You're Closed?

Then how about the people who have no concept of time whatsoever. They're the last people left in the store, 5 minutes after close, but they don't notice. My employee approaches them and asks if they need help. "No, we're just looking." I turn off 25% of the lights, but they don't notice. I approach them and ask if I can help. "No," in an exasperated voice, "he already asked us if we needed help. We're just looking." I reply, "Well, can I ask what you'll be paying with?" (So I can start counting the other tenders.) At that point, one of two things happen.

1. The halfway considerate ones reply with a shocked expression, "What time do you close?" "We closed 15 minutes ago." "Really??" (Like 95% of the stores in the area don't close at the same time.) Then they either hurry to the register to buy their item(s), or apologize and leave.

2. One person looks at the other with a disgusted look like "how dare she ask us such a question." That type of person usually quickly leaves, too, but never apologizes and sometimes complains about me treating a customer like that and they'll never return to our store. Well, since they didn't buy anything they're not actually a customer, are they? (Before you say they might have bought something if I'd given them more time, that type of customer usually comes on the weekends to kill time before meeting friends or going to a movie or until curfew or whatever. They rarely buy anything; if they do it's $5 or something that doesn't even cover the cost of the electricity to stay open.) Besides the fact that the employees might have weekend plans to get to after closing the store!

Our office allocates our hours expecting that we'll be able to start close-out the SECOND that we close. For every minute that a customer stays late, that's another minute that we stay in the store, pushing payroll over budget.