I have my doubts. In my experience, the absolute worst customers were the ones who wanted to lecture you because ~I used to work in retail.~ I think some people just suck.
Was there ever a time when people were not being told toxic nonsense like “the customer is always right”, which only encouraged the Karens of the world to feel like entitled little assholes who always think they get to talk to the manager?
Assholes are gonna asshole. If someone actually needs to work retail/service industry to know how much it sucks, they don’t have any empathy to begin with. This isn’t like “Wow, being a model or a pro wrestler is awesome” where people learn the reality of needing to maintain your body in a specific form while constantly traveling and being underpaid and so forth. NOTHING glorifies retail/service industry work.
So you mostly just get “Oh, I worked at a supermarket 40 years ago and my favorite thing to do was to walk around the parking lot to find carts. So I am really doing them a favor leaving the cart in the middle of a parking spot in 120F weather”.
I worked a looooong time ago in a service industry job and I got that same thing from the knobs. Here’s the thing though - I tended to not believe those people. If they did, they did it for like a week. That’s my guess.
I have my doubts. In my experience, the absolute worst customers were the ones who wanted to lecture you because ~I used to work in retail.~ I think some people just suck.
They used to work in retail when it wasn’t insane.
That’s like “I used to drink directly from the stream”
Was there ever a time when people were not being told toxic nonsense like “the customer is always right”, which only encouraged the Karens of the world to feel like entitled little assholes who always think they get to talk to the manager?
That is the sad truth.
Assholes are gonna asshole. If someone actually needs to work retail/service industry to know how much it sucks, they don’t have any empathy to begin with. This isn’t like “Wow, being a model or a pro wrestler is awesome” where people learn the reality of needing to maintain your body in a specific form while constantly traveling and being underpaid and so forth. NOTHING glorifies retail/service industry work.
So you mostly just get “Oh, I worked at a supermarket 40 years ago and my favorite thing to do was to walk around the parking lot to find carts. So I am really doing them a favor leaving the cart in the middle of a parking spot in 120F weather”.
I worked a looooong time ago in a service industry job and I got that same thing from the knobs. Here’s the thing though - I tended to not believe those people. If they did, they did it for like a week. That’s my guess.