To think that if you’re even slightly rude to retail staff you should be banned from the store.

[ThisAquaCrow]

Based on a conversation I’ve just had with a family member who has left work today again in tears because approximately 90% of the people she deals with range from low level rude right through to ‘you fucking bitch’ rude.

What is WRONG with people and if you are rude to retail staff on a regular basis, WHY?

Excusez-moi?? Why should she 'attempt to change that'? I genuinely don't understand.

I'm also an immigrant from a very blunt, straight talking, no beating around the bush, no small talk culture. You'd probably be asked to leave the shop (or at least get a serious wtf stare) if you started gurning for no reason or engage the cashier in some random chat.

I suspect I'm ND, but not diagnosed.

I hate gurning like an idiot. I smile if I have something to smile about. Not 'just because'. I always say hello, please, thank you and bye when I'm in the UK. That's 100% enough when interacting in the supermarket/shops in my book. I do not and will not engage in pointless faux-friendly, time wasting 'chat' about nothing. They're not my friends and I couldn't give a monkey's what they think about today's weather or price of the tomatoes.

I obviously do not abuse staff, don't roll my eyes, keep a neutral facial expression, don't call them names. Unless they do it first, then it's fair game.

If that makes me rude, so be it. Being an immigrant doesn't make me a performing monkey who must ape every local behavior trait/social norm.

@aliceinawonderland we don't have a script really apart from asking people to confirm details
It's stuff like
I answer the phone and ask for their name/address and they immediately start huffing or sighing
I can't do anything with no clue who you are!

It's like when you ring 111, yes some of the questions are totally not relevant but it's quicker to say yes, no, yes, yes rather than spend 10 mins complaining they aren't relevant

Totally agree. People don't have to mask or pretend to be something they aren't. Other people, including people working in retail, have to understand that everyone is different. Some people are chatty, some aren't. The problem is when it's taken personally by someone who makes assumptions about another's behaviour. I've taught my children that people's behaviour is usually something to do with whatever is going on with them, not personal to them, so don't take it that way. We're all different, learn to accept differences, not conformity.

I think there has been an increase in rude people but also a huge decrease in good customer service. Dealing with difficult customers is a customer service skill that seems to have gone out of the window. In many places they don't even know how to talk to customers who aren't difficult let alone the difficult ones. If you are rude to a customer, you will get rudeness back from lost people, and if you don't know how to deescalate situations then you will end up in horrible confrontational situations with the type of language the OP describes. I'm not sure if stores just don't bother training their staff any more or what it is, but I have seen so many situations blow up needlessly. Unfortunately I do think it goes both ways.

I worked in customer service for many years including in retail.

If the family member is finding 9/10 customers are rude, I'd perhaps suggest he or she may be giving off a vibe that people are reacting to.

Companies are spending less time and money training staff.

At my last work, supermarket, staff that started 30+ years ago spent a week trained up at another store for a week for 35 hours, even though they may only signed up to work p/t hours. I was given 4x5.5 hours in the evening (17 years ago)

Now there is zero training. New staff are given a roller by a manager to do. No mention of the seriousness of the need to rotate. Staff there for years wasted time in rotating stock. This increases waste. This wasn't exclusive to my store. It happened at other stores, based on comments made on the staff forums on staff pages.

Training staff to use the tills - kiosk, self scan and manned - you instructed the new colleague what buttons to press, which drawer Sterling 30g was in, how to cash in scratch cards etc.

Noticed that fewer new staff last as long. If companies spend time and money into training, they would get better staff, fewer pissed off customers, less stressed staff (as staff are not replaced immediately) etc,

Retail manager here 👍🏻 16 years in retail at all levels from sales assistant to manager.

@ThisAquaCrow 90% of customers being rude sounds like a horrendous place to work. I’d say it’s either in a particularly bad location, or the business is doing something wrong here.

Most customers are lovely. Do we get the few in a day that are a bit frosty and dismissive? Of course, but I always try and remind myself and my team that we have no idea what’s going on in their day/life.

You absolutely do get the few that are awful. Like the woman who returned boots to me after 2 months of wear with the soles ripping off, uppers all scraped and torn - they looked like they’d been put through some kind of machinery 😳 Told me they were unfit for purpose - but they were fashion boots that she’d decided to buy and wear on her motorbike. I had personally fitted and sold the boots so had interacted with her and at no point during the sale did she tell me that’s what she intended to use them for. She hadnt come in dressed in bike gear etc to shop - I had no idea she even had a motorbike.
When I refused to accept them as faulty due to wear and tear she started screaming at me and at the other customers in the shop telling me I was a “fucking cunt” and nobody should shop here and she was away to get her husband to “sort me out” 🫠 I did ban her.

Or the man who asked one of my younger team members if she had weekend plans - she replied it was her child’s birthday. She hadn’t been absolutely amazing all during his sale giving him great assistance and advice and I was waiting by to give her praise for that afterwards. He then completely flipped on her and told her that she should have known from looking at her that she would be a “young mum - no doubt a single one. A typical statistic with no prospects” 🙄🙄🙄 I banned him too.

But that’s certainly not all the time, thankfully!

Low level rude I would class as the entitled ones. I fit shoes so we’re actively involved in a sale and really can only serve so many customers at a time. We always engage with customers, get to them as quickly as possible etc. But the ones that continuously interrupt you when you’re with another customer to repeatedly ask for a size/colour etc. Or while you’re serving someone at the till and another customer comes in and ignores the fact you’re serving someone and launches into their own needs. That’s rude and entitled and happens FAR more times in a day than it should!

Something in society has changed, not sure if it is lockdown related or not, but people have definitely become less tolerant. I’ve worked in a variety of environments, including hospitality and have never known it to be as bad as it is now. My current role is in healthcare - the way people treat nurses in particular is horrendous. Teachers get a really hard time too. I’m a great believer in killing (rude) people with kindness; it generally makes them back down, but it’s exhausting! I think everyone is too stressed, working too many hours and staffing levels have been cut back too much everywhere/the cheapest staff are hired - it’s a recipe for disaster.

Yeah, maybe they should also get ride of some of the rude staff. Ones that sign when you ask where something is or continue their conversation when serving you!!

The problem is that “rude” is objective. What is the scale?

@fivebyfivebuffy - to be honest, I would only say that the first one on your list qualifies as 'low level rudeness' - the rest are definitely quite rude, and swearing under their breath is very rude.

As I said earlier - the problem with saying that even low level rudeness should result in a ban for the customer is that it could penalise someone who has simply had a bad day (bad news such as a bereavement or serious illness, been bullied at work etc) and who, as a result, looks a bit grumpy and doesn't chat happily with the cashier - would it be fair that that person got banned?

Depends what you mean by "slightly rude" OP.
Does that include having a legitimate complaint/gripe and being robust when no-one wants to offer any customer service?
I have worked in retail, including two supermarkets.
If a customer had an issue, I'd go out my way to try and fix it/resolve it or come up with an idea of how it could be resolved later. It just doesn't happen now.

Example:
Tesco early morning. No customer services available until 8.
Bought an item that was underneath the wrong label.
Would not have bought it at its correct price (exorbitant).
Self-checkout. Came up high but assumed it would default after ClubCard.
Paid for groceries. Checked receipt. Item expensive.

Staff there could not refund - no customer service.
Item could not be returned later - fridge item.
Nor was there any compromise. It was even more irksome that the price the smaller item was being charged as was the same price as the same brand on an offer - but they could not just switch it - no customer service.
No thinking outside the box - no offer to take back item, write a handwritten IOU for use later etc
No apology for the mislabelling in the first place.
Simply told: Cannot do anything. Customer services not open until 8. You should have known it was [insert price] etc

Very frustrating as a customer when you're faced with no actual customer service, just computer says no belligerence.

@fivebyfivebuffy I do not understand why customers ring call centres when they need to be somewhere in 5 mins. We used to know how long the customers waiting the longest waited for. Think the opening hours for the call centre I worked at - think one of them was 8am-10om M-F and 9am-5pm weekends and bank holidays. The call centre I worked at finished at 8pm but there were at least two others open til 10pm.

Complain to Tesco HQ/X/Facebook and they usually quite good as DM had same situation of buying cheese from there and it was the wrong one. It was the store's fault as the ticket for the cheese on CC offer was under the wrong ticket.

It really pisses me off when supermarkets don't put all the flavours/type (strength of cheese, fat content) on offer. As 1. The one I want is never on offer and 2. As a code checker, customers only bought the flavours on offer. Leaving the non offer flavours not sold and need to reduce them if they are fresh items. Never followed the top handset price to reduce them on as it was 20p MORE than the ones on offer. Knocked the price so they are at least 50p cheaper than the offer items. If all the items in the range were on offer, then we would not have to reduce anything or very little.

Evri are not responding to chatbot messages. Parcel in question got lost after me requesting parcel to be delivered to one of their lockers last Wednesday (27/11). Contacted the online retailer of order. They will send out a new parcel but one of the items which I ordered was a limited edition and now sold out. Just want to speak to a human asking could I bloody go to the depot and root through the parcels myself. As I seem to find lost items at my previous job with ease.

@SDTGisAnEvilWolefGenius yeah I think I'm that used to it that it's low level to me!

It's a brand where people are known to be rude/high expectations (think Rolex, Porsche etc)

I loathe it when staff ask me what I've "got planned for the day". It's just so false somehow
It was so much better when one just had a pleasant professional interchange
Hello how can I help you
Hello, I'd like to pay a cheque in please
That's all done. Would you like a receipt
Yes please
Anything else I can help you with
No. Thank you for your help.
Goodbye

I was serving drinks at the school Xmas fair earlier and was amazed at the attitude of some people - snappy, demanding and critical.

And this was other parents from the same school being arsey towards those parents who had volunteered to help out.

So I wouldn’t like to think what those people are like in the supermarket or pub.

Ridiculous situation. There should be somebody on site with the ability to deal with issues like this any time the store is open.

When these jobs are talked about in the context of pay & benefits, they're unskilled, done by people who can't do any better, are too lazy to do any better, shouldn't be done long term, should only be done by students or those wanting a bit extra cash and certainly shouldn't expect a wage they can live on. In other words, not important, of little value.

Yet, they're suddenly very important when people are getting the service that reflects those attitudes. When services are staffed by people using it as a stepping stone, those who have to do the job rather than want to.

It was quite predictable really, that devaluing customer service roles would lead to a decline in that service. When we deride those doing it and those at the top causing the problems are held up as what hard work achieves because they earn more.

Society has the service it's created unfortunately with those attitudes.

Does that include having a legitimate complaint/gripe and being robust when no-one wants to offer any customer service?

Precisely. I politely asked a member of staff if one of a group of employees I could see chatting might come and see to the flashing self-checkout I was using. Has been waiting several minutes and no one was coming. When I got a brusque ‘not their job’ by another member of staff who finally walked by - and was about to march off themselves without helping - I was no doubt ‘slightly rude’.

I was not aggressive or insulting, but nor was I my usual polite self and I didn’t hide my annoyance.

Nobody should be threatening or belittling staff, but nor should customers be afraid to voice a complaint lest they’re booted out of the shop!

Come work in a GP surgery my lovely, you will see another level of rudeness and abuse towards staff.

I think people who are rude to retail staff are knobs, they are generally quite stupid people too, this appears to be on the increase.

One customer I remember for their rudeness.

Every Sunday, he banged on the door at 9:59am as wanted his paper. He was cursing for the slow signing on the tills - new software and old hardware, don't mix. We weren't allowed to sign on before it hit 10am on the tills. Otherwise, we get into trouble as it gets highlighted.

The thing is that within 3 min walk, there are 4 shops that can open before 10am - three are 7am and the other is 6am. Why the fuck couldn't he go to one of these shops and then has 3-4 more hours to read the paper?

@ Nolegusta -
“When I worked in retail I was extra nice to the rude ones and it was surprising how many folk mellowed a bit when they realised someone was taking the time to be nice”

A soft answer turneth away wrath. More people should remember that. I had a very unpleasant encounter yesterday in a shop - I had purchased one of their supposedly sturdy bags that had developed a hole after about three uses. It took two visits and three members of staff to get it exchanged - to the point I wished I hadn't bothered. I was made to feel that I was somehow running a racket in reusable supermarket bags….

Why should she change it? Stop trying to enforce your weird cultural norms on other people!

A lot of non Brits find your fake friendly pretend smiles weird and rude. The obsession with manners but only your own style and a complete inability to understand that yours are not universal. There's nothing wrong with blunt and non smiley.