Sick of customers moaning to shop staff about things beyond our control

Lolz, good luck with that! Management will take zero interest in said feedback. They never have to deal with angry customers & never intend to. My colleague & I had to deal with a man who was truly frightening a couple of years ago who had just had a bad day & took it all out on us. I thought he was going to lamp one of us & I'm not a scaredy cat.

Part of my role involves taking calls to log reports of abusive / aggressive behaviour against a large organisations public facing staff and what we hear and the volume of calls is absolutely grim! There's a lot of truly disgusting people about and usually the cause of their problems is their inability to have correct ID or blame themselves when they have spent all their money and have an empty bank account. Far too many of these people don't work for a living either!

This we can do something about a cucumber rising by 5p we can not.

And if you keep passing on customers complaints, you become the problem.

Which I guess is exactly the problem.

Completely agree with this. A bit of empathy and basic courtesy goes a long way, especially for people working on the front line under constant pressure. Raising awareness about respectful behaviour toward retail and service staff is really important, and conversations like this help. Platforms like WorldsAwareness play a valuable role in highlighting these everyday issues and reminding people that kindness costs nothing.

LOL. Do you work in Head Office? I said I get (inwardly) enraged, I didn't say I shout at anybody.
How does it help anybody to put up a sign saying "yeah, we know we are rubbish but suck it up"?

This. I'm not paying a higher price at the till because the shop hasn't updated the pricing. I'll ask for the item to be taken back.

So now as customers we’re expected to understand the full internal structure and every bloody job description? Jesus, what does it take to actually get anyone to DO anything?

These “It’s not my job” types will be exactly the ones complaining about job cuts because of self-service checkouts. Personally it feels like we’re expected to do the majority of the work anyway.

No, it means don’t be abusive to the staff. It just sounds like you have the right to shout at people just doing their job.

I get enraged by the notices saying "we won't tolerate abuse to our staff".
It translates as:

1. we know there is a problem (because we know staff are getting aggro)
2. we're not addressing it (the message is 'we won't tolerate' not 'we are fixing the problem')
3. we're passing the blame on to the customers

Yes, there are bad customers but there are awful businesses, too. I would never do a Big Shop at Morrisons because their queues are always too long; I only ever do a couple of items on the self-service.

Some woman had a go at me in Clarks when I worked there because her calls were far too fat to fit in our knee high boots. I tried to make her feel better by saying it's a common thing for customers so she had an even bigger go at me because Clarks clearly don't cater for their customers if all their knee high boots are too narrow ( I just comforted myself with the knowledge I could fit into even the smallest boots in the shop, which often meant if get them at a good price cos not many people could and they wouldn't sell)
On the flip side an overweight teenage girl wanted knee high boots but couldn't do them up. She looked at me and said "I'm too fat for them" and my heart broke. I wanted to give the poor girl a hug

It has been over 25 years since I worked in retail but I very much remember trying to pass on customer feedback to management, or even to a team supervisor. Yes, I understood that I was the company rep and that customers felt it reasonable to vent to me but there was such disconnect with the next staffing layer. If I had dared venture that a customer wanted to pass on feedback about lack of stock, waiting times, store layout etc, I'd be chewed out over the "mythical customer" and the fact that they weren't going to take these comments from me; or the fact that I clearly had not dealt with the situation properly and should have said that the customer should have made their complaint to head office via details on the receipt - completely disregarding that, from the customer's point of view, they were currently speaking to a representative from the company and wanted things dealt with here and now, not going home and putting pen to paper.

The upshot is that customers yell at frontline shop workers, who have nowhere to take that complaint, so they absorb it all, day after day, until they burnout.

I love Waitrose's stance on Head Office working in the trenches and agree that everyone should do retail "national service".

It won't be passed on as there is nobody to pass it onto

Some make as difficult as possible to contact head office. Its vastly easier to speak to a staff member and hope it's passed on that go home, navigate shite websites and sit on hold for an hour because there's no email.

Edit: Every supermarket used to have an actual customer service desk for that actually.

Its not even just staffing, it's basic things like sign posting. They keep moving things in my local supermarket and they have never bothered to change the signs hanging above the aisles. They put doors on their fridges as well but it's like they never bothered to test them first - half the time there's so much glare on the doors you can hardly see the inside of them. The clothing section is horrendous. I can absolutely imagine the staff are bearing the brunt of frustrations around those things.

The lack of staff at the self-checkouts is really frustrating as well, especially since you have to find one of the maximum of two staff working on them to ask for a bag because you can't be trusted to get one for yourself. I feel for them.

Its definitely different. When I worked in a supermarket it was still all tills, with a wee basket only section that was rarely ever used because there were usually enough tills open, but they still made sure there was a staff member to man it. Now if you go in to my local one after 7pm there won't be a single til open.

A lot of this is due to major staffing issues we are now always doing the job of 3 people. Its very different job to what it was 10 years ago. When people leave they don't get replaced we don't even have extra staff for Christmas anymore.

But why if you know they can't do anything if you have an issue contact head office. They may have the power to do something, shop workers don't. We literally can't do anything and we never meet or speak to head office or regional managers or anything even the store manager I could count on one hand how many times Ive spoke to him and thats only a hello. We honestly have no power, no say absolutely nothing.

Honestly, I think the level of service in most shops has absolutely plummeted in the last few years, especially the larger supermarkets.

But that is not the fault of your average worker and they shouldn't bear the brunt of the decisions being made wherever else.

When I worked in retail it wasn't so bad because it was a local, independent shop. Firstly, we were trained really well on things like consumer law, stock, how to support the customer so could effectively answer questions. We also had senior team on the floor and readily available should we need to escalate something and these guys were fantastic, retailing is a skill and they could smoothly diffuse situations, appease the customers, handle things etc and they were given the respect and pay that they deserved. Lastly, we had the owner around who was not afraid to let it be known he was firmly on the side of his staff. If a staff member did something wrong they did not get away with it and the owner knew us all and trusted us so if it was our word against the customers, that customer was straight out the door. We always felt supported.

That meant it was a great place to work, we always went above and beyond for the customer and feedback was genuinely heard. Honestly, I'd love my old boss to be handed the supermarkets, he'd have changed the game.

Instead, staff are seen as disposable and not backed up, not supported, not paid anywhere near a living wage. Head office don't care and the whole thing is poor for staff and customers.

Out of interest, last year I started doing a thing where I always email head office if a staff member is great. I've sent maybe 30 emails over the course of the year because there are genuinely wonderful people out there. For those who currently work in store, do compliments make their way back down the chain? Does this have any impact?

YANBU

I remember my first job, working in Dunnes Stores on Christmas Eve when I was 16. Ten minutes to closing on Christmas Eve a woman told me to fuck myself because we didn’t have the jumper she wanted in a particular size and colour. Then deliberately messed up the jumpers I had just finished folding.

People are so angry - it is pathetic. I think everyone should have to work with the public for at least a year to see what they are like. And hopefully become better customers.

You missed my point completely.

You can apologise and say you will pass on feedback till you're blue in the face, but some customers just will not accept it. One bloke a couple of weeks ago just would not accept we had sold out of a product, I took him to the section they usually are, went out the back to check the stock (tiny shop, takes 2 mins to see what we have out the back), apologised, advised we were expecting a grocery delivery next day so to try again after 6 as should restocked by then. He did not give a single shiny shit that I smiled, apologised, did everything I could AND gave him a timeline for expected stock levels. He just wanted to shout and intimidate me.

Honestly. Front line staff cannot and do not have the opportunity to escalate feedback in most cases. Be kind to them. Voting with your feet is the most effective feedback. Or if you moust, leave a trustpilot review.