No Returns For Any Reason

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright 2011 Plot Roach.

No Returns For Any Reason

By Plot Roach

I wondered how much damage I could do with a plastic spork, if given the appropriate target. I was at work at the time, in the middle of an eight hour shift working retail at my crappy mall job. It was the fourth of July weekend and somehow I had pissed off my supervisor enough that she put me on the holiday shift. We were in the middle of an hour of dead time, with little or nothing to do, as customers were off stuffing their faces at the food court. There was a free sample dinner at Colonial Joe’s Chicken Café and it seemed like every broke trashy idiot in the state was taking advantage of it. If the owner of the café did not go bankrupt from it, he would be facing angry letters from customers and employees alike for the greasy cardboard he tried to pawn off as food and the skeletal crew he employed to try and handle the mass of people and their ill tempers.


Soon it would be my mess to deal with. With greasy fingers and in a drunken rage, these “customers” would gather in my store demanding specialty discounts and freebie samples. And if I did not comply, I would be the bad guy.

I work retail. I am always the bad guy. I constantly tempt people into buying crap that they do not need. And what is worse: I suggest that they use credit to afford it, even if they don’t have the pocket change to take the bus home. And I can help them with that, too. Because I can give them cash back. And the store takes a cut, of course.

And when they get the crap home and decide it’s not as pretty, doesn’t make them happy or any of the other things that I promised, they try and bring it back. And then I am forced to plaster a smile on my face, apologize for their unhappiness and point to the sign that reads: NO RETURNS FOR ANY REASON. And the moment will end with the customer cursing me out, and then threatening to get me fired, or worse, follow me home and kill me.

I hate my job, but I hate the customers more. Most of them are only here ‘just looking’, sucking up the air conditioning and asking me where everything is made and if every little symbol painted or stitched into something has some deep spiritual meaning that can alter their lives in a way that drugs, religion or good sex cannot. They’re cheap, they’re loud and they walk around the mall treating all the workers like their own personal slaves. There’s one specific jerk who tries everything to return whatever he buys, the day after he buys it. It happens at least once a week, and sometimes as much as three times a week.

So when I saw him slink in, clutching that little white plastic bag with the store’s logo on it, I knew what he was going to do. He walked up to the front register, where I had been perched like a stone gargoyle for the past half hour trying to eat my lunch, smelling of alcohol with his hands coated in chicken grease. And the bastard had the balls to smile at me as he said: “There was a problem with me last purchase. I need to return it.”

“I’m sorry, sir. As you already know, here at the Knickknack Hut, we are unable to take returns. We suggest you take your complaint to corporate and in the future, review your purchase better before payment.” it’s the standard schlock I’m trained to say. If I deviate for it for even one syllable, I’ll be fired on the a spot.

“I thought that you would say that.” he said, and then pulled out a gun.

I don’t think of myself as jaded, but I think he was expecting more of a reaction from me than the yawn I gave him. It’s not that I wasn’t afraid. It was just that I had been working a full shift on top of taking a full load of classes at the local community college. No sleep + full time stress + idiot customers = please kill me. The math seemed sound enough. We have no security button, like the banks do, hidden under the front counter. And I would have to turn around to grab the phone, letting him have the chance to shoot me in the back. So I took the only shot I had: I pulled the spork from my mashed potato sample that one of the employees had brought over from Colonial Joe’s Chicken Café and stabbed him in the eye.

And let me tell you, he hit the floor like drunken teenage girl at prom. At first I thought that he was just stunned, then I saw the pool of blood spread out from beneath his head. Security later confirmed that he must have been dead before he hit the floor. I was so stressed at the time, that I drove the plastic spork with such force that it traveled through the eyeball and deep into his brain.

The police told me that it was the quick thinking on my part that probably saved countless lives if he had gone on a killing spree throughout the mall. The workers I would hate to see hurt, but the mall shoppers could do with a little thinning of the herd. The police were on the record that I did it in self defense, but I wasn’t so sure. If you’ve looked into the eyes of the mall worker who is selling things to you when you are being ’irate’, I mean REALLY look into them, thoughts of killing come as easily as the smile they have to plaster on their faces as they are forced to parrot the line: “Thank you, and have a nice day!”