I used to do that too! “Do you have this?” “Oh, the most popular item three days before Christmas which I’ve been asked about thirty times a day for the last month and a half? No sorry, it’s out of stock until at least after the holidays.” “Well can you go look in the back?”

Then I’d just go back there and dick around on my phone for five minutes, the manager would come out and ask what I was doing, I’d say pretending to look for something we don’t have and she’d go “oh, okay” and go back to playing solitaire in her office lol.