My favorite way out of that situation was to tell them that the registers were automatically shut down at closing. Literally no way to ring up a purchase. It worked most of the time

They did it for me last time is the bane of all service jobs. I managed a pizza place for years that would sometimes get up to over 200 food products per hour. You could see about the first 20 of them at a time on the screens. There was no way to indicate modifications that weren't available in the POS. I personally trained every new employee on phones and till.

I would tell them you're going to talk to a lot of assholes. There will be the person that wants extra cheese on their cheesesticks. You have to tell that person no. You cannot sell anything that can't be entered into the computer.

Every day during the insane dinner rush I'd either get employees coming over to say hey extra cheese on the cheesesticks on order 215. We're on order 175. There is no way those cheesesticks are going to get extra cheese.

No time to correct the employee, no time to call the customer back. Or the other which was worse. The customer would escalate the call to me. "They did it for me last time!"

I'm stuck on the phone with this piece of shit and I can't be firefighting. The fires grow. Sometimes they get so bad we have to stop production to get back on track. This means we get so far behind that I'll have to stay an extra hour or two to right the ship. For no extra pay. The customers get pissed as the wait and delivery times increase. Escalations to management increase. The whole place is engulfed in flame. Next thing I know I've been there for 12 hours for no extra pay.

Wasted my fucking mid 20s to early 30s there. It permanently ruined my mental health. It turned me into an alcoholic.

I could rant endlessly and I have so many stories.

Yup! You learn REAL fast, that if you just don't make eye contact they'll eventually go away.

When I worked at McDonald's I used to keep the DriveThru headset on after closing while I was doing paper work to tell people "sorry, we're closed" if they drove up to the speaker board. (Mind you, the building lights and menu board lights are off at this point. Something we call a "clue".)
That stopped after one too many people screamed "FUCK YOU!" into the speaker board (for us following our posted hours and me politely informing them instead of ignoring them.)

You quickly adopt a policy of "just ignore them and they'll figure it out."

There's also a lot of stores with a policy that tills can't be counted or processed unless everyone is accounted for and all doors locked, if you have to reset that process it can be an extra hour of work.

The worst part of retail/food service is the inescapable feeling of dread when you stare down the endless abyss of being stuck in that job day in and day out, forever, until you die. Only by resigning yourself to that fate does one gain the perspective needed to truly sympathize with the working class.

fuck the draft, make everyone spend a year or two in the service industry after high school

I don't know. Some people who experience abuse and escape it become far worse abusers when they're in position to do so.

I worked retail at a store that had a rule that we DO NOT rush customers out if they come in before we lock the doors. We were NOT allowed to mention we were closed and we were NOT allowed to roll out merchandise to the aisles.

Corportate was confused on how our store had so much overtime when customers would regularly walk in a minute before close, stay an hour and buy nothing.

My favorite tactic used by several of the coffee shops near me is they start slowly turning the music louder. People naturally start leaving once it's too loud to think or talk. Place I used to work at we'd turn off half the lights and everyone would just show up at the register no confrontation needed. People were fine with it a vast majority of the time but occasionally there would be someone who asked us to turn the lights back on so they could keep shopping