to think behaviour of retail workers has got worse?

[todayday]

I do mystery shopping audits of retail stores. I have been doing it for quite a few years and have noticed the standards for shop workers has really slipped.

A lot of basic politeness is missing. If I ask where something is, often they say over there which is not very specific rather than taking me to the item. Other staff will not move so I can access an item if they are doing an online shopping order. People restocking often refused to move or sigh when asked politely.

Knowledge of accessibility is poor. Staff often look miserable and look like they don't really care. Others will be chatting away and ignoring customers.

There are great retail staff too who go out of their way to help and always have a kind word to say. In one store, the shop worker would not just assist people struggling with self scan but she would scan their entire shop for them.

I don't doubt that the conditions are poor and they get treated badly. But so many of their behaviour is poor even when someone is being polite and nice to them (as I am in my role).

This.
Retail and hospitality are hellish.

I applaud any worker who works to their wage- the bare minimum they can legally get away with paying you= minimum effort.
OP you should be telling the corporations to value their workers, advocate for thriving wage and worker rights.

Massive corporations expect a ridiculous amount of work for God awful pay while expecting complete flexibility from staff for terrible shift patterns. And customers are dicks.

This, back at you!
Damn right. 👏

100%

Im on minimum wage. And last year when it went up due to the government raising the minimum wage, our managers were asking us weren't we happy because (company name) had just given us a nearly 10% pay rise. No, they had just followed government guidelines. Which they had to do by law. In reality we got a 1% pay rise. But reality isnt mentioned when we can all pretend (company name) are great to work for...

The ones that are miserable etc wouldn't be like that if they owned their own shop and they were trying to sell.

I think retail workers are poorly treated. Stores are typically understaffed, pay is low, work is insecure, shift patterns often not good for workers, lots of stores have shit lighting and little or no natural light.
And of course there are a lot of customers who treat the staff really really badly.

Employers need to be better.

My experience is that the younger staff in stores are far more polite and helpful than their older counterparts. I think it is partly down to during covid, where a small amount of power went to some retail workers heads. Being polite costs nothing from both sides.

Not my experience. The younger and older staff are equally polite and customer serving.

It's the lack of training from employers. At my last job and with the bully store manager, when we had new starters (what are these!) they were given a roller cage of fresh and told to put it out. Same goes for the tower of bread trays delivered by the bakeries (Warburtons, Allied and Hovis) No mention of the importance of rotating. So they put the new stuff in front of shorter dates. Then us code checkers had to waste time in rotating it. Even the useless bully manager doesn't rotate. When trained on checkouts/self scan/kiosk/customer service, it was the assistants that trained and later shadowed them. When I started, there was a dedicated store trainer. We got no extra money for training staff. When Just Eat was launched at my store, we had to read a print out from the staff pages. Some colleagues like me got the hang of that well. Some need to be shown. When there was a JE pick required and those colleagues who need to be shown what do to do, I went with the customer and showed what to do. This was even more so when the JE picks had to be done on the handset via an app.

Also the rudeness and impatience from customers is unacceptable. I didn't bother to put my full on customer service to the rude customers as I wanted to do what they want, pay and leave. There are some very lovely customers and if every customer was like that, the jobs in retail will be a breeze and there won't be staff leaving. There is absolutely nothing positive to achieve from being rude and nasty towards retail staff. Plus some areas in the country, retailers are struggling to recruit. One shop about 12 miles from me had to postpone the opening by 7-10 days as not enough people applied. People don't want to work with rude people. My workplace was well known for staff shortages, made even worse by myself leaving. I got fed up of being bullied by the store manager and crying about going to work facing rude customers and him. Customers asked "why don't (supermarket) get more staff?" Depending on my mood and the customer, I answered this accordingly. My answers were "Who wants to work with rude people?" "Who wants to work for a bully manager?" plus other answers. It just needs 1-2 customers rude behaviour to make a staff member leave.

Also some staff are clueless with food. One day when the usual produce colleague was off attending to a funeral, one of the new starters put out the produce delivery. He put out courgettes in the cucumbers. Also seen some normal stuff in the free from range. I know that some brands do GF stuff and just small panel saying Gluten Free on it. People following a GF diet may have purchased this in error and get very poorly with this. Mentioned this to the bully store manager who couldn't give a flying toss about this. Then some staff split up multipacks of bottled water then put the bottles out. We then have to go to the bottled water section and remove the multipack bottles (as have no barcode on them). They get sold to colleagues for about a third to half off. The thing is the bottles of 2l water come in cases of 12 or 15 and the mutlipacks in packs of 6. Never been taught how the numbers on the bottom of price tickets mean. Also when a product changes size, we cannot put out the new size out until the last of the old sizes are sold. As the ticket only displays the old size. Again waste time in checking the shelf and removing the new size.

Are you in America? I haven't found anything remotely like this in Scotland where I am, small town.

Thing is,if you make a fuss,they blame you

I once raised a complaint that a teenager had shoved one hand down my trousers and one up my top,sniffed his fingers and ran off laughing

I reported it to management and was told to report it when I got home

I was in tears and really shaken up

Reported it to the police (and got a telling off for not reporting it while at work)

He was arrested and told to write me a letter (to which his dad laughed and said that no should thing would happen as 'its just a maccys worker')

Police did nothing-just said to write me a letter-that was the end of that-I never got anything

I complained to the higher-ups that I should not have been forced to work for over 4 hours in tears and all I got back was that I was being given a written warning (a '48' as they call it) and when I appealed it,they closed ranks,got their stories straight,changed my story,deleted the cctv and called me a liar and told me I'd lose my job if I took it any higher

I found out later,that the 'lower' managers (mainly other woman) had a WhatsApp group,slagging me off for being upset and 'why didn't she scream?why didn't she run?' etc (I will always be grateful to the one lady manager who stuck up for me saying 'it was a fight,flight or freeze response-and she froze')

I was too beaten down to go any further and moved stores not long after

The same manager that threatened me was 'let go' due to following young (16-20 year olds) staff around and making them uncomfortablewith his comments and body language (touching them)a load of them got together and complained,saying they'd go to the press if nothing was done

The other (all male) management opened the ranks,pushed him out and closed up again

It's male entitlement at its finest

No I'm in the Midlands UK
I moved here (small town) from a large city up north

Wow then! That sounds horrible.

Was it different at any time?

Nope-its always been crap
We do have a new manager who is amazing and sticks up for her staff,but even she has limits
Retail is a joyless job

I have said to a few rude customers "Excuse me, have you ever worked in retail or hospitality?" They always say no. It's bloody obvious.

Think everyone who has not worked in retail, customer service or hospitality in the past 20 years, should be called up in a similar fashion to jury service to work in one of those roles. They get told when and where to do this - for a month. If this does not change their attitudes towards the staff, nothing will. As they are nasty people.

I worked in a retail role in a very well to do area in my teens/early 20s. I’ve had people stalk & follow me, I’ve been threatened and sexually assaulted, made to cry several times by grown men. I’ve never been treated so terribly by strangers as I have in a retail role, which is why I don’t do it anymore but when you’re younger and you have bills to pay you’re basically stuck in an absolutely horrible job where people regularly abuse you and management don’t care because to them you are just a number. No training is provided either so all these kids coming in just don’t have a clue, who else will work in these shitty supermarket roles if they can’t exploit young people?

People wonder why retail workers aren’t then nice to the polite customers? You’d be surprised how many ‘polite’ customers have turned nasty…

So sorry to hear that, sounds horrendous.

I am just so glad to be in a completely different environment, working in the top retail company and no issues, staff and managers are fine

Never had this experience in my life. Where do you work?

You are a lot more stretched in retail now. I work at a McDonald’s and although training is fairly good and regular the reality is that you’re often stretched too thin to do a good job. One example is taking orders on the drive thru, lots of customers don’t seem to realise that you’re actually working in the shop with the headset on, trying to do about ten things when they pull up to make an order. Some get very agitated when you say ‘I’ll be with you in a second’ I think they assume you’re just sat somewhere taking orders.

I worked in my towns John Lewis over a decade ago (closed down now sadly!) and there were plenty of people on every department. It would get busy but you it was never overwhelming and the quality of customer service definitely reflected that.

Yep!

I (half) joke I was nice until I worked in retail! The public are vile

I don't know why people are suggesting men don't abuse retail workers and women in customer service. Lucky you if you didn't experience it, but it's rife and was 20 years ago, let alone now. But 20 years ago your boss stood up for you, they had more autonomy and were more respected by the management.

I worked for John Lewis one summer at uni, mostly answering the phones in the soft furnishings department. The most innocuous job you could think of 😂We had a regular heavy breather call the office. A flasher used to hide in the shelves at the back of the store, and wait until one of the young female SAs walked past. There was a dodgy bloke who used to stand outside the staff entrance watching us leave. All quite grim, but we knew we could call security or the police and someone would come and get rid. I very much doubt you get that support now.

£120 for a quality sweater doesn't break the bank.
Shitty carrier bag ought to come with an item like that. @Nothatgingerpirate

The decision to charge for carrier bags doesn't stop at the sales assistant. So moaning at them achieves nothing

Reminds me of when I was in Tesco end of last year. Overhead some staff chatting, conversation ended in one of them yelling (yes, yelling before anyone questions me) “God I hate customers” and storming off out the back 😳