I don’t consider myself a neurotic person, but a couple of things make me really nervous. I hate incessant whispering at a movie theatre and the awkward chill it sends through the audience as everyone wonders, “Is someone going to shush them?” Waiting for a person to inevitably snap and tell them to shut up is as distracting as the talking itself.

Everyone fears running into exes, but, when we do, we usually act mature and construct a studied “We loved and lost” nostalgic smile. I get more nervous when I see someone I went on one single date with. Do I say hi? What if they ignore me, or even worse, don’t remember?

I was at ‘Buddies in Bad Times’ when a guy stopped me on the dance floor.

“Do I follow you on Twitter?” he asked.

“Um, I don’t think so.”

“You tweet about fashion and politics and movies and stuff…”

“Yeah, that sounds like me.”

“I’m sure I do. My name’s Ted.”

“I know,” I said. “We went on a date.”

“We did?”

“Yup. Have a good night!”

What I hate more than those things is causing a scene at a store. I’m a writer, so naturally I’ve worked a lot of customer service. I know what it’s like to be behind the till when a patron unleashes about some piece of insane minutia. I’ll put up with a lot from servers, hosts, bartenders, and sales associates because I knew their job is a tough one. I once ended a date (in my head, at least) when a guy confessed to officially lodging a complaint against a Starbucks barista. Who has that kind of time?

But sometimes my reluctance to look like a jerk turns me into a pushover and prevents me from doing something I should do. Case in point–I never return things, especially not items of apparel. I like to think I buy clothes I want to keep, but it’s equally because I lose receipts, I can’t be bothered to go back to the store, and I’m scared the cashier will give me a hard time.

Recently I bought a pair of running shoes. For some people this is a monthly occurrence, but I’m in the habit of wearing shoes until they fall apart. I’m trying to get better about that, so I was especially disappointed when part of my new shoes broke after just a week. The little loop of fabric at the toe box, where the laces begin their cross-crossing journey upwards, tore off. I’ll fully admit to not always treating shoes nicely in the past, but I swear I only treated this pair with love and respect.

“Take them back,” my friend Jen told me. “That’s a defect.”

“You can’t return shoes,” I protested. “I’ve already worn them!”

“Of course you can return them. You work hard for your money. You deserve things that don’t fall apart.”

“Didn’t Charlotte York try to return shoes and the guy wouldn’t let her because she had worn them on the street?” I asked. You’d think by now I’d be used to Sex and the City misleading me. “It’s not going to work. I don’t even know if I kept the receipt.”

“I’ll go with you,” she said. “If they give you a problem, I’ll give them hell. And if it doesn’t work, I’ll buy you a drink.”

It turns out Jen has none of my reservations about returning clothes. Later, she estimated that she returns about one in seven items she buys. The reasons vary from trying it on again and having second thoughts (“Maybe it’s not the same colour I thought it was”) to the item not going with any of her other clothes. She almost always gets away with it, including the time she returned an unworn green shirt right after St. Patrick’s Day and the dress she returned to The Bay after 89 days (just under their cut off of 90).

“That was a low point.”

I asked if she ever got stuck with something she couldn’t return. “I was unable to return items at Sears once,” she said. “They had a terrible return policy of not allowing any discounted items to be returned. I was stuck with an ill-fitting pair of dress pants and a white ruched eyelet top ‘popular with granny’s the world over,’ according to my panel of judges at home.”

The one thing she won’t do is return something she’s worn. As someone who’s worked in retail, she has horror stories about people who “use and return.”

The clothing chain Laura doesn’t allow you to return formal wear. “Apparently they had a problem with women buying the dress, wearing the dress with the tags on and then returning it. I had a woman come back and try to return a formal wear sparkly top… Reason for the return? Some sparkles came off. Unfortunately, I couldn’t return it. My manager Linda came over trying to intervene and the top was promptly thrown in her face, glitter flying everywhere, and the customer yelling profanities as she left the store.”

It can be equally disadvantageous for a store to have a too open return policy, as Jen learned at another store when a woman successfully returned a pair of dark pants she that not only smelled, but were covered in white dog hair. 

I wondered how other people who worked retail felt about processing returns.

“I can remember one woman being furious because a T-shirt she got from the clearance section had started to unravel on the hem or something,” said Mary Beth, a normally sweet and good natured friend who’s worked at various clothing stores across the city.

“She bought it on sale over a year prior and had been obviously wearing it during this time. I was then furious because I was told to give her a credit for the lousy thing. Honestly, I think it ended up being something ridiculous like $4. Well worth making a sales girl shake with anger and hate you forever.”

“It’s unpleasant to try and tactfully point out that something has been used when they are telling you ‘Nope’ and ‘It was like that when I got it,’” she continued. “Returns are just a bummer. If you return one thing, okay, cool. You’re in and out and my sales didn’t take too much of a nosedive. But if you aren’t keeping anything on your receipt, I immediately don’t like you. How did you want all of this last week, but now you hate everything? I don’t trust you as a person.”

The best return stories came from people who worked for underwear companies. My cousin Breanna worked for La Senza–“The post-Christmas returns of gifts that husbands bought for their wives were pretty funny. Women coming in with lingerie that was clearly age/size inappropriate and husbands with their heads hung in shame. It made for an entertaining few weeks.”

“It was insane,” my friend Daniel said about Victoria’s Secret. “Women would come in with bras they had clearly been wearing for years and complain that they were coming apart… There was this one customer who would regularly come in every six weeks and complain that the bra she had purchased was defective. She would give the tags of a recent bra that she purchased and return an older bra expecting we were too stupid to be wise to her shit. The only reason we put up with her was because one time she threw an absolutely epic tantrum at one of the poor cashiers and made her cry.”

Despite this, Daniel said he feels generally okay about returns but worries it’s “symptomatic of today’s economy, encouraging you to buy everything in sight without any thought to the repercussions.”

The general feeling seemed to be it’s okay to return clothes, but be respectful and don’t push it. Considering that I was anxious about my very first big purchase return, I knew I would never become one of those customers who throw fits and make people cry. But I also wanted a fresh pair of running shoes, a prospect I was not optimistic about when Jen met me outside the shoe store. 

When we walked in I spotted the young man who had sold me the sneakers. I hadn’t been able to find the receipt (the lesson–keep receipts for everything), but at least I had the box the shoes came in. I explained the situation. After glancing briefly at the defect, the man said, “Unfortunately, I can’t give you a refund, but I can exchange them for a fresh pair of the same style.”

“That’s all I wanted,” I said. “Thank you.”

“It was within 14 days?” He asked. “Whatever, I think it was within 14 days. Don’t worry about it.”

I couldn’t believe how casually it played out. Jen stood a foot back from the till just observing. Like a parent letting go of a child’s training bike, she was teaching me to do it on my own.

The man brought forward a new pair. “Now, if there’s a problem with these ones, you will have to contact head office.”

“Don’t worry,” Jen said, her first interjection. “If it comes to that, I’ll deal with them.” I’m a fan of doing things yourself, but it’s nice to know friends have your back.