Reason for return

The returns counter opens on the twenty-sixth and it is the worst place in retail.

All through December the shop sells. From the twenty-sixth, for the following twelve days, the shop takes it all back, and the person taking it back earns no commission, no praise and no short queue.

I have run that counter since 2019. I learned the policy and I can recite it without looking.

"Change of mind: fourteen days, online orders only."

That is the one that causes the most arguments, because nobody accepts that buying in a shop and buying on a website are different things in law. I explain it about thirty times a day and about five of those I explain it twice to the same person.

"Size or colour: thirty days, with the receipt, the tag and the packaging, unworn."

That is the one I break most. Tag torn off I accept if the item is new. Packaging I accept opened. Unworn I judge by eye, and in seven years I have rarely got it wrong.

"Gift without a receipt: credit note at the lowest price charged in the previous thirty days."

That is the cruellest, because the lowest price in the previous thirty days is the Christmas sale price, and whoever got the present finds out at the counter what their aunt paid, or what she did not pay.

"Does not apply to swimwear, underwear or earrings."

That one is hygiene and there is no discussion. It is the only one I have never broken.

Lindomar turned up on the twenty-sixth at nine in the morning with a temporary badge.

The chain sends reinforcements from other branches for the January push, because the volume after Christmas is three times a normal month and the regular team cannot cover it. He came from the shop in the other centre, from the stockroom, and had never worked a counter in his life.

First thing I told him: never say "it is company policy". Say "I cannot do that". The first blames an invisible building and makes people angrier. The second is a lie and it works.

He learned that in two hours. It took him three days to learn not to argue and five to stop apologising.

About the counter, physically.

It has two positions side by side, a metre of worktop each, and two terminals sharing one receipt printer. The printer sits on the right of my position, which is the left of his.

Which means that for every return processed one of us reaches across the other's space, takes the paper, checks it and hands it over. On a Monday in January that happens about two hundred times.

Behind the counter is the returns room, where the stock sits until it is checked. Two and a half metres by three, steel shelving down both sides, a door that opens inwards and a cold LED strip.

On the twenty-sixth that room had one pile on the floor. By the second of January it had two piles and a gangway between them.

What twelve days on a returns counter does to a person is documentable.

You get sworn at. Not every day: about twice a day. You are told you will lose your job about three times a week. You watch people cry over a dress, and almost never is it about the dress.

Around the thirtieth the team turns funny in an ugly way. Counter humour in January is A&E humour: nobody outside would find it funny and everybody inside needs it.

That is the humour Lindomar and I got to know each other in. Not the nice one. The other one.

On the second of January the system went down at ten past nine, twenty minutes before closing.

When the system goes down, the queue stays. You write it on paper, promise to reprocess it and ask for a phone number, and people leave with every right to be furious.

The last of them left at quarter past ten. The shop had shut at ten. The centre switches off the music and half the lights at half ten, and switches off the air handling with them, which nobody who has not worked in a shopping centre knows.

At twenty to eleven he and I were checking the second of January pile in the returns room, because checking does not wait, and the two of us had that floor entirely to ourselves.

With no music, no air and no people, a shopping centre is a very large and very quiet concrete building.

The door of the returns room opens inwards and has no lock. We pushed a box against it, which locks nothing and changes everything.

The steel shelf on the left is bolted to the wall and holds thirty kilos per level, according to the label stuck on it, and that is information I did not need to have and do.

We left at twenty past eleven by the service door, which is the only one that still opens at that hour.

The check on the second was left half done and was finished on the morning of the third.

It happened twice more, on the fourth and the fifth, both after closing and both in the same room. The second time we had already moved the pile away from the door, which is not a decision anybody makes out of tidiness.

On the sixth the January push ended and he went back to his own shop. Temporary badge handed back to HR along with the tabard.

We exchanged numbers on the twenty-seventh, not the sixth, because everybody on a counter exchanges numbers on day one to sort out shifts. His is in my phone as "Lindomar stockroom", which is how I saved it on the twenty-seventh of December and never changed.

The full stocktake is in the second week of January and it always closes with a discrepancy.

A discrepancy is the gap between what the system says exists and what the count finds. Theft, mis-scans, returns keyed wrong. The chain works to a tolerance and our shop came in inside it.

One item was missing from men's knitwear. A grey jumper, medium, which was in the second of January returns pile and was not in the count on the twelfth.

The policy has a clause for that, and a form, and a justification field, and a transaction code that I keyed in myself, because the counter is mine.

The jumper is at my flat. It is too big on me, it still smells of the stockroom, and I wear it on winter Sundays.