There is nothing positive to achieve from being vile towards retail staff. Why act this way?

[uihd]

Yesterday evening I bought a few items from a supermarket on the way home from work. There were some customers being very rude and disrespectful towards the staff. It has got worse in the past 5 years.

Why do people think it’s ok to act like this? What do they want to achieve with this attitude? Do they realise that people are leaving retail and avoiding looking for work in the retail sector due to their behaviour?

Nothing positive can be achieved from acting like this. If people get a kick out of this, they are just pathetic people.

The staff in supermarkets have no control over
. Prices
. Stock availability
. Products that have been discontinued. Both in store stop selling it and brand stops making it
. Staffing issues
. The number of self checkouts installed
. The law
. Company policies
. Lottery rules

I have done my share in working in retail. Never I want to do that again

I am totally baffled by the 7% (at the time of posting) who are voting YABU.

My DD works in local grocery store and she said she has this often. She's serving a customer, working quickly to help pack items and she's always interrupted by some entitled person who wants her to fix the costa machine, or someone who's waving a scratch card in her face, both examples expecting her to drop everything to help them NOW 🙄

She has a brilliant work ethic, smiley, friendly, open but when someone does that, she treats like with like 'madam/sir, as you can see I'm busy right now, if you queue, I'll get to you in a timely manner'. She'll then deal with their request without smiling, won't make eye contact, won't converse and just be matter of fact with them. Not rude as such, just perfunctory.

i guess when people feel powerless, overlooked or small in their own lives, they try to 'steal' these things / feelings even just for a moment, by bullying those that they think are lesser in some way. Its been the way of the world forever.

Wow a punch in the face that's nuts.
I worked retail and one particular job I was allowed to fight fire with fire .

If a customer swore at me all bets were off.
Who the fuck do you think you're talking too
Was always followed by you can't talk to me like that.
General manager had my back as id tell him what happened ..
It was fairly rare occurrence thank god.
I had other methods for nasty customers.

It’s not just retail it’s customer service in general.

I work in a call centre in the banking industry and honestly the way some people speak to us is abhorrent.

I have noticed though over the years that it’s usually the people who think they’re entitled to something but aren’t who are the most vile, whereas the ones with genuine complaints will take the time to explain their issue, will acknowledge that they know it’s not my fault, and will wait while I log the complaint and thank me afterwards.

But I think that the industry need to start biting back.

We have an abuse reporting line and customers who are repeatedly abusive to staff can be reported, warned, and in some instances have their accounts closed.

Shops should start doing the same and banning abusive customers.

People who use drugs at the weekend, low serotonin levels mid-week. Moody, depressed. That could be 1 to 2 per cent of the adult population.

If I don't get good customer service on the phone, I'm still polite and always end the conversation with "thank you for your help" because it's not their fault the system is shite.
Schools have started to block emails from abusive parents and ban them from the premises. Retail outlets should do that, too.

A few years ago when I could still do my own shopping I went tot he supermarket.

It was a red hot day, if they had AC it wasn't coping. The place was rammed.

I had to ask staff for help a couple of times.

Before I left I went to customer service and asked to speak to a manager. I told him how great his staff had been and that I appreciated it.

I thought he went a bit over the top with his, "Thank you so much" now I understand why.

I mostly try to set a good example for my kids in my interactions with retail staff, but I have had some recent experiences that made it very hard to stay calm.
Visited a supermarket with self-check out recently. I got flagged for a control - all fine. An employee comes and proceeds to super-slowly scan some items and then starts berating me that I forgot one. She then makes a big show of having to take all my shopping out of the bags again and tells me off for forgetting to scan the one item. I readily accepted that I could have made a mistake and was fine with it but she felt it necessary to repeat three times that I should pay more attention when scanning (making me feel like shit).

Upon paying and receiving the receipt I found out that she had in fact scanned one item twice and that the difference was because of that. My daughter (who had observed it all) then mentioned that she had indeed see her do that but also didn't want to make a fuzz. I called the employee back and told her that she had in fact made a mistake. She then sighed and pointed me to the customer help desk where I had to queue to get paid back for an item wrongly charged. At no point she apologized for berating and embarrassing me.
I have the strong feeling that some retail staff have no problem being rude to people they think won't argue back.

Because nothing works. In this country.

You pay for a service and you don’t get it.

You pay taxes (well, a small minority pays, everyone else just takes) and you get nothing for it.

You buy a product and if anything goes wrong, no one wants to know (probably with the exception of Amazon).

Being rude doesn’t help. But people are sick to be back teeth of being bent over.

Absolutely, me too

I've spent a lot of time with members of the NHS this year unfortunately, and as with all professions there are the good and the bad. There are some people that seriously push the bounds of professionalism with their attitudes though.

As much as I appreciate that they're stressed and stretched some appear to go out of their way to avoid doing the job they're meant to do and their communication skills are atrocious.

I obviously live in a different part of the UK. Our local transport, refuse collection, parks and amenities services work well. Our drains are cleaned, our streets swept.
I have an excellent GP practice and a great NHS dentist. The hospital is a centre of excellence.
Even if something went wrong with any of these things, I would not be rude to the person on the frontline.

I work in retail. Some people are just arseholes these days.

One afternoon we had a till outage and no one could pay via contactless.

One woman really REALLY lost her shit however just before she did, we were going to give her the shopping for free as a goodwill gesture.

After her outburst not only did we not do that, we also barred her.

Yes, that’s me. I have never been rude to the staff member who helps, but some companies have absolutely awful automated checkouts. The worst one that I use is Boots.

For God’s sake, Boots, sort the bloody things out! Customers need to put their bag somewhere!!! This must drive the staff crazy, constantly having to reset the machine. The M&S ones are fine - so the Boots ones can be as well.

It actually doesn't make things better if you're rude to them though. Just be pleasant and polite.

I've worked front line, and also managed front line teams. There are two groups of people who we tended to get abuse from. The first group are just arseholes - angry, disgruntled people waiting for an excuse to shout at someone to make themselves feel better. The second group are people who are just tired and stressed, and their last nerve is being shredded by the latest problem.

When I managed teams we knew we'd get abuse from the first group no matter what, but we'd start to get abuse from the second lot when standards slipped. Usually that was something we had no control over - like systems crashing or management deciding we didnt need to replace staff who left so call wait times suddenly went up to 20 minutes.

The fact is, across the board, management teams are making choices to run on a skeleton staff and force customers down routes they don't want (like undermanned self service tills) knowing that an inevitable consequence is their front line staff are going to get abuse as a result. They're ok with the trade off if their numbers look better.

I always feel sorry for supermarket staff manning the self checkout area, instead of serving one customer at a time they are trying to meet the needs of several customers each having an issue at various machines (which invariably have faults or glitches)

However I was a bit miffed when I returned an item of clothing to a store recently and wasnt refunded. (It was their policy but was easily misinterpreted) The staff member was not rude and neither was I but I was a bit huffy, and as soon as i got to the car, i was annoyed with myself, and still feel bad about it 2 weeks later, because she was young and it was not her fault that she had to give me a crappy voucher.

I really think everyone should have to work retail for a bit just to understand the sheer scale of rudeness retail staff encounter. And its often nothing to do with understaffing or poor training. Just people being assholes for no reason. I remember some absolute tool asking me for directions - note I worked in a jewellery store not information, which I politely gave him correctly. But them about ten minutes later he came storming back to scream at me that I'd told him to turn the wrong way at the bottom of the escalator. I was mind blown that he came all the way back to yell at me rather than just asking someone else, or even the actual information desk he passed twice.

Isn't it obvious? The rise of automation creates a new social contract - that the customer will be expected to do more of the work and in return they get a more efficient experience with predictable interactions. The self-service checkout is the epitome of this.

The social contract fails when the automation fails to deliver its promise of efficiency. The frustration of this experience can't be directed at the machine as there's no way to feedback to it. So inevitably it will be directed at the human "supervisor" of the machine.

Yes your sentiment is indeed outside the norm of how people in the country feel.

I'm not rude to staff but the self service machines annoy me no end. The constant beeping, the impatience they have with customers, the barking instructions and the inability to notice that not every donut is going to be the exact weight of another one. I'm always muttering at them "give me a chance".

I've actually spat out a "for God's sake" at one malfunctioning machine that the person behind me took a step back.

My teeth are worn down from gritting them and being polite.

It's sometimes difficult when you're being treated like an inconvenience for being there (with a real ailment) or stupid. And what is really irritating is a lack of poor note taking/passing on information.

I don't know. There are, what - about 60m people in the UK? I can't speak for all of them any more than you can.
However, I do know what it's like to live in a country with poor infrastructure and little accountability.
Some delays on the tills at Sainsbury's don't bother me too much. I prefer to see the bigger picture rather than be rude to people in service industries.

Those posters infuriate me (as in, seethe inwardly. I don't take it out on staff).
The poster says:
the management know there is a problem
the management know it annoys customers, but
the management are going to victim-blame customers, and
the management will do stuff-all to improve the situation.

No wonder people get cross.