u/miiista1203

Okayyy this is mainly a nothingburger update but I know some commenters wanted an update and I know some people might be upset with how I'm going with this.

Long story short; nothing came out of it. I told all of my managers about the situation and even though they said they will get the AP guy to look at footage, it's been total silence about that. Which I get though as usual store managers are, they only care about cards and customer satisfaction. Here's where most people might get upset at me about; I'm not going to push for anything to happen as it was already almost a month ago and I have more important stuff in my life than to press charges against that customer. So, pretty much nothingburger like I said.

What did upset me a little though was that the same customer came back a few days ago and the manager who saw me break down in front of her due to it, told the jewelry associate to "be super nice to that customer" instead of you know, kicking her out the store. Manager didn't even tell me herself either that the customer was in the store, she had the jewelry associate tell me because I had to cover her lunch break while the customer was still there. I said fuck that and gave the keys to the CEC who understood. According to the CEC, the customer checked out and said some snarky shit about the CEC not ringing even though CECs are not allowed to ring at my store.

TL;DR Old lady customer gets mad we don't have the velvet drawstring bags for jewlery and yanks my wrist when I tried putting them in a box, telling me and my coworker that we need to work on our customer service skills and makes a big scene out of it.

So, today I was working 2 to close up front but was moved to jewlery due to the jewlery person calling in for the night. Everything was going well and I had an old lady wanting to look at some J4 jewlery we had and she was very sweet! However, about 40 mins later she came over to the jewlery counter to buy the jewlery and asked me if we had "black velvet drawstring bags" but I said that I didn't think so as I hadn't seen any the past times I've worked in jewlery, only the boxes.

Immediately, it's like a switch flipped. She got snappy and told me to look for it, which I did thinking we probably did have some and I just wasn't aware of it (can confirm by my ASM that we haven't had the drawstring bags in 2 years). My coworker came to the counter to help/grab the keys since I was about to go on my lunch and the CEC came to look at my iron mountain to find a receipt for a different customer wanting to return so the counter was very crowded and I couldn't really look.

Perhaps this was my fault but, I just went ahead and grabbed a small black box and put her bracelet in there, which was a little tight and the old lady looks at it, takes it out and says "Don't try to cram it in there!" and told me I didn't even look for the bags. At that point, I was irritated so I opened up all the drawers that had our jewlery boxes and told her that's all we had and I offered her the smaller plastic bags since that's the only bag for jewlery we had to which she rudely said no and insisted that we had the drawstring bags. My coworker who was supposed to cover my break came over and the customer asked her the same question, in which my coworker replied with the same thing, "we only have boxes."

Old lady gets even more mad and we (my coworker & I) agree to just put it in the bigger box. As I was putting the jewlery in the box, the old lady grabs my wrist and yanks it away from the jewlery, shouting "Forget it, put it in the bag, I'll just get [next town's store] to deal with it" and starts throwing her jewlery out of the box so I just put it in her bag. While bagging, she tells us that we have bad customer service and that it's the worst she's ever experienced and wants to talk to our store manager (who wasn't working, only an ASM was)....over us not having drawstring bags for jewlery. She then yanks the bag and receipt from our hands, scratching my coworker in the process, and proceeds to bitch on and on about the boxes, to where I tell her that I offered her the bag but she refused and she shut up after that and walked away.

The same CEC told her the manager would be there to talk to her and she was practically yelling, saying how she needs to talk to her. Im on the brink of tears and I go to the back office to talk to the manager (who was still helping the customers without their receipt because she was looking it up on their system thingy) and Im not gonna lie but, I broke down in front of her and I think I had a panic attack as this was the first time I've ever experienced a really rude customer during my 4 years of retail. I also wanted to tell her first before the customer got to say anything and paint me in a bad light lol.

After telling her the whole thing as fast as I could because the customer was still angry and waiting for her, I go on my break and my other coworker who was watching/heard the whole thing was clocking out and told me what happened when my manager talked to her. As a manager does, she tries to de-escalate and offers her compensation with one of those free tote bags you get by signing up for the card but the customer was like "I don't need that, I have more money than all of you guys" while she was over here tweaking about a $14.99 bracelet not being able to go into a velvet drawstring bag AND shopping at Tjmaxx mind you...😒

Anyway, customer tries saying how every Tjmaxx has a drawstring bag and my manager said she'd like to see how she knows as our store hasn't had them in 2 years and the lady storms out, grumbling about how we're the worst. I get off my break, everyone asks if Im okay and not to worry about it and my manager tells me how she's going to ask out store manager and our AP guy to check the cameras too see if there was any footage of her grabbing my wrist.

I don't expect anything to come out from it but I hope she never shows up again. I couldn't even get lunch either because I was too afraid to go out there and leave the building while she was still in ghe store

🫠