Holiday Gift-Giving-Back Season Begins : Retailing: One worker’s account of the day after Christmas, often the most stressful of the season. Customers can be surly--and less than honest.

It was the day after Christmas, and Kiel Bisceglia was ready for all hell to break loose.

He was in charge of the crew of eight at the refunds center set up Tuesday in the Fallbrook Mall Target store, girding to handle the onslaught of customers who would want exchanges or money back for their unwanted coffee pots, video games and sweat suits.

Already a veteran of a past day-after-Christmas exchange blitz, 19-year-old Bisceglia has seen it all: a customer who tried to return a nearly empty can of nuts because, she said, they didn’t taste good; people who brought in sealed television and telephone boxes containing nothing more than bricks, hoping that an unsuspecting clerk would hand over cash before finding out what actually was inside.

Customers who return gifts can be hard on salespeople and retailers’ profits, but clerks at Target and many other stores are told to make exchanges as hassle-free as possible. To help matters, these stores often put their best employees at the return counter.

“We do it so they (customers) will say, ‘Great,’ I should do business there more often,’ ” explained George Hite, a spokesman at Target Stores’ headquarters in Minneapolis.

At the same time, no store wants its staff to be bamboozled by a shopper who comes in for a refund on an out-of-style sport shirt that was bought somewhere else a year ago.

So Bisceglia, well aware of the balancing act he must perform, got to work at 5:30 a.m. and prepared to handle his job with grace. It couldn’t be nearly as bad, he figured, as the madhouse atmosphere of the last few days before Christmas.

And in the early hours, at least, it wasn’t. Bisceglia spent most of his first few hours on the job handling routine preparations.

Even more than an hour after the store opened at 7 a.m., Bisceglia--a friendly, patient young man--was biding his time by leaning against a cash register and asking a co-worker how her weekend went.

Before long, however, the action picked up and the West Hills store was bustling. Bisceglia soon faced a customer who questioned him sharply about why he gave her a refund of only $32.91 when her receipt totaled $35.05. He quickly pointed out that the receipt was for two items and she was returning only one of them.

“Oh,” she replied. “Sorry.”

That kind of confrontation was nothing new for Bisceglia. Sometimes, he said later, customers “get all huffy and puffy, and then when they realize it’s their fault, they feel stupid.”

Before long, a momentary mini-crisis emerged when a customer who exchanged an item set off the store’s security alarm while heading out the door. It turned out that the store had installed a new security system that requires some merchandise to be decoded before leaving the store, and no one gave the refunds center the necessary decoding pad. Bisceglia said he’d take care of it as soon as he could.

A little later, the customer service staffers were abuzz after they foiled a shopper trying to pull an all-too-common stunt. The shopper brought in a pair of Jordache jeans with a $32.99 Target price tag. Trouble is, Target normally doesn’t sell those jeans or any other pants costing more than $25. Apparently, the customer took the tag from another item and stuck it on the jeans in hopes of tricking a sales clerk and walking away with cash.

Renee Greco, one of Bisceglia’s customer service clerks, politely told the shopper that the pants were from another store, and he quickly darted out. “They don’t want to get caught,” she explained.

Perhaps Bisceglia’s toughest call of the day came at 12:30 p.m., when he was approached by a tall young man with a stack of five video games worth about $200. There was no receipt, but the customer wanted his money back anyway. “It just didn’t look right,” Bisceglia said.

So Bisceglia first asked the man for his driver’s license and then checked his name against the store’s log of customers who have gotten three or more large cash refunds without receipts in the past; these people can be denied further refunds. This customer, however, didn’t show up on the list, so Bisceglia cleared him for the refund, even though his gut instinct told him that something was wrong.

That type of stress comes often for customer service personnel. Target officials say many employees dislike giving refunds to shoppers they suspect don’t deserve them--people who they fear stole the merchandise or perhaps used it for a long time before bringing it back. But as long as there is no proof of something amiss, Target employees are supposed to accept the return.

“Sometimes it’s hard to get the employees to do that,” said Jeff Biddle, the store manager. “They want to protect the company, along with the customers.”

Added Bisceglia: “It just kills us sometimes, but you’ve got to do it.”

The store does take precautions to protect itself. If someone wants to return a newly bought item that was on sale recently, the store’s policy is to give the customer credit only for the sale price--even if it is possible that the item was bought at the full retail price. All the same, if the customer claims to actually have paid the higher price, he or she is supposed to get full credit for that amount.

For the most part, customers seemed pleased Tuesday. Many, in fact, lauded the Target store’s service and said they were pleasantly surprised to have their exchanges settled in a matter of a few minutes.

“It was real nice,” said Sandi Galperen of Woodland Hills.

Bisceglia clearly deserved some of the credit for the refund center’s smooth performance. Managers at the store had nothing but praise for him, marveling at how cool he stays under pressure despite his youth.

Bisceglia, though, acknowledged that the job takes a toll on him. Although he’s not sure what he wants to do with his future, he is fairly certain that he won’t pursue a long-term career in retailing.

“It’s just too stressful,” he said. “It’s very stressful.”