Shopping Courtesies, Told by a Retail Employee
Starting at the end of my senior year in high school, I worked at a fashion retail store. I worked there for almost a year and I left simply because I wasn’t getting paid enough to make the thirty to forty-minute drive to work worth it. However, while I worked there, I really enjoyed it! My coworkers were great people and we got along really well. Sure, there were parts of that job that weren’t my favorite, but overall, I really loved working there.
That being said, I’d like to shed some light on a subject that not many people talk about, whether it’s because their job won’t allow them to say anything, or they simply don’t have the right platform or means to voice their opinion. The following is just a list of courtesies that, as a retail employee, I wish customers would follow. These things will make the sales associates’ jobs much easier and keep their sanity intact.
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When you’re trying on clothes in the dressing room, please put the clothes back on the hanger. It doesn’t have to be perfect, and it’s easier for employees to quickly take things out of the dressing room and back on the sales floor. One of a retail employee’s worst nightmares is opening the door to the dressing room and seeing loose clothes strewn about, laying on the floor, inside out, unbuttoned/unzipped, and hopelessly tangled with hangers. I’ve had many experiences exactly like that and every time, I just felt like crying as soon as I opened that door. I hear the screeching music from Psycho every time I see another dressing room from Hell! Please be considerate when trying on clothes.
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If you want to take it one step further, after you’ve put your clothes back on the hangers, take them out of the dressing room and put them on the designated rack for “go backs.” The employees will appreciate this immensely.
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When you’re shopping on the sales floor and flipping through the rack, just be gentle. Shoving clothes aside aggressively, or even picking up a piece of clothing and putting it back haphazardly on the rack could potentially tangle the hangers or make them uneven. This may not sound like a huge deal, but at the end of the day, after the store is closed, the employees have to do “recovery” and go through all the racks and straighten them out so they look all nice again. This process takes an unbelievably long time, and we’re all tired and just want to go home.
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In addition to that, another part of “recovery” is picking up clothes that have fallen on the floor. We get on our hands and knees and reach under racks to find clothes, which usually end up super dusty and kind of gross. If, as a customer, you see an item of clothing fall off the hanger as you’re looking through the racks, just pick it up and put it back on the hanger. It’s really not that hard.
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If you’re looking through folded t-shirts or folded anything, be gentle. Please don’t flip through the stacks of t-shirts and leave them in a jumbled heap. It took a lot of time and effort for the retail employees to fold and stack those shirts exactly the way corporate tells them they have to. We have to fold each t-shirt a certain way, usually with a t-shirt board, which takes longer than folding them with your hands. I understand that sometimes you have to unfold the shirt to see the design. If you do this – and it’s okay that you do – please don’t try to refold the shirt yourself and put it back on the pile. It messes up the uniformity of the pile and we’ll just have to refold it anyway. Just let an employee know about the unfolded shirt. I promise you that we’d prefer that over just throwing it back in the pile.
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Lastly, and most importantly, do not stay in the store past closing! This is the number one thing that I cannot stress enough. You may be in the store and it’s only five minutes past closing and you say you’re sorry and the employees say, “Oh you’re fine! It’s okay!” It’s not okay. It’s never okay. Those employees aren’t allowed to say that it’s not okay, but I can tell you the truth. No matter how friendly and happy and understanding those employees may be, they still want you out of that store immediately. They’re tired. They want to go home. They still have to recover and clean the store. And you are taking advantage of the store’s strict policy on customer service. We have to let you shop until you voluntarily leave the store on your own. I had a woman who ended up staying forty-five minutes past close! And she didn’t end up buying anything. She just tried on a bunch of clothes and left them all scattered around in the dressing room. Please don’t be that person. Don’t even be that person that comes in fifteen minutes before the store closes. We all know that you may have entered the store on time, but you’re sure as hell not leaving on time.
Thank you for listening to my ranting, and I hope that you think about these things the next time you’re out shopping. Please, don’t make our lives harder than they have to be. We’re already working retail. Don’t make it worse. Thank you!