I have two jobs. One of them is a retail sales job, a job that has led me to the inevitable conclusion that retail employees are the punching bags of the disempowered modern American. Male, female, black, white, red, yellow, brown, gay, straight, any and all others and combinations thereof... anyone and everyone can go into a retail chain (and most of them are chains these days), step all over the employees, abuse, malign and belittle, complain and threaten, and there is no recourse for the employee. We just have to smile through clenched teeth and suck it up, no matter how wrong they are, no matter how rude they are.
Recently we have had to deal with a particularly difficult customer, who claims that we damaged something that we did not damage. Long story short: she tried to scam us out of the maximum liability amount listed on our paperwork, and complained to our corporate office when that failed.
Now it looks like she's getting everything for free.
There is something inherently dehumanizing about corporate structures. I often refer to the corporate structure of this particular retail store as a 'schizophrenic hydra'--a great shambling, multi-headed monster whose heads are constantly in conflict with one another, and you never know which one is going to bite you--and I imagine most corporate structures are pretty similar. The people at the bottom of the structure--the ones you deal with directly when you visit a store or restaurant--have little or no say in their workplace. They can only point to their managers, and the managers can only point to their managers, who can only point to corporate guidelines, which are apparently intractable and infallible even though everyone involved agrees that they are blindingly stupid.
The people on the bottom, your everyday underpaid retail wage slaves, are left with a set of impossible rules, contradictory messages (be yourself! by wearing a uniform and memorizing your sales pitch from our cue cards!) and the occasional impossible customer that often sees said retail employees as a mere obstacle in the path of extorting as much as possible from said retail company.
The corporate overlords are so afraid that an angry customer will tell his/her friends, blog about it, and raise enough hell to hurt business
while simultaneously aware that employees cannot protest their treatment without risking their jobs that they will take the customer's side nearly every time. Even when the customer is wrong. Even when the customer is lying.
I could continue this into a full essay, but that is beyond the scope of this blog post. So without further adieu, I present to you, humble reader, the four simple steps to getting free services and goods from major retail chains.
Step 1: Obtain a service from a major retail chain, making certain that you get some kind of documentation for it (a receipt, work order, etc.)
Step 2: Complain to the manager about the service. State that something was done wrong by one of the underpaid wage slaves, and that you are very unhappy about it.
Step 3: This part is critical. While the second step may have gotten you a free rework, a free meal, an extra service, a coupon, or something, at this point you must contact the corporate level of the company and complain about the service AND what you got in the second step. It does not matter how accommodating, polite, and generous the individual store was; you must say that they were rude and unhelpful. Your wording should ideally be non-confrontational, but rather sound as though you are frustrated, a little hurt, and confused about what you can do. You want to sound more reasonable than the employees you have undoubtedly pissed off, who are going to have some 'splainin' to do to when corporate gets your message.
Step 4: Profit!
You may not always get exactly what you want, but you'll get a lot. What you'll lose... well, that's between you and your deity/belief system of choice. You'll probably enjoy your ill-gotten goods more without your soul anyway, and it might even mask the flavor of waiter spit in your free meal.
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