I manage a place that sells ice cream and has an attached gifty/grocery type store (all one business). We get to see quite a few parents who let their children do whatever they want.
I literally had a kid using the wall to do a flip on the chairs, he was between 8 and 10 years old!
Not long ago, we had a parent walk away from their child to shop, and the kid opened up a Styrofoam cooler (that was merchandise to be sold) and got inside and started stomping around in it. He left dirty shoe prints and dents in the cooler, and it was no longer in sell-able condition. The cashier at the time told the kid that it wasn’t a toy, and to get out, and parent came back over. No additional action was taken, not sure if the mom apologized or not.
Today I came in and found a busted bag of rice with a note saying that “a kid dropped it”. I have no additional details on that interaction.
My question is, how do we hold these parents responsible for their children’s actions? Do we post a “You break it, you buy it” sign and request that customers pay for any damaged product while they are in the store? Does this hurt customer relations?
TLDR, parents let their kids run loose, and damage products, should we hold the parents responsible for these products, or would it hurt our customer relationships?
In grade 3 or 4 my class was taken on a felid trp to a very nice nature preserve, Well before we went in, the teacher decided it would be a great idea to lead a class full of dummies through the optics store so she could grab some camera stuff.
The trouble maker of the group waited for his time to shine, once the teacher was distracted we all hear a loud smash and a scream, The dummy decided to climb up on a glass display case, inside the display case was some binoculars worth over 8k in 1990s money… Pretty sure dummies parents had to pay up.
oh and the kid had to go get like 40 stiches. ruined the whole trip for everyone.