Odd Encounter

About 2 years ago, I worked in a clothing store that I actually hated. I don’t normally say I hate things, but this job genuinely made me hate working. The pay was pretty good for the state of Michigan, roughly 13/hr. I won’t name drop the name of the company, since they are actually a small business franchise. I wish them luck truly, but I have a lot of stories that outweigh all the “good” that came with this job.

I believe it was roughly a month before I put in my 2 weeks when this event happened. My job was to sit at the register and put on a fake smile to great the customer and be the overly pushy salesperson. I hated doing something I knew wasn’t authentic, the fun part about being at the register was scanning the items because I was the one who did inventory, so it felt like I did some part of the sale too.

A man with his wife came in one afternoon, he was pretty tall and had on a suit. The wife was dressed casually and instantly took a liking to all of the display we had in the store. My manager was her personal stylist while I stayed at the front with the husband. He was on his phone and so I was I, it was normal that boyfriends and husbands would sit at the front of the store and just wait to swipe their credit cards on overpriced items.

This man got up and waved to get my attention, he proceeds to ask if there were other locations. I said yes, and that we in fact we had some in Chicago. His face lit up with interest and I got nervous with what questions he was going to ask me. Most of them were general questions that I had memorized from my training. I got a little bored after like the 10th question, that I just responded with “I’m not sure, the owner would know the answer to that question.” Once again, he served the same look he did when I told him we had multiple locations. Here we go.

Never in my life did I expect to meet one of those men that claim that they are some forms of an African prince or something like that until this encounter. He said that he would love to buy a piece of the franchise or at least negotiate with the owner about getting a location all the way down in his home country in Africa.

He was being a bit pushy and kept on asking for the email so he can coordinate with higher management. I think his intentions were pure since he told me that he would love to have a place like this so his wife could shop as much as she wanted. Maybe he was a prince…

The following days later, the owner came by to check in on the store. I explained to her the story and how I gave him the store customer service email instead of her personal. She thanked me and told to never serve a customer like that ever again.