Comic Strips

The problem is most of these subhuman screaming banshee lead-poisoned troglodytes have worked in customer service or actively do.

The issue is the people who treat customer service like shit treat almost everyone like shit and have no ability to develop self awareness.

These people operate with some form of deep social disorder (like narcissism for example), and think they themselves are incapable of wrong doing.

You cannot help these people. You can only respond with equal or greater aggression and socially isolate them, which is exactly what they deserve.

You really, really can accurately judge a lot about people by whether or not they return the shopping cart, how they treat "the help".

I would not survive this but I am willing to sacrifice as tribute to break the cycle.

This usually ends with people waiting for their turn to be assholes.

For me, the worst part of working retail at Christmas was hearing the exact same record played on repeat for eight hours straight.

It was years before I could listen to any Christmas music.

While I've subscribed to this philosophy for decades at this point, there is a possible issue that was really hammered home by COVID -

there will be a non-zero number of people who will be even shittier because "I had to ~~ensure~~ endure it, so they should, too!"

I still think every person working a cash register should be allowed one free kill at work every year. People would be a lot more polite if they knew there was a chance they could face actual consequences for their actions. Would especially help around the holidays, as you dont know if this Taco Bell employee has burned his kill yet prior to the new year

When I was a mid-level retail manager, my philosophy was that my floor worker's job was to take care of the customers, my store manager's job was to take care of corporate, and my job was to facilitate both. The best way to do that most of the time was to take care of and protect my floor workers.

Most of the time the customer complaints were baseless. Sometimes they were legitimate. But in all cases my priority was taking care of my workers. I may have had to coach them on something after the complaint (usually on how to better handle asshole customers), but ALWAYS in private, and always calmly.

Sometimes I had to do something for the customer if there was a legitimate issue, like give them a $20 gift card or something.

But no matter what the situation was, if a customer was abusive to my staff they were banned from the store on the spot. I'd trespass them, put their picture on a board for our greeters, and if they attempted to return we'd have polkce escort them away.

If they had been trying to buy a firearm (we were a massive destination outdoors store), we'd blacklist them in the corporate system and I had a text message group with all the nearby firearm dealers where we'd share the names of customers we'd blacklisted.

Nobody's business was worth allowing my people to be abused. I didn't care that we were losing a $20,000 sale - my staff was worth more than that, both from a basic humanity standpoint, and also because having a good, experienced, loyal employee is more important than having an unreliable asshole customer. And you don't retain good employees if you don't protect them.

If not retail during Christmas than the worst of humanity is on display weekly on Sundays when the after church crowd starts funneling into their favorite brunch spot. Every server has horror stories

Think I got gigantic person privilege, cause I worked retail for years while in college and everyone was super nice to me.

I’d rather we just teach empathy from the get go.

American culture is one of individualism and that is such a shitty thing for society.

Yes, we should also have high schoolers visit a water treatment plant, sewers, work with garbagemen, work at a dump, a recycling plant, an electrical plant, several types of factories, etc

I have said for years something similar but if you're in IT you should be mandated to spend a part of your year working on helpdesk and providing Operational support requiring on call. Too many CS wonks now in IT who come right from school into development and/or management pipeline.

The only retail workers I've seen that appear to be enjoying themselves are people working in Games Workshop. If you express even the slightest interest in Warhammer, they'll be talking to you for an hour gushing about lore, and it's a remarkably good sales tactic because I've only ever talked with a GW employee once without buying something.

I mean, at this point, it sort of is for most of us.

However, I expect the refrain would be, "I worked retail, and I never did that thing!" Kinda the equivalent of, "I have black friends!"

Jokes aside that can't really work when companies are private tho.

Like imagine Amazon has a strike going on so government drafts you to the unfilled labor positions.

As a former food service and retail worker through many jobs, the worst people are other coworkers, mostly meddling managers, not really the customers. The shitty management makes the job horrible. These asshat assistant store managers who get power trips and have no actual skills.