When Will the Madness End?

The lengths that some adult men will go to acquire toy cars is absolutely unbelievable.

So, let me paint you a picture. Here's the scenario: We're having a "pre-Black Friday sale" at work, which I think is just a way of squeezing a little bit of extra money out of consumers before the sale day proper. (Thanksgiving falls on different calendar dates every year, and yet the corporate offices want the retail stores to make the same amount of money this year that they did last year during the same fiscal week. When this isn't practical or realistic, I think they invent new occasions like "pre-Black Friday" to try to compensate for this.)

What this means for me, as manager of the toy department, is that I was positively inundated with customers looking to gobble up all the underpriced merchandise that they don't legitimately need (which, I suppose, is a nice switch from the usual behavior of buying overpriced merchandise that they don't legitimately need). It was a crazy morning, compounded by the fact that I was running around trying to hang several hundred signs in the department to show off the new pricing, only to be interrupted constantly by customers calling the store all morning long. It was basically the same questions over and over again: When does your sale start? Do you have x product in stock? Can you hold it for me? What do you mean there are five hundred and twenty-seven other customers who are looking for the same items?

Now, don't get me wrong. I expect to be busy at work, particularly during the holiday season. Indeed, I prefer it to being bored. I've had jobs where the days dragged on endlessly because I wasn't feeling particularly engaged or challenged, so I think it's fantastic when the hours just speed by. Given a choice between looking at my watch and grousing that I still have two or three mind-numbing hours before the end of my shift, and looking at my watch and being upset that I only have two or three hours left to get all my work done, you can guess which one I prefer!

So, toys were flying off the shelf. (Which is weird, because I thought you had to put batteries in them first before they did that.) They were selling faster than I could restock them. In addition to all of the above, I was also trying to deal with a couple of pallets' worth of freight from the previous night that nobody had bothered to get around to taking care of. It was all stuff that I could have been selling, if it had actually been stocked to the shelves. All this on a Friday, the last day of the week, which meant I couldn't work longer than my regular shift without accruing overtime (which, right now, is a big no-no).

This is the time that Hot Wheels Guy arrives and demands that I go to the back room and sell him a shipping case of toy cars. (Let's call him Egon, because his real name is also the first name of one of the Ghostbusters.)

Wait, let me amend that slightly. His story, and I use the word "story" in the sense that it's a completely ficticious tale, is that his workplace is running a toy drive for less fortunate children, and he wants an entire case of Hot Wheels... but it needs to be a sealed shipping case, because otherwise he won't be reimbursed by his employers. Does this seem right to you?

Keep in mind that I keep my department well-stocked. There were probably about 400 individual Hot Wheels cars for this guy to choose from——the two-hundred-and-something that could fit in the regular "home" plus another display that I built in the main aisle of the department to try to catch some extra sales. There was absolutely nothing stopping this fellow from buying 72 cars (this is the quantity of a full shipping case) and, presumably, producing his sales receipt to his employers as proof of payment.

Of course, you and I know better. What Winston, or whatever ficticious name we're using here, really wanted was to get a sealed shipping case so he could get that one collectible car inside. The other 71 cars are barely worth the aluminum-zinc alloy they're made from, in his eyes.

I explained to him, as I have several times before, that I'm not in the habit of letting collectors dig through cases of freight from the stockroom. When there's room to put more cars on the pegs, that's when I put more cars on the pegs. It's as simple as that. Naturally, he demands to speak to one of my supervisors.

I explain the situation to a manager and she agrees to back me up. She says that if he needs a case quantity in a box, we'd be happy to put 72 cars in a box for him, but it's not fair to the other customers if we let him get dibs on a shipping case before anybody else. His response is smooth and rehearsed. "The cars aren't for me; they're for the children. What, are you saying you don't want my money? That you don't value me as a customer? I want the phone number for your corporate office!"

(I should mentioned parenthetically that this is not the first time I've dealt with Peter here. He introduced himself fairly early on in my tenure as manager of the toy department, trying to establish a rapport with me. From what I've heard from previous managers of that department, he was in the store literally the day it opened, and has been trying to befriend the various toy department managers ever since. That was three years ago.)

So he makes an elaborate show of getting on his cell phone and registering a complaint. He makes sure to ask for the name of the manager who crushed his dreams and ruined his chances of ever making any children happy again. A little while later, that assistant manager gets a phone call that goes something like this: "This is the corporate office. We got a complaint that you're refusing to sell to a customer. Please make that customer happy and sell him what he wants."

I found out a little while later that there was no call from the corporate office. This isn't actually how they deal with customer service issues at all; they typically e-mail the stores so the store managers can follow up on the problem. My store manager says that in 12 years, he has never once heard of an instance of the corporate office following up on a complaint with an instant phone call. So, the entire thing was an elaborate scam.

I didn't know this at the time, of course. All I knew was that I was being directed, apparently by the corporate office, to do something that I didn't really agree with. It's my job to do what I'm told, though, so I dropped everything and went to the back room to find a case of Hot Wheels cars. Even though, you know, the Hot Wheels were already fully-stocked, but other items were empty on the shelf and I was losing sales as a result.

I brought out the little square-shaped box with the Mattel logo prominently emblazoned on the front. Naturally, he was hovering right by the stockroom doors, waiting with bated breath. Apparently the tape had already been cut, though, so he demanded that I sit there and count the cars inside to ensure there was actually a full case quantity. Just then, I got a phone call, so I told him I had other customers to help (I'd been dealing with Janine here for about an hour, and that's a huge chunk of time to be wasting on a childish, demanding customers with a self-entitlement complex) so I took my leave and went back to my job.

After he made his purchase, he took the time to confront me yet again, waving his receipt in my face as though it were some sort of badge of honor. He went on this rant about how he doesn't appreciate being labeled as a "collector" just because he buys collectibles and that I need to treat my customers with respect. What's funny about this is that, the entire time I've been dealing with him, I've been trying to treat Slimer here like every other customer. Which means I'm not about to be his friend or try to do him any special favors. By this point, I had also spoken with the store manager, who told me that the so-called call from the corporate office had been a fake. I called him on it. I said, "You know, it's fortunate that the home office took the time to address your complaint so quickly. You must be a pretty lucky guy."

At this point he shifted tactics. He professed that he was really a nice guy and that I'd given him no choice but to act the way he did. When it comes right down to it, though, we all have a choice. He wanted to just put this whole incident in the past and he tried to shake my hand. Now, I strongly dislike handshakes. They're an antiquated form of social interaction (people used to do it to demonstrate there were no concealed weapons in their grip) and every time someone offers a handshake I can't wait to find a restroom and wash my hands. (There's no telling whether this person picks their nose, recently used the toilet, etc.) I shook his hand because it's the polite thing to do.

I was angry at this guy for wasting so much of my time and concocting this elaborate, cockamamie scheme just to get his grubby mitts on a shipping case of toy cars. Getting upset, I think, was my mistake. I should never give anybody the power to ruin my entire day, especially somebody I barely know (despite his efforts to buddy up with me). So, I've decided that he's going to be part of my own, private game. I'm going to have some fun with him. Instead of dreading the thought of spotting him swarming around the Hot Wheels aisle like a starving vulture, I can't wait to see him again, now.

Watch this space for details.