I've been going to this location for 25 years, but today I had very unpleasant harassment incident at this LCBO. An LCBO employee colluded and supported another customer in being rude and harassing towards me. This is what happened:
I approached a checkout and the cashier took my 3 cans of beer and began to ring them in. She said nothing about another customer, another order being rung in, nothing. There were no other customers anywhere in sight of this checkout. She merely took the cans and began ringing them in. There was a box and some bottles to my left, pushed off to the side, with no apparent owner. I thought they were returns that hadn't yet been re-shelved. As my purchase was being finished, a man came up behind me. Suddenly, the LCBO employee turned to me and loudly said, 'You could say thank you, you know!" She was very humiliating in how she said it. She spoke to me like I was 12-year-old who needed to be taught a lesson. The entire store of 20 or so customers was staring because she was also very loud. I hadn't even finished keying in my card info yet, so I was a bit surprised. Of course, I would have said thank you when she finished the purchase. That's what I thought she meant, but it turned out to be far worse than that. I left in surprise and bewilderment, but came back a few minutes later and asked to speak to the manager.
It turned out, the man behind me had left his selections to the side of the counter and wandered away. How could I have known this? Apparently, the man felt I was in his way. What?! The cashier even said she didn't know whose the selections were, either, and she had not begun to ring them in yet, not knowing whose they were. She said she was repeating what the man said to me when he returned. I was busy paying, I didn't really hear him. However, she was very loud - everyone in the store could hear her! I said to the LCBO employee, "You mean, the male customer behind me was inappropriately rude and harassing to me, when I had done nothing but innocently approach an empty counter, and you not only allowed him to do so, you supported him in it by saying it to me, too?" Worse, the cashier didn't even let me lodge my complaint with the manager in private, which is policy. She left her register and came running up to us and began arguing with me while I was trying to tell the manager what had happened. I honestly don't believe the male customer would have behaved that way if I had been a large man. I'm a small woman in her 50s. I don't think the cashier would have behaved that way, either. She not only allowed a male customer to be rude to me, she supported him in doing so.
While the comment made ("You could say thank you") is in the realm of people merely being rude - we have all had other customers occasionally be rude to us, or even a store employee having a bad day -- this is the first time in my life I have ever had a store employee triangulate and collude with a customer harassing another customer, in front of an entire store of other, listening customers. Her role was to say, "Sorry, I'll be with you in a minute" -- to him, or to me, either would have been fine. Like a professional. In a professionally run business. Absolutely inexcusable. read more