17 Absolutely Wild Scams Customers Tried Pulling At Stores And Restaurants
I’ve personally never worked a retail job, but I know plenty of people who have, and the stories they would tell me made my jaw drop to the floor. The BuzzFeed Community recently shared some wild scams that customers have tried to pull, and OMG, I don’t have any words for what some people shared. Here is what some said:
Note: Some of these responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
1.”My daughter worked at Nordstrom’s not long ago. She worked in the handbag section. It was a really slow day so she was unpacking some wallets while keeping an eye on any customers. The high-end couture handbags are either secured by lock and key or set behind glass. She watched a woman walk into the section and visibly test several security locks to see if she could unlock it. When she could not, she found some lower-end bags that weren’t secured, so she picked one up and took it over to the cash register, where she tried to return it. My daughter looked at her and said, ‘Ma’am, I just saw you take the bag off the shelf and walk over here.’ The lady denied it and accused my daughter of lying. My daughter then pointed out that the bag tag did not have a purchase sticker on it, which every purchase gets.”
“The woman started arguing with her, so my daughter called security. They arrive and offer to show the woman their security tapes, clearly showing the woman taking the bag and trying to return it. She starts screaming that they are all liars and she is going to get them all fired. Sure enough, she called company headquarters and filed a complaint. Once corporate was shown the videotapes, she was made a persona no grata in all Nordstrom’s stores because, apparently, this wasn’t the first time she tried pulling this scam. They had her picture and others up in all break rooms and security rooms at all Nordstroms.”
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2.”I worked retail at a Yankee Candle mall store one summer between semesters of college. It would’ve been 2009. My entire job consisted of straightening items on shelves, dusting, and cashiering once every two hours because we never had customers. No one buys candles in the summer. They do, however, shoplift them. We had a guy coming in regularly in a huge parka and stuffing jar candles into a special candle-holder harness hidden under the coat. It was a whole operation, and he came in multiple times. The dude was fast and timed it really well. Also, no one cared except my manager. But those big jar candles were (and still are, I believe) $25 each. Get your money, candle bandit.”
3.”I worked in a very high-end department store behind the perfume counter. A woman came in with a plastic grocery bag with a broken bottle of perfume that she had obviously dropped and wanted us to give her a new one. I couldn’t help but laugh and ask her if she had dropped an expensive vase from Birks (an expensive store in Canada) and if she thought they would return it. Thankfully, my counter manager agreed with me.”
4.”I worked at one of the first Hypermart USA stores, now Walmart supercenters. Back then Walmart had a policy of accepting any return for any reason, with no questions. People quickly learned to take advantage of that, and one day, we had a man bring in the oldest, nastiest boots you’ve ever seen. Even though we had never sold that brand, we still had to give him a new pair of similar expensive boots. Later in the break room, some of us talked about how stupid the return policy was and how customers took advantage of it, and one of the store managers heard us, and we all got chewed out.”
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5.”I was working in domestics at a department store when a customer wanted to return a quilt that had obviously been washed about a hundred times. It was one of ours, but it was faded and raggedy. They argued and refused to leave when I said no. My manager overrode me and gave them the money to make them leave.”
6.”I worked at Outback Steakhouse for years. During the holidays, people always seemed to be looking for free stuff. One year, a lady called and complained about a blonde server and wanted something free. She continued to change which day it happened and what dish she didn’t like. She said all she wanted was gift cards left at the host stand, and she would forget about all of this. I finally told her yes but that I’d apologize in person. She didn’t like that and never showed.”
7.”I worked at a clothing store, and a girl came in to return a pair of jeans. I looked at them and they were obviously very worn, not once, they were flares (early aughts) and I knew very well the look of hems shredded from walking on them for months or years. I said, ‘Umm, it seems like these have been worn. She said, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve worn them, but I have my receipt; I’ll take store credit.’ It fell on me to lay this knowledge on her, so I said, ‘Honey, you don’t get free refills on pants.'”
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8.”This story takes me back. At a drugstore where I worked, we didn’t have UPC scanners. We had to price every item and enter it at the register. We stock boys did double duty and ran a backup register to cover breaks or help if it got busy. I worked the entire store, so I had an idea of what the prices should be.”
“A woman comes to my checkout lane, and I’m ringing up her items. A lot of the prices seemed too low. After I rang up a few, I saw what looked like one price tag pasted on top of another. She had taken expensive items and covered the prices with others that were much less. It wasn’t just for one or two items. It was for almost the entire order.
I called a manager who saw what she had done. I don’t know what conversations went down, but they called the cops and had her formally charged. She was emotionally destroyed when she left, and as a young person at their first job, I was happy to have caught her.”
9.”I worked returns, and our store had a 90-day return policy. A woman walked up with her receipt, but it was outside of the return window. I apologized and denied the return. She scoffed and asked to speak to the manager, so I called her over. The woman then tried to claim that she didn’t have a receipt (our store does offer store credit if the customer lost their receipt). I explained that she did, and this customer insisted I was lying. My manager had my back, and the customer eventually gave up.”
10.”I worked at a video game store that buys and sells games. We threw away a ton of movies one night because we had too many, and my manager told us to. We ripped all of the movies in half and threw them in the dumpster behind the store. An hour later, the dumpster was empty — no big deal. The next day, this drunk guy came in with a box of ripped-up movies and tried to sell them back to the store. It was the most surreal thing, but it was funny. You could also clearly see where this guy used a pair of scissors to cut off our logo.”
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11.”I worked at Sam Goody like 25 years ago. It was in downtown San Francisco. A guy came in to return a CD, but it was just a piece of circular cardboard that he wrote ‘music’. He told me it was defective, and I was like, ‘It’s a cardboard circle.’ He got really angry and said to call corporate, so I did, thinking, ‘This is weird, but sure.’ Corporate actually told me to return the CD and gave me a lecture about treating customers better. I had no clue how to refund this, so I asked the person what I should enter. They kept saying, ‘the SKU,’ and I kept saying, ‘It’s a cardboard circle; it doesn’t have a SKU.’ I think I gave the guy about $20. That might be a reason why Sam Goody no longer exists.”
12.”I worked at a small chain women’s clothing store, and one day, we had a woman come in with a bag and items that had our old logo and style on the packaging, and by old, I mean packaging from 2008 or 2010, and this happened in 2019. Our returns policy said 90 days or something, but we’re trained to do returns on an unlimited timeline to appease customers, so I had to scan this woman’s stuff, given it still had tags.”
“The register no longer recognized those SKU codes (unsurprisingly), so my manager said to just scan the least expensive thing in the store of the same category, so the least expensive pair of clearance shoes for the boots she’s returning and an inexpensive tee shirt for the top she’s returning, etc. For returns without a receipt, it is policy to refund them the item’s current price, so if it was on clearance last, then they will be refunded the clearance price, but these items don’t exist anymore. We probably changed our POS system since we had that stuff. It was so weird that she came in; she had just forgotten to make her return for ten years.”
13.”When I worked for a big three-letter pharmacy chain, this entitled man came in with his son. He wanted my old pharmacist, who I worked with, to refund him all the money for his son’s ADHD medication, which I am on and I know is a controlled substance. He wouldn’t do it. So it escalated to the point where we knew this man would not go down without a fight, like threatening our store manager, got involved, and called our corporate guy. He called us right back and said to do the refund and call the police. He was arrested at the door.”
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14.”In 2004, when flip phones were just starting to get cameras, I worked for a cellphone company. A few stores kept getting the same call every few weeks. A guy would call saying that he needed to get a new phone and that his wife was about to go into labor and he couldn’t leave her. He’d tell us he could provide his information over the phone and then send a buddy in with his ID to confirm. He’d go on about wanting a phone with a camera so that he could get pictures of the baby and how he didn’t have a camera, and he’d keep us on the phone for ages, pleading for us to ‘trust him.'”
“Finally, one day, one of the managers asked him if his wife was an elephant because she’d been pregnant for the last eighteen months. That’s how long he’d been calling with the same story. I guess he assumed he was calling call centers or something.”
15.”I used to work for a small chain of furniture stores. One day, a decorator bought a leather sectional, bedroom suite, and dining table and chairs from me. I asked if her client needed to see the pieces before we delivered them, and she said no, that he’d trusted her with everything. She said yes to everything I suggested, and I was really pleased about the big sale. She paid with her credit card and explained that she would bill him for everything plus her services once she was done with his entire space. Made sense.”
“A few hours later, she called me and said that her client had decided that he wanted to see everything and was on his way. She told me she’d lied to him about what the furniture had cost and that she’d said it was much more expensive than it actually had been. She said we needed to change our price tags to reflect what she’d told him, or he’d be angry at her. We canceled the sale on the spot.”
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16.”I used to work at a Waldenbooks way, way back in the day, and we had these two guys who would shoplift books and then try to return them to us, but all they could get was store credit since they had no receipts. So they’d get books with the store credit and try to return them for cash, but since they had a receipt that said store credit, all they got was store credit. They’d try with new employees to see if they could get the cash on the books. It was ridiculous.”
17.”Back when I managed restaurants, a customer said they found a piece of glass in their food. Later found out he had pulled that shit in a dozen local restaurants. Apparently, he carried a piece of glass around with him to get free food.”
Do you have a story of a customer trying to pull a fast one? If so, share it with me in the comments below!
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