When Beauty Gets Ugly: "Ridiculous Returners"

Truth: Returns are frustrating in general. Nobody likes having their hard work brought back to them, even if most of the time it’s not the customer’s fault. We don’t get angry with people for returning…mostly…so please understand—we have numbers we need to make, and returns push us further away from our goal. Any of you out there would get frustrated in that situation. However, some returns are just totally bogus.

You’ve heard me rant about the constant returners. And the ones who cleverly try to disguise face creams with body lotions. What you haven’t heard about yet are the ridiculous returners…

Man, oh man. These people have some serious balls. It never ceases to amaze me how some people act during a return. My favorite is when they walk up and hand over a jar of face cream or a bottle of foundation and ask to return it. Oh, yeah…and the damned thing is empty! Yep. Empty. As in all gone. Completely.

“It just didn’t work for me,” they’ll say.

Well, obviously…

“Yeah, and it gave me a reaction.”

Of course. The bottom of the bottle can do that sometimes.

I mean, seriously! That’s like me buying a pair of Seven Jeans, wearing the absolute hell out of them until their ripped and frayed, stained and faded and damn near shapeless—and then returning them because they didn’t fit right.

Balls, I tell you. Balls.

I once had a woman who returned an eyeliner sharpened nearly to the bottom. She told me the color wasn’t right for her eyes. Maybe she should try a powder eyeliner instead. Sure, I told her. We picked a new color—at which point she asked if she could return the small nub of a pencil she hadn’t liked. Uh, really?

Wait…it gets worse—

I paused, giving her the eye. Then I said, “Alright. We can do that this time.” —Because let’s face it, at that time and place I didn’t really have a choice.

So I start the exchange on the register. As I’m nearly done, she asks me what I’m going to do with the pencil now that she’s returned it. I tell her it gets put with the other returns to be disposed of. Then I finish the return—but apparently, she’s not done yet.

“Well,” she said, “if you’re just going to throw it away, can I have it back?”

That’s when I blinked at her. Long and slow.

“It seems like a waste to just throw it out,” she continued.

Seriously? I’m thinking to myself.

“Unfortunately,” I told her, “You just gave this pencil back to me in exchange for that new eyeliner.” I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when she continued to argue with me.

“But if you’re just going to throw it away, what’s the difference?”

“The difference,” I said, “is that I gave you money for this pencil—”

I picked up the pencil so she could see it.

“—which you then spent on this eyeliner—”

I held up the bag with her new purchase. “I need to have some kind of product on my end since we did an exchange.”

To which she said, “You people are so wasteful! I can’t believe you would just toss it in the garbage. It’s people like you and companies like this that are destroying the world!”

Yeah, lady. It’s all me (I’m shaking my head right now, just so you know).

I can’t even really get mad at people like this—because their behavior is so utterly…well, ridiculous.

 

Cheers to you all—and happy shopping!