“Pretty soon I learned some lingerie truths: older women only buy black pants and the “returns” counter was a perfect place to experience the British middle class attempting to get in touch with their anger.”
“Tales From The Fashion Shop Floor” (featuring friend of the Toast Bim Adewunmi!) is up over at the Guardian. There is no end to my desire to read horror stories from people who work in customer service; the gold standard, as always, remains Not Always Right, but I am willing to add more to my list if you will tell me about them in the comments.
Also, the English are inscrutable; could someone please explain this to me? They hold up earrings to catch the light, rub their thumbs over leather as if they are rubbing sugar into butter, and wait for the magic to happen.”
why would you rub sugar into butter with your thumb
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Tags: customer service, does she mean like when you MIX sugar and butter together like in baking? because you still wouldn’t use your thumb for that, retail, surely one doesn’t rub sugar into butter, the guardian, work
“why would you rub sugar into butter with your thumb”
Because if you rub sugar into butter with your tongue, the mix usually isn’t quite right.
One of the most amazing places for customer service horror stories is http://howmaywehateyou.com/ . It’s from two hotel concierges in Times Square and the day my friend sent it to me I read it for 5 hours straight.
No it’s fine I wasn’t planning on getting any work done ever again
omg thank you so much
And down I go into the rabbit hole…LOVING IT!
It’s been 3 hours since you posted this. I’m still on this website. My boss thanks you.
same here. thanks forever
Maybe, like, you’re buttering a piece of toast or an English muffin or something, and you also want to put sugar on it, and so you rub it into the bread item?
that can’t possibly be it can it??
Why wouldn’t you just sprinkle it on, though??
I think they meant rubbing butter into flour? like you do when you’re making pastry or crumble.
But like a lot of scone recipes involved creaming the butter first, then adding sugar. What did people do before they had mixers? I could see doing hand mixing like one does with pastry.
I don’t think you could cream butter and sugar with your hand? When I’ve not had a mixer, I’ve always used a wooden spoon.
You rub sugar into butter with your thumbs because you are mixing it by hand for baking, MALLORY.
It’s almost (but not quite) like crumbing together flour and butter, which YOU ALSO DO WITH YOUR HANDS, because it gets more air into the mix.
We are not like you. We do not have to have machines to do everything for us. We mix by hands, we wear blankets instead of turning the heating on, we open a window instead of using air conditioning.
Even if you have an electric mixer, there are still recipes that tell you to do it by hand.
Because electric mixers don’t crumb together sugar and butter right.
wait i’ve heard of creaming butter and sugar together but never CRUMBING, what is the difference
Maybe the English are just trolling us again
It wouldn’t be the first time.
It creates a different texture where it is slightly denser and less fluffy, and then you sort of mix the flour in by chopping at it with a spoon and that’s how you make shortbread
Tell me more. The spouse is mad for shortbread, and I can’t get it quite right. I’ve been making this (http://www.splendidtable.org/recipes/almond-shortbread) which is excellent, but eventually I must get back on the horse and learn to shortbread properly.
I am actually terrible at shortbread because I hate it. But my mum is super-good at it, and this is what she always did – sort of… squish the sugar and butter together between her thumbs and fingers, then chop in the flour. But she last did this when I was 10.
You would make streusel like this: rub the softened butter into the sugar and flour with your fingers to make crumbs. I use a fork
mixers are as inexplicable as hands, these tasks are what forks are for! Just like whipping cream or beating egg whites, which I dare say some people also do with their thumbs or electric mixers, because of kitchen madness or something.
Wait, what? Whipping cream and beating egg whites to a peak are the two tasks that electric mixers are ideal for. I have done both of these things by hand, when trying to make a chocolate mousse, but they took a LONG-ASS TIME. Then I put the two together with the chocolate and the whole thing deflated into soup and couldn’t be coaxed back to life. When I found an electric mixer to use the mousse lofted up properly in no time.
Amateur tip: when it deflates, chuck it in the freezer and call it semifreddo!
Oh definitely. Forks for everything!
WHIPPING CREAM WITH A FORK
THAT IS MADNESS that would take a MILLION HOURS
pish tosh it is easy. but you can use a manual whisk instead of a fork if you got flimsy wrists. just like you can use a pastry cutter instead of a fork to make pastry if you are a fancypants.
It is madness, the whipped cream tastes exactly the same
I have done it by hand, I have done it with a whisk, I have done it with electric beaters. Unless you are cooking for Eric Ripert, no one will be able to tell. And Eric is just happy that you are using real whipped cream, so he will smile and ask for seconds
With a fork. My word, you’re a goddess. I thought whisks were impressive: forks are twice or thrice impressive.
oh now if I were really impressive I’d do it with my thumbs like a sturdy Englishwoman.
also I used to have a Viking stand mixer but I lost it.
Thumbs to whip egg whites?
I was with my brother and sister in-law in rural Chile, and somehow they managed to make pisco sours without a whisk or a blender. I saw them smashing the ice, and then they distracted me with my inability to chop onions without a cutting board until the egg whites were whipped. I just assumed they had a secret whisk – one where you don’t get to know where it is until you’ve been in the family for ten years – but maybe they did it with thumbs and they were deceiving me so I didn’t learn their leet skillz/judge them for being adept in poorly equipped kitchens.
Oh that’s just shaken. It only looks whipped because the agitation of the egg white and ice shards together makes foam.
I once whipped cream by hand with a fork for Thanksgiving at a friend’s place and had multiple men come over to stare in awe and watch it. I honestly think they had never even considered that was an option or a possibility.
It is THE LAST RESORT is what it is. It ain’t fun but it works in a pinch. (I have also whipped cream in a food processor before, with mixed results. Have yet to try it with an immersion blender but I think it would probably work better–more air/control.)
Whipping anything by hand is hell on carpal tunnel. Ask me how I know.
The image I’m getting here is of little British ladies punching at leather, grabbing away at it and mashing it together in big chunks, and then licking their fingers clean because if they didn’t wanna be gross they’d have used a fork, and all I know is I’m making damn sure to wash new clothes twice before putting them on from now on
It’s weird because I have a sense memory of doing this – the butter melting in my fingers as it envelops the crunchy sugar – but I have no idea when or why I would have done it. I guess at some point in my long and storied life I have made shortbread.
I was theorizing this is what you do, over there, in that strange place! I just replace the butter with cream, and you have *double* cream – why do you ever eat anything that requires futzing with butter proportions?
“By the end of my contract, I could size up a child’s head for a straw boater at 20 paces.”
My desires are now only for Project Runway/High Noon shootout fashion outfitting duels.
Specifically, it’s a shortbread thing. For shortbread, I don’t think you want the butter creamed and fluffy like a chocolate chip cookie, you want a fairly dense sugar/butter mixture that you then cut flour into like piecrust. Brits make and eat more shortbread than we do.
Unless you’re making whipped shortbread, and why would you ever make non-whipped shortbread? “No thanks, no down-filled pillows for me, I’d rather sleep on this brick.”
Shortbread is the best.
It is my desire that this thread devolve into about seven excellent shortbread recipes.
I can’t think why you’d use your hot fingers to do that, though, as it melts the butter and will alter the consistency of the butter/sugar and thus shortbread. Also you’d get butter and sugar all up under your nails.
Oh yes, retail. I am firmly of the opinion that everyone should have to work retail and/or waitress before they are allowed to take any other kind of job, you learn things about dealing with people that stay with you and serve you well later. Plus you bond with the coworkers who have shared the ordeal with you, in what I imagine is an echo of the war time camaraderie that soldiers experience.
I have heard enough people say this (myself included) that I think we need to start writing to our Congresspeople and making this a law.
I will sign any petition to this effect.
Some countries require military service of their young people. We should require customer service. It will lead to a more empathetic nation.
i will die on the “we should have mandatory customer service” hill. i steadfastly believe that only good things will come of it.
(except for the part where a friend pointed out to me—the richest and most privileged will always find a way to weasel out of mandatory service somehow. ughhh.)
You, my friend, are entirely correct.
Because of the summer I spent working at a movie theater, I never ever ever talk on the phone while standing in front of a cashier.
How many times did I patiently wait for a white man with graying hair and pleated khakis was to stop arguing with someone via Bluetooth earpiece? So many times. So many.
If I HAVE TO take a phone call, I’ll step out of line entirely. Don’t make the clerks wait on your conversation, and don’t make the other customers wait on you either! MANDATORY RETAIL SERVICE FOR EVERYONE.
At my first job, cashiering at a drug store, this beautiful woman came through my line and as I was ringing her up, she said in a really flirty voice, “You can call me anytime you want to!”
I said, “Wow, really?” and she gave me this disgusted look and said “I wasn’t talking to YOU” and flipped her gleaming locks to reveal a Bluetooth earpiece.
Ever since I have hated those stupid headset things and the people who wear them.
You’re making cookies and you don’t have a fork, so you just stick your fingers in there and go to town? I’m not clear on the motion being described, because who kneads leather
I can’t stop reading Not Always Right and it is my DAY OFF from my RETAIL job why would I do this to myself?!
My favorite customer complaint, from when I was a travel agent (a thankless job)
The gentleman said “the food was awful, and there wasn’t enough of it”.
Is anyone else weirdly proud of themselves when they read something which then gets featured on The Toast? Because I read this earlier today, and I am.
I somehow forgot these when we were complaining about customers in yesterday’s link roundup/open thread:
1. One guy came in to return a shirt. I politely explained that we couldn’t take it back because it had been worn, but he swore up and down that he hadn’t even tried it on in the store and hadn’t taken it out of the bag after buying it. It was a white cotton t-shirt with huge yellow sweat stains in the armpits. I asked how the sweat stains had gotten on the shirt if nobody had worn it, and he said, “Well, I left the shirt in the bag in my car, so it must have absorbed gasoline fumes from inside my car.” “…. what?” “Gasoline’s yellow, right?” He did not get his money back.
2. At the same store, one woman would come in every few months, spend hours trying things on, then select one or two items to put on layaway. She invariably failed to come back and purchase the item by the deadline. Store staff would call several times to remind her, after which she would come (roughly a month after her initial visit) and pay the outstanding balance for her merchandise. Two or three weeks later she would come back to return it. Then two or three weeks after THAT she would come back to try more stuff on and begin the whole cycle anew. Half the time she wouldn’t come back to complete her purchase despite our follow-up calls. It was store policy to charge a 10% non-refundable deposit for layaway. In the year and a half I worked there, we made hundreds of dollars off this woman in deposits for items she never actually purchased.
3. Still the same store – a woman whose attitude was matched only by her enormous hair came in and selected about $300 worth of merch. She wanted to pay in US $100 bills. I politely explained that we couldn’t take USD in denominations over $20 but there was a currency exchange office just 2 doors down. She got really angry at this and demanded to know why I wouldn’t accept the large bills. I said, “It’s a loss prevention issue, because we’re not trained to know the security features on American bills, so it’s harder for us to spot fakes.” Of course, she got super pissed that I was implying she might be giving me counterfeit money, and kept insisting that I take the $100s because she would absolutely not walk 2 doors down to exchange it for CAD. I lost my patience and said something like “I don’t understand why you’re so surprised that we have our own currency here and prefer to use it instead of a foreign country’s.” She went, “Oh, is that how you’re gonna talk to someone who’s spending $300 here on a Tuesday night?” I said, “No, but today’s Wednesday” and she lost her shit. She finally stormed out to the currency exchange office and came back to buy her stuff, but she insisted that someone else ring her up because she was so angry at me. Like I cared. I mean, I won that particular interaction, since a) she exchanged her damn money b) I didn’t have to deal with her entitled ass anymore.
Re #3, you are my hero and you remind me of another hero of mine, a woman who worked at a coffee shop with me. We were on a college campus and served these annoying coffee milkshake drinks that took forever to make. Inevitably, most of the people who order these were sorority girls who paid by credit card, didn’t tip, and usually had some weird request about the milk like that we mix skim and whole to make some approximation of 2% since we didn’t have 2%. On her last day working there, my coffee shop hero refused to make those drinks. If someone would ask her she would just say, “Nope! I’m not making those today.” It was beautiful.
HAHA! #3 is so amusing.
HAHA! #3 is so amusing.
My favorite story from my time as a receptionist was a lady who complained on tripadvisor that her room did not have an ocean view. The hotel is in Vienna, Austria.
Not exactly the same, but with a similar appeal: the wonderful http://iworkatapubliclibrary.com/