I haven't worked retail in years, and I was lucky enough to never have the legendary nasty customer.

However, I worked in the pro shop in an ice arena a number of years ago. One day I came in and my manager cryptically asked me if there were any problems the last time I worked. I said that nothing stuck out and she said something like, "Okay."

After five minutes or so of awkwardness, she calls a meeting with everyone that was there that day. I find out in the meeting that a customer called to report me for trying to swindle him in terms of something like identity theft. Why? Because we had a system where if you pay by credit card, we would ask for your address as some sort of household record keeping. Sounds fishy when I put it like that, but our intent was to help the customer. We didn't sell info, or call and harass people. If anything, the number one reason we did stuff like that is so when customers wanted to return something, the process would be smoother and you wouldn't even need your receipt because--hey--there's a record of what you bought, and it wouldn't take long to look up! One last note on this before I continue this story: We didn't get crazy about it like GameStop or something. We didn't require customers to pay for stuff via credit card that way if they didn't want to. Long story short, it was all optional, and we made that clear during transactions.

Anyway, because I asked this customer his address via standard procedure, he took that as me trying to id theft him. During the actual sale, he put up no fuss and politely left after his transaction. What got me is that he tried to tell my manager that I was ignoring black customers. There was just him in the pro shop when this happened.

To this day I have no clue what that guy's motivation was, but I am glad I had a manager that was level headed and realized that the customer was completely full of **** and had some sort of hidden agenda.