re: Retailer/server employees: worst ever customer?

Worked for a hardware store way back when.

We would get shipments of generators in when hurricanes were heading our way. We had a very specific return policy for generators that were listed at every register, on the receipts, that we verbally told the customers, and we even would attach notes to the boxes the generators came in:

1. You have to have your receipt.
2. You must bring the box the generator came in when you return it.
3. We can only return an unused generator (meaning if you had put gas through it, no return).

Had a guy come in, buy one, asked the cashier the policy, I watched her tell him it. She even pointed to the policy on his receipt. He asked me it when I was helping him load it up, told it to him again. His truck bed was loaded with an assortment of junk. He said we’d have to take it out of the box to load if and wanted me to do it. I told him I can’t due to company policy, so he huffed and puffed and took it out. Made a fuss when I handed him the box and then he took it over and dumped it in our trash can.

Few days later this bastard comes back and says he wants to return the generator and needs me to bring it in. I smell the gas on it and tell him he can’t return it but he says he doesn’t care he’s returning it anyways. So we get it in. He has no receipt, the box is in a dump somewhere, and this thing smells like a BP station and he throws a hissy fit about us not returning it and starts on the typical “we’re racist and blah blah blah”. I stop him and say “sir I’m 3/4ths Cherokee and a quarter Cuban (I’m neither but frick him), I don’t care about your personal racial problems”. He pulls the generator off the counter and damn near wiped my legs out with it and goes to swing at me but our GM yanks his arse and tells him to frick off and don’t come back.

Dude showed up a couple of weeks later claiming we still owed him lumber he purchased or some nonsense and had a lawyer with him. I was heading to lunch but saw our GM laying into this guy and his “lawyer” pointing out the parking lot.