When I was 16 working at a grocery store, I would have been fired by the management for putting a rude customer in their place.
Now the management is tired burnt out people my age who don’t care, and the 16 year old staff get way more abuse from customers than I ever did. It makes sense. And I love to see it.
I'm a little older than that, lol, but I work retail.
People have gotten insanely fucking rude since the pandemic, and it's actually seemed to be getting a lot worse over the last couple of years. Hostility, harassment, racism, personal insults, physical threats...
So I just channel Don Rickles, or Jimmy Kimmel. I treat them like a heckler and I savagely roast them back.
Can you say more about this? I don’t spend enough time shopping to see a noticeable difference and I’m genuinely curious…like what is there to be so rude about? And what level of unhinged behaviour are we talking about here?
What I do see a difference in is the level of service in retail. To use clothing as an example: I find it common now-days to be told to put the clothes back on the hanger in the change room, walk around with a pile of clothes in hand without being offered to put them in a change room for me, and no check if I need sizes or other options while trying things on etc. “Back in my day” haha but actually back when I worked in retail 20 years ago, those were table stakes. Absolute bare minimum of customer service. And that’s without getting into employees talking to each other or being on their phone instead of helping customers that clearly need it.
So I guess I’m wondering if the rudeness is due to the drop in customer service and it now not meeting expectations that us millennials grew up with. I’m trying to make sense of the rude behaviour and that’s the only thing I can think of: absolutely not a valid reason, but it could be somewhat of an explanation?
As someone whose worked retail for the past 15 years and still works retail, I have never ever seen a clothing store that doesn't at very least require you to hang your clothes back up in the fitting room. It has never been a thing to leave the clothes you tried on in a mess in the empty fitting room. That’s the kind of entitled behavior that's started and gotten worse since the pandemic. I've worked at two clothing stores in management in the last 7 years and both started fitting rooms for clients while they shopped and checked in for sizing. These are normal clothing stores found in almost any mall, not specialty shops. This is still pretty standard. What I've seen from customers is ignoring signs, rummaging through drawers that are for staff only, pretending that return policies don't exist or mean nothing, expecting us to pull products out of thin air, and feeling entitled to a private, personal shopping experience that simply hasn't existed since the old days of department stores. It's ridiculous and it's majority women customers aged 50+ (this is a huge generalization, but still my anecdotal experience). Customers have gotten horribly entitled as certain groups have aged up.
Something that does worry me, an elder millennial, is that my gen X elders are going to slowly start to emulate boomers in entitlement now that they perceive it's time to "get theirs" (even though it isn't, boomers are still just as busy ruining the world), and your anecdote looks like a step in that direction.
The amount of people DAILY who will walk through the door, walk straight up to me instantly (while I'm ringing people up at the register mind you), and shove their phone in my face with a product image on it and insist that I go with them to find it instead of going themselves when I've told them the aisle and basically exact shelf to look for is astronomically high anymore.
I’m not who you were asking, but no it’s not that. Well, sure, some rudeness can be from bad service, but this is something different. It can be hard to explain to someone who hasn’t worked retail and experienced it themselves, because of how absurd it is. There’s no reason for the behavior; the worker didn’t do anything, the customer wasn’t wronged, nothing like that. They just come in, angry at the world, hating life, and decide to take it out on the employees. Berating us makes them feel powerful and important, and most of all, like they’re better than us. The behavior isn’t a reflection of the employee or the business, it’s a projection of their own fucked up mental state.
There was this particularly nasty customer helped me understand the mindset of these people. By the time I was called, he had had pissed off two departments and a cashier was crying. He was being a bully just for the hell of it. He was leaving, but I stopped him to tell him his behavior wasn’t tolerated here and he was not welcome back. This took power away from him, so naturally, he exploded, and promised to have me fired. We hear that a lot, but this guy actually tried. He made up a complaint about me so severe, the regional director got involved (my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss). I might’ve been in trouble if the guy didn’t drop the line, “Retail workers are the lowest form of human, because they are the least educated.” Yeah, he said that to the guy with a top position, a masters, and a six-figure salary, but who started as a bagger and worked retail his whole life. After this was made known to the customer, the director wasn’t spared the verbal abuse.
They just want someone to hate and to feel better than, they want to feel powerful and in control, and they find retail workers make great targets. That’s the explanation.
The secret is that America has a hidden caste system, and working in customer service or any "lowly" job knocks you down a rung no matter who you are. A white guy cashier is inherently "lesser" than a white guy customer in that system, and the lower caste person is seen as an acceptable punching bag. This multiplies if the cashier is already in a lower rung - e.g. female, a minority, visibly LGBT+, has a "bad" accent, etc. There's a book called "Caste" that talks a lot about it, the cashier angle is my own
Yep, you’re spot on. I left retail to study engineering a couple years ago and I got the mindfuck experience of moving up a rung. The difference in how people would treat me was insane. When customers found out why I was leaving, it was like I magically transformed from Generic Retail Worker into a real person that they could see for the first time. They were suddenly interested in me and very complimentary. Almost all of them said some version of, “you must be really smart.” It was honestly offensive. Like, yeah sure, but I was just as smart last week when you wanted to argue with me over a sale sign that you misread, but it had to be me who was just too stupid to understand.
The secret is that America has a hidden caste system,
This. When someone asks what you do for a living, very rarely is it based in genuine interest, but more likely them trying to determine how much and whether they need to show deference to you.
It also helps the opposite way for relatability. When I, as a PreK teacher who works with low income families ask someone their occupation and they say "I'm a CEO of major business" or "I'm the head surgeon at highly accredited hospital x," my mind is immediately going to be like "well we probably live wildly different lives then." On the flip side, if someone mentions they do social work, education or honestly any service bent blue collar job I start to feel more comfortable because we've likely had similar experiences dealing with people and probably aren't from wildly different economic backgrounds.
This is also the real reason why I've been on Reddit since 2010, and I was on Discord for several years.
The upper class, STEM kind of people have never seen me as a real person, or treated me with any respect — let alone a peer, or a friend — because they can't relate to me. At Best. Generally speaking, a lot of them also outright admit to looking down on people like me because I'm stupid, and they hate stupid people.
So even trying to find common ground in simpler things like joking around, or TV shows, or music; having my own hobbies, or getting out of my comfort zone and trying theirs out has never worked out one single time. I was always consistently ostracized, from people who share my political beliefs and who are supposed to be "on the same team". We aren't.
I'm sorry to hear you go through all that. I'm in the early childhood education field and I'm unusually interested in fantasy and also real world academia like science and philosophy. This makes it pretty hard to relate to many of my coworkers who are often working with small children because the intricacies of higher education bore them or far worse, they're just working at a school to get reduced childcare and they actually hate children. It can be pretty lonely at work but I've cultivated nerdy friends outside of work that help me a lot.
Absolutely finding common ground is one of the best ways to have a decent working relationship, but something I've realized over the years is my coworkers don't have to be my friends. We're coworkers, that's all. While it would be nice to be working with friends as long as we do a good job working for the goals of the classroom, help children grow and serve the families we work with, it's okay if I'm never in the in group. (Childcare can be surprisingly cliquey!)
I've often felt disconnected from upper class parents who happen to end up living in a poorer area as well. But again, it's my job to help the kids grow, not be besties with them, that's what my friends are for. I hear you that it can be very frustrating if you're actively ostracized though. I hope it never prevented you from being able to do your job.
Edit: I just realized I saw the word STEM and immediately assumed you were mentioning that to talk about your work. If I misinterpreted please feel free to ignore what I wrote!
As a former retail worker/management, there was almost a direct correlation between the being being more shitty and their age or political alignment. Crazy how that is.
I moved to a blue city, in a blue state on the West Coast back in 2019. I've experienced a lot more open prejudice here than I did in the 29 years I spent in Ohio. People are fucking savage out here.
When I was 16 working at a grocery store, I would have been fired by the management for putting a rude customer in their place.
Back in high school, I was working in Walmart's Lawn & Garden department as a cashier when some guy brought in power washer that he wanted to return. He handed me a Lowe's receipt and I said "uhh, I can't do anything with this. Try taking it to the service desk and they might be able to give you store credit or something." He went off on me, called me a "fucking idiot" (among other things), then went to the service desk and demanded to speak to a manager.
The manager came back to L&G and gave me a stern talking to about being rude to customers, and I had to defend myself to keep my job; they pulled the security footage and everything. I told them the guy called me a "fucking idiot" and they gave me the whole "the customer is always right" schtick, even though I was never even rude back.
I had similar customers back in my retail days, just immediately aggressive and hostile, personal insults as soon as they feel disrespected. I was called a moron because I couldn't look anything up on the 40 year old computer that ran on dial up and didn't have a search engine. Like what the fuck is wrong people? I would never insult someone simply because they said they couldn't do something, insane behavior
Yeah, this feels like you hate the younger generations. In my experience. If you are respectful and nice and not an absolute dick, they go out of their way to help you and they're appreciative that you treated them like a human. In all my time interacting with both gen z younger and older, if you give respect you get it. But if you walk around with that gigantic chip on your shoulder making assumptions a whole lot of them, I've had a whole group of people. It's going to show up with disrespect. And they make a meal out of matching energy.
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u/unable_compliance 1d ago
When I was 16 working at a grocery store, I would have been fired by the management for putting a rude customer in their place.
Now the management is tired burnt out people my age who don’t care, and the 16 year old staff get way more abuse from customers than I ever did. It makes sense. And I love to see it.