Unoficially Banned From Shops.

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I don't really know if I am on the spectrum or if I am an NT. If I say I am autistic I may be found later to be lying. I can't do that. I will have to wait.

I can say I am unique and very different. I think differently... I think! Haha.

All you have to say is that you SUSPECT that you have autism. Then, there's no chance that anybody will think you're lying.

I just want to find some shops where I am safe and they will take me as I am. Shops that trust their customers. Why do some of the shops who assume every other customer is a criminal have open planned shops in the first place? Clearly the companies are not mature enough for such a layout?

Is there a way you can just state your existence without giving it the name autism? I can understand your reserve in that area, but could you write on a card something like, "I have a condition which makes it difficult for me to... . If I am overwhelmed... . Etc."

You should shop in Morrisons on a Saturday between 9-10am - it's basically autistic hour

https://my.morrisons.com/blog/community/quieter-hour/

Officially banned sounds like, trespass warrant

"Unofficially banned"? Did someone tell you not to come back?

What did they tell you?

Autistic gait

Clothes



Sometimes ass holes security guards have the nerve to follow me around the store, but that's it


Security guards have their own prejudices but they are based on pattern recognition


Getting banned (officially or unofficially) from a couple of stores is one thing


But you make it sound like a lot of stores


So that sounds like something extreme is going on

Have you considered deciding what you want to buy before entering the store? Many supermarkets have an online catalogue you can look through, and it will have the specials in it too, so if you need to take your time making decisions about what to buy, you can do it at home instead by browsing the catalogue and writing a list.

This way, you can collect and purchase everything on your list without needing to take a suspicious amount of time deliberating, and there shouldn't be a problem.

I can take a while making decisions like that sometimes. When going to a restaurant I'm not familiar with, I'll see if I can find the menu online, so I can decide what I want in advance, so anyone I'm with won't need to wait on me to figure it out when we get there.

Believe it or not, though I don't like bright flickering lights, or ultra bright lights, and never have liked music in stores, these things are less of a concern to me then the store layout and the crowds of people. So to make the autistic hour on a saturday is crazy, as saturdays have the potential to be the busiest days of trading. All the stores I have worked in, and on the railway have saturdays as the day everyone seems to turn up at the same time. So to me, it won't help. It will make me a little more comfortable without the music, but then I am far more likely to hear the staff making comments about me as I enter. I don't get comments like that with other customers. (I have not had this happen in Morrisons. It was Tescos where this used to take place).

I think part of my problem is having on and off over 25 years at various levels of working in the retail sector where I know things of how things should be done and how things should not be done, so this makes me all the more panicky when they break all the rules in the book and act in ways that both security guards and trained staff should not. The largest issue of all in the big stores is the lack of proper training. How can they recieve proper training when those training them have not been trained properly?
A classic example of this is where I was working. They would give youngsters higher pay then me after they had a days training and a certificate to assemble and PDI bikes. I had to correct so many glaring and dangerous mistakes due to this. It took me two years of training and constant monitoring with thousands of repairs under my belt before I was allowed to PDI bicycles where no one needed to check my work... And bicycles is my secondary special interest, and I was repairing my own bikes since I was the age of about seven onwards. By the time I was 10 or 11 years old I was changing spindles and bearings etc. Many of these day trained staff have never done anythinglike that. They are far too much in the deep end. What really annoys me, if they make a mistake and a customer has an injury,they as individuals get sued as the company stands back and says "He was a fully trained staff member" ad show his certificate to prove this.... The guys who trained the staff were certainly not up to my level of training. They did make sure the staff they trained knew some basic safety features, but I was mentioning a few things and they seemed surprized... Like it had never occurred to them...
Now why mention this is like bicycles, retail training is similar. There are many ways one can easily tell an experienced staff member by what they do compared to an inexperienced staff member. For example, the inexperienced staff members will be concentrating on targets and trying to promote things like store cards and interest free credit etc... (Some more amuturish stores even name and shame poor performing staff). But the experienced staff know that sales come to them because they are trustworthy and they do not push certain products without having a genuine concern that the product s right for the customer.
I once had a staff member under me when I was head of a bicycle department who could sell anything. He would even have money in the till for bicycles that not only I did not have, but our company disn't even trade with thw manufacturers.. I would have to phone customers back to apologise! He sold bikes that I couldn't sell. But his tallent concerned me and other staff. He had the art of communication but was not concerned about matching the customer to the product. His concern was earning the shop every penny he could find. His Dad owned a well known local caravan dealer. His Dad must have really passed on the selling knowledge to him. But this HAS to be married to both customer experience and concern that customers are buying the right products for their needs.
If a customer does not want to take advice, I won't stop them. They have free choice after all. But they can't then say I didn't warn them! Haha!
Anyway. I have forgotton what I was origionally typing about.