Customers’ rudeness and impatience is causing retail workers to leave

[Auburngal]

I have worked for a supermarket for 16 years. The rudeness, impatience and aggression from certain customers is making retail workers leave retail.

Just under 4 years ago customers were ok in queuing outside for 30-40 minutes to enter the store. Now they tut and sigh if they need to queue for 30 seconds.

I have changed departments from customer service to shop floor due to panic attacks as one problem is that customers think we are only open for 16 hours a week when my store is open for 100. It’s the elderly who think they have to shop between 10am-12pm. Only about 5% of them travel by bus. The other 95% are not helping themselves or us on insisting shopping then. Stubbornness is a sign of weakness.

We are so short staffed that at least once a week i have to go on the kiosk and hate it as get moan moan moan. How would these moaning Minnies like it if we moaned to them for 5-8 hours a day?

No wonder half of us are on antidepressants.

There needs to be something done to tell people that their rudeness towards retail workers is making the workers leave. Have seen two colleagues having mental breakdowns over the constant abuse, rang in sick then hand in their notice in ten weeks.

There’s no positive gain from being rude n nasty towards retail workers. Those who are rude and nasty towards shop workers have never worked in retail and wouldn’t last a minute.

Like with other retailers, staff leave and not being replaced fully. We get it in the neck from customers. They don’t contact HQ about their complaints. That way they are recorded on a system. Whereas moaning to us does nothing apart from getting headaches etc.

Other side of the coin OP. I went to my local corner shop yesterday to pay in some money in my lunch break. There was no queue. The shop assistant ignored me for a couple of minutes whilst I waited patiently. He acknowledged me with a grunt, then proceed to stamp a huge pile of letters for 5 mins before serving me very grumpily! I think people generally have lost social skills and manners which I guess is inevitable with the rise of tech and loss of community and face to face interactions.

You arent wrong.

I worked in a psych hospital (one of the wards was a locked ward for safety) for over a decade - had some unpleasant incidents but never experienced the level of rudeness I experienced as a student when I had a part time job in retail.

It honestly shocked me.

It's not just retail, manners and standards have declined and need to be reinforced and brought back somehow.

I had a panic attack last week. Stems from losing my Nanan the week before. A rude lady said “where do you think you are going?”

What did she think was happening, from her point of view? You can’t just walk off on someone and not expect some kind of reaction. She’s not to know that your grandmother died, and the average customer wouldn’t expect you to be having panic attacks.

This is a bit of a mixed post really. People are rude, and that’s not acceptable. But neither is you complaining about people shopping when they want to shop.

Teenaged me in the 90s had rude customers. Is it worse? I’m not sure if it’s worse, or that we’re less able to cope with it, or less willing to, or all three.

Stubbornness is a sign of weakness
What the hell does that even mean?! Shopping when you want to, is not stubbornness or weakness. Don’t be daft.

It sounds like your capacity to cope with it is low as you’ve come back to work too soon when grieving. You have my sympathy that you likely can’t afford it any other way, and my sympathy for your loss.

I’ve worked in retail since I was 16, now 32 and I can say it is honestly a lack of staff, it has a massive knock on effect.
Higher management (not say the store manager for example) are asking the staff to push the self service tills. Where I used to work, if the self service machines were not being used enough, they deemed it that we was a member of staff over - because the machines should take priority over using a manned till. We used to hand out complaint leaflets and explain to customers that our hands are tied but please do complain to head office 😂.
Any job that is customer facing is the hardest job in the world IMO, (tongue in cheek) I fully believe everyone should have to do 6-8 weeks national service in a customer service job to see what it’s like 😂😂.

I think a lot of this stems from a long term problem where those in management and owners do not back up their staff.

Customers and clients have become more aggressive over time.

Those in charge, when called on by the staff or customer, unfortunately often side with the customer, even when they are being unreasonable.

I’m not sure whether it’s a misguided assumption based on the old adage “the customer is always right” or whether it’s because they take the path of least resistance because in the short term, it’s easier to give in to the customer.

Of course in the long term, that short term decision leads to customers learning that if they make a fuss, they will get what they want and the result is more customers making a fuss.

Owners and managers need to back up their staff as the default position and only move from that where there is genuine proof that the staff are at fault. If a member of staff is shown to be consistently unpleasant or unreasonable, that’s a different matter, but “the customer is always right” needs to be removed as a concept.

Hard working staff who find their manager doesn’t back them up, even though they were doing their best, perhaps in a difficult situation, feel aggrieved. Managers who assume the worst of their staff should understand that is likely to worsen the staff members’ behaviour. Feeling secure and that the manager has your back, even when things have gone badly is what gives staff resilience to deal with the assholes. And there absolutely are some.

I'm. It rude to staff. I work in hospitality so I get it.

However. Shops have cut back to the bare bones and all the self service crap loyalty discount and car park vouchers and scanning receipts stuff pisses people off. This needs to feed back to higher up tho. It's not your fault.

And this is the fault of the (often NMW) staff how exactly?

I think there are a few issues.

1. Everyone is stressed harassed and poor so very close to the tipping point.

Col, car park prices etc

1. Everything takes so long to do, so e.g getting a refund takes almost a week whereas when you pay it goes out instantly.
2. head office flat out refuse to except any complaints from its workers, so 1000 customers are telling the staff things are shit thinking they've done their bit but because head office haven't heard from the customer directly they don't think there's an issue.
3. Staff being underpaid, it's not worth the hassle getting moaned at for minimum wage, when UC are going to harass you again for not working enough so people think why bother.

I'm not excusing customers being rude or abusive to staff but I do think those in head office should come down to the shop floor to see how they could do more for their staff.

I agree with those saying that rudeness from customers seems to be mirrored by increasing rudeness from staff. I don’t want obsequious nonsense but it’s normal now to be served by someone who doesn’t even look your way, and continues a conversation with the server on the next till.

My local McDonald’s drive through is a hit miss range from, “good morning, are you using the app today? 😀” to “yeah? 😠”
Sometimes my kids and and I genuinely look at each other and laugh at how abrupt and rude the tones are!

It takes time to learn those skills

Older people like my parents don't go til 10 because the asda they go to will not open tills til 10 so if they go before they are expected to use the self serve for a trolley full of shopping, my dad asks each week if they can put a till on and is told no , there's we don't do that before 10 and there's no staff . I personally think that's disgraceful

Yes what they have done to retail branches of banking is diabolical.

Everyone knows that the only reason people go into branches these days is either because they are unable to technically self service ( like my DF with mild dementia and DM with very poor eyesight) or if there is something involving lots of paperwork- me trying to set up POA on their account. Yet they insist on spending £££s redoing the branches so they look like an Apple shop and then closing them because they don't make money .

It's like self service scanning at the shops. I don't mind using it provided it works. Morrisons used to be awful to get the items to actually scan and I would end up swearing at it in frustration, obviously not the staffs fault of course but my thank yous when they fixed it might have been a bit snappy.

I think Booths had the right idea in getting rid of self-service tills, tbh. The rise of self-checkout goes hand-in-hand with this decline. It has contributed to the dehumanisation of the shopping experience and there's been a concurrent trend to treat others as lesser humans.

@waterlellon how long does it take to learn to say “hello” at the start of the exchange?
When I first worked in a shop, there was a sign beside the phone saying, “always answer the phone with GOOD MORNING TESTINA’S WIDGET STORE, HOW MAY I HELP YOU?”
Would you put someone on drive-thru order taking who couldn’t master remembering to start with “hello”?

I agree everyone is rude today and working in retain must be hell on earth. I honestly feel for you and I'm always polite to retail staff.

Not sure when "elderly" people are meant to shop tho. Late afternoon when people and college kids are piling in on the way to and from school run? Evenings and weekends when lots of families are doing their weekly shop? Early mornings so they can add to the rush hour traffic? Or should they just go in the middle of the night? Weird.

Dont understand the bus comment either. Weird.

But why does he ask every week? It’s not the staff who make the decisions. They are told they can’t open tills till 10, end of. If they opened one they’d get in trouble. It is a PITA for the customer, but again not the fault of the staff on the shop floor.

If I'm not working I'd rather go out in the morning as the roads get so busy with school traffic in the afternoons and I have more energy so can understand why the elderly do this.

If you go out or don't get back by 3 where we are you can't easily get down the road due to school traffic and same with dm in another area not far away

Has it occurred to you OP, that one day, if you are fortunate, you will be one of the old people you despise so much.

But why does he ask every week? It’s not the staff who make the decisions. They are told they can’t open tills till 10, end of. If they opened one they’d get in trouble. It is a PITA for the customer, but again not the fault of the staff on the shop floor

I agree- it's not the shop workers who decide this is it? he needs to speak with management about it as they are the ones who make the decisions

Whilst I agree the McDonalds drive thru experience can be questionable in terms of customer service... 99% of the time they are young kids, bloody good on them for getting out there and working! Today's tech mania doesn't exactly foster social skills, they'll get there in time.

Exactly, op isn’t coming across as particularly polite herself.

Sorry to read about your bad experiences @Auburngal
I guess there's some company policy you are told to follow if a customer starts being rude but have you tried abandoning that regime and just looking silently at a customer if they carry on being rude? Give them one chance by asking them politely if they could stop, if they continue, just go silent and look at them. You cannot get a written warning for this method.

He asks because he finds it very difficult to scan all the shopping and I think he hopes that they might actually start opening them again, he's late 70s and disabled so it's very difficult , I've told him he's wasting his time and he should just stop going there and go Aldi instead

Customer facing jobs are hell.