Then there’s the once a month “special trip” people, they’ve got a bunch of stuff to go out, a bunch of slips for stuff to pickup, and they want to review all the new stamps before buying 2 sheets. There’s a whole slew of unprepared people out there. I see them at the drive-up ATMs too, they don’t seem to be doing anything out of the norm for an ATM, but somehow it takes them 5 minutes.
Yeah the disappearing clerk thing can be annoying, but I’ve worked retail enough to guess it’s probably related to a supervisor that said “you’ll go on break at 3:15” and has a history of complete freakouts if they check the clock records and find out the person went on break at 3:16. Makes no sense on our side of the counter, but when you’ve got to deal with a manager that thinks the most important thing is whether or not you did exactly what they said you learn to stop caring about the customer just to keep the peace.
Odd, I’ve never been micromanaged to that level in any position I’ve held, in retail or otherwise. However it wouldn’t suprise me if it ended up being union thing.
In my experiance in retail, management doesn’t really care about anything other than the sales and overtime.