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

Absolutely if retail doubled their staff we would have time to give the personalised service everyone seems to want these days.

Also if your ever shopping and some is unconscious on the floor don't try to step over or squeeze around them to get to the milk and don't ask members of staff who are giving cpr to pass you something

...but aren't prepared to pay the premium.

Really? I've found the opposite - the assistants usually walk me to the correct aisle! Super helpful.

I have no idea why people be rude to people in retial unless they are no to great at serving or friendly behaviour
I can not stand when i am served by a grumpy student or a lady who thinks we are not worthy...
Once i called out a lady being a bully to the loveiest retail wroker becuase she wanted action noe for all she had spent....I walked past and said how dare you be so rude...the girl thanked me and said it happend becuase the manager was not in store for the rude cow.
Working in retail i heard all sorts of stories, it was a great job i actually miss.
The excuse its covid and such..nah its proples lack of common decent manners and selfish behaviour.

I would guess some people are just always rude & always has been,At the moment with issues around cost of living and also the general difficult atmosphere in past decade with things like brexit, Covid, wars in Ukraine/Gaza/Iran etc is everyone is likely feeling a bit more stressed as a starting point. Combine that with the reduction in staff a lot of places and probably more people who are normally pleasant are snapping and being rude. Even if each person only does it once every year that still adds up to a lot of additional interactions that are unpleasant for customer facing staff.
It’s also true sometimes staff don’t help themselves. I recall recently a member of staff had to do a trolley check for me. She started scanning items and accidentally scanned the original barcode on something reduced which then showed as an inconsistency and meant she had to do the whole trolley. I asked if we could then move to a till to speed up and she said not. When I said (not rudely I don’t think) “I appreciate this may be policy but this is ridiculous. You only have an issue because you made a mistake and I have a massive amount of stuff it’s going to take an age to put through manually plus the chances something will be lost or damaged is huge. Is there not someone in store that can authorise moving it”. Her response “I’m sorry but we have to do the check and I can’t open a till. If people didn’t keep stealing things we wouldn’t need to but unfortunately they do.” Now I get she was not aiming the comment about stealing at me but I can also well imagine someone losing it at that. I had to bite my tongue and take a breath and then said “Ok. I’m just leaving the shopping at this point as I’m not prepared to have my shopping crushed & totally rearranged when I’ve sorted it out because Tesco choose not to employ checkout staff to save money which is the real issue here. You can just return it”

I felt a bit bad but also think she handled the situation poorly. I don’t think I was abusive but I was pretty blunt and I wasn’t as nice as I might ordinarily be because I was tired and a bit stressed and I needed to pick my daughter up in the next half hour and it was a 15 min drive to get to her. I can’t possibly be the only one who has been snappy in similar scenarios.

You admit you were stressed and a bit blunt.
Maybe she had personal problems too.

My gran used to say "You can get the measure of a man (or woman) by how he treats those he considers "inferiors". This is very true about waiters and serving/retail staff especially.

People think they are in a position of power and abuse it. Likely very sad personal lives so take it out on others. Perhaps mental illness too.

You never know just how that retail/ hospitality/ other service worker might be feeling after umpteen different customers have treated them less than nicely. I try very hard to be the exception, and if not in a particular good mood myself, just smile and shut up.

YANBU to object to it, but I don't think people doing this kind of thing have any grand plan, they are just reacting and not bothering to put a filter on it, probably because there are no real consequences for acting that way.

If you lived in a small village and treated the local shop staff this way, other people in the village would gossip about you, which puts off most aside from the most oblivious. But we all live such isolated lives the random people who pass in the supermarket are nobodies, and if they think less of you, nothing bad will happen.

Ideally we would all consider the human in front of us, I think most people try to but some do seem to forget that in the moment of their stress/frustration.

You don’t need to speak for them. Their electoral choices tell us they are not happy.

So people voted for local councillors based on their perceptions of the service industry?
Ok.

I think that's a very good point. We're living atomised lives. It's a dislocation.

They don't really have a choice if all the supermarkets and other retailers go the same way though.

Shopping online is better, but even that has been entshittified. It used to be the case that you ordered something and it would come the next day - 2 days later at worst. Now things don't even get despatched for about three days and then sit in the courier system - if you're unlucky it will arrive a week after you ordered it.

"entshittified" 😂
Brilliant term!

I agree that retail staff are treated terribly which is awful and I believe there's two main drivers behind this in recent times.

First, the average person is much worse off now. Struggling with increasing bills, food prices etc etc. insecure housing, lack of jobs/opportunities to better yourself. A bleak outlook. They are working longer for less and are tired and frustrated. Add in that shopping taps into the primal hunter gatherer in you and it's a recipe for disaster. Now I'm not saying that abusing retail staff is OK given all those burgers it does explain why some people are now more likely to do it.

Secondly, the greedy shareholders sucking the profit out of the shops are pushing to slash the number of employees doing all the leg work to save a bit on wages. Reducing the number of staff is leading to worse service all around, and frankly, fewer people to pick on. Therefore the average worker gets more abuse more frequently.

It's abysmal and I'd personally rather actually be unemployed than do it today (having done loads of different retail roles from supermarket to fashion in previous years).

Sometimes there is shitty customer service though or valid complaints, but there is no need for personal abuse.

Staff take the rough end of it. I was on the phone to South East Water the other day and there is a warning not to be abusive before you speak to anyone. It's not the person at the other end's fault but water companies have been appalling lately and people are understandably angry about how much their water bill has gone up, that leaks have gone unrepaired and that they have just released a mountain of shit into the sea where they had been planning to swim. I could have got angry (but didn't) when they said they would have to issue the £1000+ they owe me in a cheque, and that this would take some time, instead of the BACS credit they could do instantly if they wanted to. I mean who the fuck uses cheques? Plus I first requested the refund three months ago by email and they had done fuck all about it.

I know some organisations make senior staff spend time dealing face to face with customers and all public-facing organisations should take a leaf out of their book.

@Livpooli absolutely agree, it should be like national service. The way some people used to talk to me, and then come into the shop with their teenage kids, who would soon get part time jobs of their own. How would they feel if someone spoke to their lovely Digby or Elspeth the way they spoke to me? One woman went absolutely ballistic at me for getting her granary bread not whole meal, then came back to say she was sorry, it had been a stressful morning as her recycling bin blew across the road. In no other industry are you allowed to rage, shout, scream at people for something inconvenient which happened to you that day. I am now in a professional job which involves pissing people off on a much grander scale, yet no one ever shouts at me. It’s all about class.

Supermarket shopping is very stressful for the reasons already described. Partially because of other customers, partially because of how the stores are run. There needs to be legislation to BAN self check-out and mandate how many staffed there needs to be at any one time. There should also be laws about people dithering and blocking aisles, it's ridiculous. People should not be able to allow their kids to mess about in the shop either. It should be a simple process to go in, walk round quickly selecting your needed goods and then leave and pay. For whatever reason it has become far more difficult in recent times.

But staff certainly do not deserve abuse. None of it is their fault.

I agree. Of course we shouldn't abuse staff, and I don't, but the general level of customer service has declined. People shout at staff at least in part because they are frustrated. And I'm pretty fed up with the pre-emptive accusations about not abusing the staff. If anything I think it normalises the idea that everyone is being awful to the staff which is the last thing we want to encourage.

I think there's a general feeling of the country isn't working well. And I do think the attitude from that tips into both how you vote and how you treat retail staff.

I think the public in general are becoming less patient, more entitled and more demanding.
Whats driving this? A combination of things probably. I don’t think we can underestimate the impact of cost of living rises. My stress levels are sky high every time I’m in the supermarket trying to keep my grocery shop cost down to a reasonable level. I’ve never been rude to staff but I can imagine people being more easily annoyed by small things and it escalating into rudeness and verbal abuse. More technology. As someone else said it’s making us less tolerant of things taking time and some people have become less able to wait in queues, wait for staff to get something for them, wait for anything really. The technology is also a source of stress. Those self service tills can test the patience of a saint. I also think that the internet is full of trolls and it’s too easy to bash someone on social media. Some people might literally be unlearning social skills because they are engaging in less face to face human interaction. Covid didn’t exactly help this.

I think it shouldn't though. What I feel about how much it costs to fill my car with petrol has nothing to do with the person taking payment and it would be very wrong of me to be in any way rude towards them.

That’s how protest vote works.

Unhappiness with unrelated issues, compounded over time.