Speaking about people’s weight is a very delicate issue. This is a particularly tricky topic for salesmen. Especially those who sell wedding gowns to brides. A wedding dress saleswoman wants help on whether she made a mistake when handling an unpleasant client who insisted on trying on a dress that was plainly way too small for her. Read the story and let us know what are your thoughts about it.
Source: Reddit
I work as a bridal sales associate. The other day I’m assigned my bride, I did a normal introduction of myself, I asked the bride if she’s tried on any dress before. She says yes, I ask if she has any photos, she seems annoyed and says no.
I ask her what size the dresses she was trying on were and how they fit, she tells me a 30 and that they fit well. I kindly explained to her that we don’t carry many size 30 dresses in the store (we have probably 150 dresses and only 3 are a size 30). But we can try 26/28s and if she finds “the dress” she can order it in a 30 as we have that size available online.
I start pulling the size 30s we have to show her, she hates all of them, and tells me “how about I just pull dresses myself since you can’t seem to do it”. I tell her that’s fine I’ll start her a dressing room. I asked another coworker to try and assist her since she definitely wasn’t wanting to work with me. She was just as rude to my coworker, so I went back over to her + her family/friends.
She pulls out a size 14 dress (a dress I know we only have that one of in the store) I tell her that and she still insisted to try it on, I’m walking on eggshells here so I tell her, in a sympathetic tone “well as this is a size 14 so I’d recommend we don’t try this on, we won’t wanna try and be squeezing you into it” since I felt like if I said honestly “this dress is many sizes smaller than the dress size you’ve told me fits you” she would get even more aggressive towards me.
She just puts the dress back and walks away from me so I give up and ask my sales manager if they can try and assist her. She does and she is suddenly all nice and polite to my manager and ends up finding a dress. I continue my shift till my sales manager calls me over and tells me this customer said I “brought up her weight and made her feel insecure about her size” ???
I nod my head and listen to my manager and tell her I appreciate the feedback and I’ll make sure not to mention that again but I didn’t think I DID TO BEGIN WITH?
Was there a way I should’ve handled the situation differently? I specifically tried to not say directly “you’re too big for this dress”? This really pissed me off, I can admit my faults/mistakes, I just honestly don’t see what I did wrong here? As well as the fact that this woman tried to get me in major trouble with my manager and affect my job because she didn’t like the wording I chose to explain to her something glaringly obvious (her being 8 sizes larger than the dress she was asking to try on).
Am I a Jerk For even telling her I wouldn’t recommend trying it on in the first place? Thank you to anyone reading my post and I appreciate any feedback 🙂
Here are a few comments on the story where it was originally posted:
