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.

When I am being friendly and get bad customer service, I often wonder how the person serving me got through their interview. And I wonder how they feel
when they get rude service somewhere…

I'm not convinced some people, either staff or customers see their own behavior. A huge amount of people lack self awareness. For every retail worker who complains about a customer...were they giving good service? And for every customer...were they polite and treating the retail worker with respect? Its a 2 way street. It's not black and white.

I had customers before saying ‘you are the rudest person I have ever met’

I wasn’t rude to them. They were rude themselves and used nasty words like b1tch and die. They made me cry.

Think customers need what they said to shop workers back. If they don’t flinch, apologise etc. They are just NASTY people.

Retailers need to ban customers. Hopefully some nasty people will get banned from every shop in a 5 mile radius. If that doesn’t teach them a lesson, nothing will.

@Auburngal please, and I do mean this kindly and politely, let it go.

I agree people in general are less polite, come across as stressed, can be very rude. It’s not pleasant.

There is no excuse for saying ‘bitch’ and ‘die’ to anyone , let alone someone who you do not know outside the context of those moments.

But honestly, lingering on it will do you no good. Let it go.

I think what people forget is that we are retail customers almost every day. Retails is everywhere, from supermarket to shoe shops, catfood to cardigans. We see people working in retail all the time, far more than we see people in other workplaces (apart from our own). So we are going to have far more interactions with retail workers than any other kind of worker - which brings the average of bad (and good) service right up. So, whilst for example, doctor's receptionists might spend a lot of time chatting to one another or being miserable, or nursery workers, or cattery employees - retail are so much more visible that they are the ones that will be remarked upon because we see more of them.

(I'm not a 'chatting to my workmates' or 'being miserable' type of retail employee, by the way, I'm out there, customer-facing all shift. CHANCE to chat to fellow employees would be a fine thing!).