
Japan has a reputation for outstanding customer service, and as such you’ll usually find courtesy and pleasantness on both sides of retail transactions. As polite as clerks are, most shoppers are just as respectful towards the hard-working individuals who’re ringing their purchases up.
Still, not every customer is a joy to deal with, and one young women working at a convenience store thought she was encountering an extremely rude male customer who refused to be served by her. As it turns out, though, the man she’d mistaken for a chauvinist was simply following his own particular code of chivalry.
A lot of the stuff you’ll find in a Japanese convenience store is pretty family-friendly. Often, the clientele consists of kids coming in to buy candy, hungry salarymen and Internet writers picking up boxed lunches, or passersby stopping in to grab a cold, refreshing bottle of tea or can of coffee.
Convenience stores also provide some less wholesome vices, though, and occasionally a customer, usually a guy, will become impatient and frustrated when he can’t find his preferred type of booze or the clerk is too slow in retrieving his regular brand of smokes from where they’re kept behind the counter. It’s likely that’s what Twitter user Yuma thought was happening during her shift at her part-time convenience store job.
Yuma was at her position working the register when a crotchety male customer approached and suddenly declared “I aint got nothing to say to you! Go get your manager!!”
Not sure what the man’s problem was, Yuma did as asked. Her male manager came out and rang the customer up, but the puzzled part-timer still had no clue what all the fuss had been about, considering she hadn’t said anything at all, let alone something that could have caused offense, prior to the customer’s outburst. So after the man left, Yuma asked her manager, “Did I do something wrong…?”
Not at all, according to her manager, who relayed what the customer had told him:
https://twitter.com/yuma_ryosuke/status/597057443697299457“It wouldn’t be right to make a young girl ring me up when I’m buying a porno mag, so I had her go get you instead.”
So while he didn’t go about it in the most delicate way, it turns out the customer was at least trying to spare Yuma a bit of embarrassment. The good-natured young lady decided to take the customer’s actions with their intended sentiment. “It was actually kind of cute that he thought to do that,” she tweeted. Now that she knows his M.O., though, we’re not sure what the porn-craving customer is going to do the next time he needs his fix.

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