An old promotional sticker, left on stock by mistake, sparked a full shouting match at the till over a price discrepancy of a couple of pounds — and continued even after the lower price was honoured anyway, purely to keep the peace. Some grievances, it turns out, aren't actually about the money.
Returned an item that had clearly lived a full life — worn, marked, unmistakably used — insisting it arrived "faulty" straight out of the box. The wear pattern told a rather different story, and told it loudly, right there at the returns counter, prompting a fair amount of hostility once it was gently pointed out.
Let two children loose through a homeware display like it was a soft play area, several breakages later, and responded to the resulting conversation not with an apology but with the assertion that we "shouldn't display breakable items where children can reach them" — in a homeware shop, which sells, largely, breakable things.
Attempted to return an item bought somewhere else entirely, receipt in hand, complete with a date and item description that had been very lightly "adjusted." Unravelled the moment someone looked up the receipt number and found it belonged to a transaction that wasn't this one, or this item, or in fact us.
Spent forty minutes describing, in granular detail, a product we do not sell, have never sold, and — after some gentle probing — turned out to be something he'd seen in a dream. Genuinely lovely chap. Just shopping in the wrong universe.