most likely had dementia and would be mortified if she had been in her right mind. Of course, this wasn’t the line of thinking of my boss, she was more concerned about a customer survey making her look bad. I can’t help but think, though, what if that had been my grandmother and an employee had been so rude to her? I should have been more compassionate.

But then maybe she shouldn’t have copped an attitude with me.

41 thoughts on “10% off if you strip in public and blame the store.”

  1. For some reason I wanted a bit of info on Tallulah Bankhead and came across this video. Coincidence? Maybe. Or it could be something else. Duke

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        1. Unfortunately, Fandango………

          We once had a month-long stretch in which someone pooped in a fitting room every Sunday evening right before closing time.

          And people wonder why I’m jaded 😖.

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  3. So sorry you had to go through that. At least I live in a country where the shop staff are super polite and would have helped her to put it on. Before leading her out to the changing rooms.

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  4. Lol I used to work in retail and I’m glad I didn’t really come across people like this, although I did have my fair share of weirdos, such as the ones who’d insist on new stock from the store, just because. Pro tip: we don’t actually do that because all of our available inventory’s usually up front, but customers seem happy to see us make the trip regardless.

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    1. Ha! Yes the fake trip to the back. They think there’s a warehouse in there. But the store I work for is famous for taking back any return so I don’t blame the customers for being leery of it.

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  6. In my distant youth I worked summer construction jobs. One was building prefab walls for BIA houses. The crew drove in from Anadarko. Between start and ten or so there was much humorous discussion over the length and approximate value of trips to the room. “Damn, Jerry, that musta been a six dollar shit.” Har har, “More like seven fifty!” Hahahaha!
    The naked in the bathroom woman is a whole other story…

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  7. I sold high end men’s clothes for a year or so. My other retail was several years running a chain of 19 music stores, plus the Pro Shop flagship store. There are the serious retail stories. Retail is a lot like a highly volatile dysfunctional family

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    1. Please don’t tell me that 😭😭. That means there’s nowhere safe on earth from someone like her.

      But I’m not so sure they are all the same. We’ve had managers with four decades of experience in retail who say they never met anyone like her (and then they quit like the hundred managers before them).

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  9. Ug. I feel for you. Ineffective bosses are the worst! It’s telling that she felt she could lay into you and the other guy without issue but not be firm with a customer who is out of bounds. It’s hard to think on your feet when faced with people doing odd things and then react defiantly when you call them on it, but getting a discount after flashing random staff? Lol. Only in retail.

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    1. You are right in everything you say except that my boss is not ineffective. (You are new to my blog.) She is very effective. At ruining my life and the lives of all those around her. You’ll see….

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  11. 😂! You have a way of making the most extreme boss fails seem hilarious. It’s not funny living it, but the telling is superb. I worked a lot of different unrelated jobs just to be employed and pay rent so I could have my girlfriend over. (This is the pre nuptial bliss era) retail was one of my gigs. I had some of the most bizarre experiences from robbery at gunpoint to mice mitigation using ancient hunt and broom sweep methods while other coworkers destroyed furniture jumping up and down. My favorite was thinking I must work no matter how bad I felt and I was suffering from Taco Bell Hell one day when a very nice looking mom came in and asked to see swing sets. We didn’t have any set up and the catalog picture wouldn’t do so I took her in the back where most of the staff sexual assaults occurred and pulled out a very large swing set box. “Open it.” “Open it?” “Yes.” This was absolutely a firing offense to open new stock prior to a sale but It was a firing offense not to kiss the customer’s ass to get a sale. So I opened the box and showed her the different parts and mansplained the physics of assembly. Then a mouse ran across her foot and she screamed bloody hell and in her super human effort to get away she clobbered me in my groin and I farted so loud they heard it in the credit department. So a very good looking and well dressed young woman ran screaming out the no customers allowed beyond this point door where staff regularly stage group sex orgies and I come hobbling out bent over, gasping, and holding my destroyed manhood. The manager, a straight up solid dude and veteran of WWII came up to me and asked me if my dad ever told me to never fart during sex. I didn’t quit but I did toy with suicide by humiliation for several days.

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      1. I wish this was just a fictional day in the life of a struggling teenager, but since I have no pride or self esteem, I share it freely with the world. I did over play the purpose of the stock room. It was used by several employees to carry on with each other because they didn’t want to spend the money for a cheap motel. To be honest, it disgusted me, but I was the most junior and most disposable person there and I needed the job. Of course, my boss was just making fun of me for being such a complete fail on the sale. I was truly destroyed by the experience until denial, transference, and rationalization was able to overcome my humiliation. Now, It’s just darn funny.

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          1. I could certainly tell a lot of stories of my bizarre existence. I’ve managed to make my way through it all with my sense of humor intact. This story was when I worked for Western Auto. It was one of those stores that had vehicle services and hardware. It was a step up from my pot washing job with the drunk chef at the Sheraton Hotel run by the mafia. I should probably blog through all of these adventures. Living on the bottom shelf of society has its perks.

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              1. That is very true! I will admit, my best adventures were when I was the last monkey out of the barrel of monkeys. I got to watch all those other fools get their daily dose of Karma. Karma didn’t mess with me. She couldn’t punch me down a notch because there were no more levels under me. The worst she could do is have me step in dog poo and then drive myself crazy wondering who pooped in my car. I still feel bad about blaming my girlfriend.

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                1. 😂 That was like the time my fiance’s roommate had a carton of spoiled milk in a bag in the living room and for days we blamed my fiance for the smell 😂 I almost ruptured an organ laughing when we discovered it.

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                    2. Ohhh. That must have really hurt. I’m kinda insensitive so I would have been next to you on the couch trying to put my laughed out liver back in.

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