WIBU to tell this man to back off shouting at the pharmacist assistant?

[SurferRona]

I was in a large pharmacists earlier to pick up antibiotics and a man being served by an assistant in front of me suddenly started shouting at her telling her to ‘say please, if you want me to pay’ that ‘you don’t just say that’ll be £21.01, you say please. Now say please and I’ll pay’, ‘I expect you to be courteous and say please to me, say please and I’ll pay’…. Properly angry. The woman was youngish and looked scared, and didn’t seem to know how to respond, or what to do. So I called across to him to back off, there was no need for that, couldn’t he see he was scaring her? He then turns on me telling me to keep out of it, nothing to do with me. I responded again saying it was to do with me as he was bullying a scared young woman, which was also racist (assistant looked to be of south Asian descent), there no need for it, and he was clearly just having a go at a young woman just trying to do her job. The male pharmacy manager then came over and the man quietened down. He then kept saying he wasn’t racist- but I thought it was as he wouldn’t have behaved like that to a white man serving him, and did quieten down once the male pharmacist came across. WIBU for intervening like that? My other half keeps telling me to keep my neb out of things like that, but I just kept thinking what if it were my daughter…. How else should I have dealt with it? If at all? I have no idea if I just made it worse for the young woman assistant☹️

Why would she be scared?

@fUNNYfACE36 why would she be scared of an aggressive man who's willing to shout intimidatingly towards young women? Hmm I wonder

*@abraxam . You say men are more likely to be aggressive to a woman than another man?
The stats don't bear that out at all.Men are much more likely to be victims of physical aggression than women.Verbal aggression stats aren't collected but I see no reason to suppose this would not be the same

@Lululeman I agree. In my experience I've found some white people (using the word 'some' very generously here,) are often unwilling to recognise racism that doesn't fit a particular model. If a black footballer misses a goal and subsequently gets a shit ton of monkey emojis under his social media posts most people would generally see that as racism.

Viewing racism through this very narrow lens allows people to operate in the world safe in the knowledge that they aren't racist because they rightly see such behaviour as wrong and gives them a false impression that they can recognise racism when they see it.

The problem with this however, is that racism rarely manifests in such clear cut and dry ways. If you posed this incident on a predominantly black forum the responses would be so different as to paint this thread at odds with the realities for many women of colour (hate that term but a catch-all needed nonetheless).

Reminds me of a thread posted a while back from a black mumsnetter who said a security guard was following her through a cosmetics shop so closely as to be pretty much tailing her - cue pages and pages of responses telling the woman it had nothing to do with her race because they're as white as it gets and they're always followed etc etc... It's tedious in the extreme, but when you accept that this type of denial is required to maintain a degree of cognitive dissonance for the majority it begins to make sense.

Why did you bring the race card into it shameful.
She should say please actually but he could have handled it better.

@Xol. You do. Twat

Goodness

I think you were reckless.

This man is horrible to retail workers because he's nasty and abusive. You cannot possibly imagine that it's his first time doing this. Why were you so confident that he wouldn't turn around and hit you? De-escalation was needed here. Not accusations.

At the very least hopefully he's reflecting on how he comes across with that behaviour. He may deny he's racist but maybe he will realize he actually is aggressive and sexist.
I bet that woman is so grateful to you OP. I would be.

Using the term 'race card' is shameful.

You're welcome.

no it is not, your welcome😊

yes it is.

but since don't know when to use your and you're, I'm hardly surprised.

If you are being a nasty, misogynist prick, you're not in a position to complain about how people interpret your behaviour.

Spot on.

This guy was being a nasty bully to someone who he wrongly believed to be his social inferior. Whether that was due to her sex, her age or her ethnicity we can't know for sure. (In all likelihood it was all three). But people like this tend to think they are entitled to a certain degree of forelock tugging and get upset when people who they consider beneath them fail to deliver.

In short, he was a cunt on a power trip and the OP was absolutely right to pull him up on it. Whether he used explicitly racist language or not is irrelevant and I find it utterly bizarre that people consider the accusation of racism to be worse than this man's appalling behaviour.

Good for you!!

People like this need to be called out more. I've done it before as well, and would do it again.

Most recently was on a tube train during the tail end of covid. 2 young women, one in a hijab, chatting to each other, not wearing masks.

The man sitting next to me, opposite them pipes up that they are completely rude for not wearing masks, yadda yadda. Goes on and on.

Eventually I go "why are you even speaking to them? Shut up and leave them alone. You wouldn't speak to another man like that."

Credit to him, he shut up then.

Good on you OP. We should all have zero tolerance for that sort of abuse and this isn’t just about that one girl. Someone saying that, in that tone, won’t be the first time they’ve done it.

You did the right thing. He prob likes to pick on woman too.

Good for you standing up for the young girl. I often think if it were my own children in the situation what would I do-and here I would have definitely defended them.

Exactly what I was trying to articulate but couldn't quite word properly - customers expect deference and for the staff to do exactly what they want, when they want it and if a staff member says no (for whatever reason) it is taken as a personal insult.

I work on the cigarette kiosk and if you're buying a couple of items (drink/snack/newspaper etc) and you're also buying cigarettes then you can pay at the kiosk. Anything more and you need to use a regular checkout. On a daily basis you'll get someone coming up with an overflowing basket of stuff saying "Can I just get this here?" and then looking mortally offended when we say "Sorry this is the cigarette kiosk, if you want to buy all of that you need to go to a self scan or an actual checkout". "Why can't I get my stuff here?" (Because it's the cig kiosk, not a checkout and you don't want cigs) "It's not like you're busy!" (Just because I'm not dealing with customers doesn't mean I don't have other jobs to do) "It's only a basket, I don't want to wait in the queue!" (Then go to self scan, there's three tills not in use right now and no queue) "it'll only take a couple of minutes!" (So that same amount of time it'll take you on self scan) "This is terrible customer service, just do your job!" (I am doing my job but you don't want cigarettes or lottery so you're the one in the wrong place, you wouldn't go to the bakery and demand they make you a pizza) ... And on and on and infinitum.

Why do people ask a "Can I...?" question if they have zero intention of respecting any answer other than "Of course, let me drop everything to do whatever you demand I do!"? Because they have an expectation of deference from service staff, that we should be falling over ourselves to fall at their feet and do whatever we can to keep them happy, as opposed to showing us the respect of treating us as an equal, who has autonomy and an ability to (politely) refuse to do something regardless of how we are asked, especially of it's something we can't/shouldn't do anyway.

It's like how people misuse the phrase "The customer is always right" not on my shift to mean "I want the moon on a stick and you will get it for me whether it's physically possible or not, just because I have demanded not as a customer!" when the phrase is actually "The customer is always right in matters of taste" which actually means "What the customer wants is what they are going to buy, so if they want a purple and gold gingham suit, even if you think it's an absolute disaster of a fashion crime, you sell them that suit with a smile on your face, because if you don't they'll go elsewhere to someone who will.

Great post melj

OP:

I disagree about the way the man started yelling at the assistant BUT I think those people working in customer facing roles should be polite and should use please and thank you.

Good on you OP. And yes sexist and racist. Horrible man!! I’d like to think I would have done the same as you.

You can be polite without saying please and thank you

You can be a cunt whilst saying please and thank you

Politeness and manners are not wholly dependant on someone explicitly using a specific word, or not.

If you can't think of reasons, you lack some fairly basic common sense and empathy. But the point is that the OP could see the assistant and could assess whether she appeared scared.

Interesting. As pointed out upthread, use of the term "the race card" is in itself a pretty reliable indicator of racism.

Interesting logic. You accuse me of saying something I didn't say, you don't bother to RTFT, you start spraying around accusations of idiocy and rudeness on the basis of a staggering degree of inattention and idleness, yet you really think you don't come out of that exercise looking the most idiotic and rude? And you then compound that with further name-calling.

You're not covering yourself with glory here, @Myfabby. If you want to know what a twat looks like, look in the mirror.