Which is why everyone should work in costumer service at least once

If everyone worked in some sort of customer service job for one day I feel like the world would become a better place.

I don't think she was expecting him to be perfect. She would naturally expect an assistant manager to know about the conditions of the sale, and the fact that he said it was his first day seemed to explain the error.

She was still rude. The polite response would be something like "don't worry everyone makes mistakes" or even "its no problem Im just glad everything got sorted out." Just because you open yourself up to rude comments doesn't mean that they are any less rude.

If you have to rely on lying to get good tips, you are a bad server. Yes, some people are just shitty tippers but if you are a good server the majority of people will tip accordingly. I would never lie to a customer, but you do you.

You'd be surprised how often upper management fails to communicate with the folks below them in a retail environment

It clearly says that he had been previously told that it was online only. So there is definitely a communication break down and OP can't be blamed for not questioning it to begin with since it's such a common thing to have online only special deals.

Actually GM's fault because they didn't communicate the new information in a timely matter.

Exactly. Why wouldn't she believe him if he told her it was his first day? That would explain why he didn't know the conditions of the sale.

.....that's kind of what the term assistant manager means. Your not the general manager, and not a normal shift leader/manager. Your the manager that assists the GM in their duties.

If only there were some easier way to convey that very sentiment… like – I dunno – a button, maybe?

I don't think that meets the criteria to be considered a smart ass. You sound like one of "those" customers. You do realize most places are training their employees to be upbeat and fun, making jokes and actually talking to the customer right? The reason is most people like it. Having fun with other human beings is enjoyable to most people, and service employees are human, not generic service robots.

For some reason people take the term "the customer is always right" literally. No. It means that even if the customer is wrong, you should still find a compromise to help them or just fix the problem without arguing or incident. Like if a customer ordered food from a restaurant and ordered wrong or forgot to specify something, and the food they got wasn't quite what they wanted (wanted extra pickles or add some sauce to their burger or something and didn't get it because they forgot to actually tell the person taking their order) and come back to complain, just fix their food. It's not worth the possible loss of customers, especially if they told their friends and family, they told theirs, it happened again to one of those people and it reinforced the honesty of the story they heard so they told their friends, ect. In short it means the customer pays 100% of your paycheck so just apologize and make it right.