"The customer is always right". My arch nemesis. :P

Really though, sometimes the customer is just plain out wrong. When I worked at a dollar store in the city, people would whip that phrase out for every old thing! Even if they could not possibly be more wrong. I love providing excellent customer service, but I can not bend the fabric of space and time in order to make some people correct. lol

For example, I used to get people in the store and they would ask for a product that we have never sold. (Car tires, most notably. Who would buy car tires from a dollar store?!) I would tell them "I'm sorry, but we do not sell that product." If I could, I would recommend another store that carries what they are looking for or recommend a similar product that we do carry. Usually it was fine and it ended there.

Every once and awhile, we'd get someone who insisted that we DO in fact sell that product and I should look for it "in the back". We did not have storage in the store. It was a very small store and all our purchases went directly out onto the shelves. Plus, all the stock was put out by me because I was the stock manager so I saw everything that store ever had. I would tell them that we don't have any storage and they would call me a liar and ask to speak to my boss. When confronted with the same answers from him, they would usually storm out of the store, cursing, swearing never to return again!

Sometimes, there's really nothing we can do.

I loved working at that store. It had such a great community feel and so many of the customers were little old ladies who were there several times a week. I always knew what they were there for and when the salespeople came in to get us to sell their wares, it made me so happy to find items that I knew the customers were asking after. It felt like we were all working together to make everyone happy!

But every once and awhile, someone really angry and demanding would come in and just ruin everybody's day. If someone aggressive like that comes in, it really is better just to lose them as a customer than to try and keep them around. All the yelling always scared the little old ladies and made them feel unsafe. Safety was so important in our shop.