Apparently, consumers and retailers are equally good at driving each other nuts.
The NY Times’ Haggler lists eight top consumer pet peeves, which include modern-day nuisances such as constant upselling, annoying after-call surveys, nonstop e-mail address requests, and especially pushy sales reps:
This can be a particular problem in clothing stores, which for some reason are home to the most cloying and relentless of the breed. Shopping, as far as the Haggler is concerned, is awkward enough. It doesn’t need the awkwardness added by a too-chipper smoothie, trailing in your wake, pretending to befriend you in the hope of earning a commission.
Meanwhile, MainStreet.com offers a roundup of five retailer pet peeves, culled (and softened) from an expletive-laden discussion at Reddit. The retail worker peeves include customers who rudely don’t get off the !#@!*!@# cell phone at the checkout line, customers who sprinkle coins all over the counter and then get annoyed as the clerk takes his time picking and adding the mound of change up, and customers who take stuff off shelves and then put it back in some other part of the store after deciding not to buy it:
A Walmart employee named VinFx describes his frustration with this: “The other day at Walmart, I saw a pack of turkey bacon in the candy shelf before the register. I touched it and it was fully room temperature. Ruined,” the user wrote. “I have no idea why jerks have to do that. They were 3 feet from the cashier and could have said they didn’t want it. Instead, they jammed it in between the Snickers and Bubble Yum racks costing the store $4 for nothing.”