Yesterday a customer came up to me and asked me if there was a public restroom in our store. This isn’t rare, our store is fairly large and people assume that it has a bathroom in it for customer use. We don’t, and our managers are incredibly strict about it (seriously, i got marked down in “loss prevention” on my annual review because I let an 8-month pregnant woman use our upstairs bathroom once). Anyways, I told the woman that we didn’t have a restroom for customers and offered the two other public restrooms in the area: one across the street, and another literally around the corner.
“Can you please let me use the bathroom, I just got my period and I need to insert a tampon.”
Ok. Who says “insert” a tampon? I gave her a look of “Sorry your undies are kinda bloody right now” and then told her that she should hurry over to the other public restrooms, which would take her less than 2 minutes to get to.
This was not enough for her, she would not be defeated.
“I really just want to insert a tampon! Please please please please!”
I stress again that I can’t let her into the back for security reasons (or whatever I’m supposed to say) and then she gives me that look, that you-are-a-woman-you-should-understand-what-i’m-going-through kind of look. But now that she had been begging for a full minute now I had no sympathy for her.
If I was in her situation I would have bolted out of the store right after I told her where the other restrooms were, not stand around wasting my precious tampon time by begging some sales associate to let me use their bathroom. I hate it when people stress the emergency situation of something and then just show how un-urgent their problem is by wasting time.
At this point a nearby customer, trying to be helpful, says:
“Maybe she could use one of the dressing rooms to put in a tampon.”
I try to hide the disgust on my face and pray that the women didn’t hear this suggestion. The thought of bloody gross tampons rotting in our dressing rooms that never get cleaned did not sound appealing.
Anyways, she asked to see a manager. Like that ever, ever solves anything.
I went up to the manager nearest me (who happened to be the manager with no soul) and told her a woman wanted to talk to her about the bathroom. She quickly told the woman a again that she could not use the restroom, and the woman left, but not after I made sure she wasn’t walking towards the fitting rooms. Yuck.
Let this be a lesson to all you tourists a-travelin’ to New York: If a place says they don’t have restrooms, they don’t. So take your tampons and children to Starbucks or whatever.
