15 Minutes Before Close

 I had a customer call the store a couple of hours before we closed asking if they would be able to return a fish tank that they'd purchased from us yesterday because they decided that it wasn't gonna work for them and what they needed it to do.

-Apparently these customers are known to one of my petcare people as they live in my petcare worker's parent's neighborhood...and are well known for being difficult people in general as they had helped them out last night and had told them that what they wanted to do for their tank wouldn't work for them.

From what I gather they have turtles and were trying to give them a bigger tank but ended up deciding that the tank they bought was too deep for them.

In any case.

I told the customer that they could bring the tank back so long as it was in a clean dry condition and they included everything in the box along with the receipt.

I had a niggling thought that they might try to return said tank today.

But had hoped that it was late enough in the evening that the customer would decide to return the tank tomorrow instead.

No such luck.

FIFTEEN MINUTES before we closed.

The customer and their spouse come into the store to return the tank.

And I hear over the radio that they need help getting the tank into the store, so I grab a flat cart and bring it up to help them out though I wasn't sure what these people looked like and while I was trying to figure that out the cashier flags me down saying that they need an override for a return.

Which...upon checking it out...the customer doing the return was the customer who was returning the fish tank.

And said fish tank was not yet in the store.

So I was like "Ha. No." 

(not literally) but I told the customer that I would need to see the tank inside the store first before I could do the return. (silly cashier for not saying the same but they're new) and so the customer had to go track down their spouse so they could take the red cart and then go grab their tank and bring it in.

And once I was able to establish that yes the tank was there...then I did the return to give them their money back.

But it was semi-frustrating to have this occur like right at closing time.

Because other people were trying to check out and such and this just ended up holding up the line and yah....

The people who decide to try to return things right at closing need to rethink their lives. Because it's not fun to have to do that when there's a closing rush. 

-Sarnic Dirchi