The Misconduct of American Shoppers
August 8, 2021 7:18 PM Subscribe

Amanda Mull's Atlantic article traces the rise of an American class identity system by another name. The message that money can buy you status, which can all too easily be conflated with superiority or success, has long been reinforced in the U.S. when businesses and organizations offer exclusive access for a fee, special seating in a different class for a higher rate and gifts in exchange for higher value "membership." Customer service, client relationships, member experiences and the emphasis on consumers by both business and government alike gets increasingly ugly, however, in a pandemic-ravaged economy where nearly 80% of us work in the service sector, and rather than recognize that service workers are probably more like us than not — we throw a fit.

Less than six months into 2021, airlines had reported more unruly passengers to the agency than they had in any full year since it began collecting data, in 1995…. At its most violent extreme, workers have been hospitalized or killed. Eight Trader Joe’s employees were injured in one such attack in New York, and in Georgia, a grocery-store cashier was shot over a mask dispute. Far more frequent are the accounts of short-fused shoppers becoming verbally abusive or otherwise degrading over slow service or sold-out goods. Earlier this month, a restaurant on Cape Cod reportedly was so overwhelmed with rude customers that it shut down for a “day of kindness.”

Why do so many of us behave so badly with clerks, salespeople, essential workers and so many others tasked with handling the public? Mull argues that in the "150 years that American consumerism has existed, it has metastasized into almost every way that Americans construct their identities." It's the way, she explains that "retailers won over this growing middle class by convincing its members that they were separate from—and opposed to—industrial workers…." To put that another way, business and marketing taught us to disengage, just as they taught us that the customer is always right.

posted by Violet Blue (102 comments total) 51 users marked this as a favorite

It’s also possible that everyone is horribly stressed and short fused because of the pandemic. I'd be wary of drawing definite conclusions about a long term evolution in the middle of a global crisis.
posted by Galvanic at 7:45 PM on August 8, 2021 [43 favorites]

Does this mean there's an "uncanny valley" of politeness to service workers, where there's a dramatic dip in politeness once you hit the middle class, while working class people (because solidarity) and rich people (because "bad" service isn't an existential threat) are better?
posted by airmail at 7:53 PM on August 8, 2021 [6 favorites]

I think the article may be extrapolating a causal relationship that doesn't quite work they way they're trying to frame it, but I agree that the class system is a problem.

I'm fairly old, and make good money, and have never had the desire to demean waitstaff or others in similar roles, and have never understood the ugliness of people who do. I can only assume they're deeply unhappy and hate themselves, because I like me, and like making all of my interactions with people in the service industry as positive as I can.
posted by Ickster at 8:02 PM on August 8, 2021 [27 favorites]

This might be a specifically American phenomenon; I worked retail for a few years - although it was a post office, but they're laid out like retail stores here - and didn't have to deal with very many rude customers, even at highly stressful times like Christmas or when parcels got lost. I also worked at a call centre for a taxi company and people were ruder there, but usually when the taxi hadn't turned up, which seems fair enough to me.
posted by Merus at 8:10 PM on August 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

Eh I was stressed in the pandemic too and I managed to not blow up at any service sector people; no short fuse is an excuse or really even a reason, most of us have bad days and manage to not take it out on the wage slaves risking their lives in crummy positions to get people their clam chowder or latte or whatever bc our government has shown a decided overall lack of concern for their wellbeing during an international crisis.
posted by erattacorrige at 8:10 PM on August 8, 2021 [24 favorites]

The whole Ugly American Tourist thing is a trope because it's real. We're just now awakening to see it within our own borders.
posted by hippybear at 8:14 PM on August 8, 2021 [61 favorites]

The dread I felt a couple of weeks ago when I turned up to my flight gate and saw a guy sprawled over three seats wearing no mask and a Trump 2024 shirt. Afraid we would be on the news. Thank God nothing happened, or at least nothing loud.

... and rich people (because "bad" service isn't an existential threat) are better?

There is supposed to be some noblesse oblige knocking about but no, the way rich people can treat staff is exponentially worse.

I remember being in England years ago and being a bit nervous to approach staff anywhere after a while because they had no obligation to be nice. If they didn't like Americans or didn't like their job, they could be a dick about it. At the same time, I could see that people were more themselves at work, and I appreciated that. I wish that were true here in the US.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:18 PM on August 8, 2021 [15 favorites]

I worked in a pharmacy in a low-income neighborhood & I often thought it was strange that people treated me like shit even though I knew for a fact they had jobs just like mine & got treated by shit by their customers all day long. So I thought why would you do that to another person. I was younger then so I just felt like well I don't know why this happening. 20 years later all I know is that it's much easier to just be a bitch sometimes. I always feel horrible about it & apologize one second later but sometimes it just comes out & I can only apologize because I happen to have that much energy juice left in the tank. And I think a lot of people just get 100% of the energy juice squeezed out of them every day. I just really am not sure it's really an entitlement issue.
posted by bleep at 8:32 PM on August 8, 2021 [20 favorites]

A lot of it is a "no unions and no meaningful working conditions law" thing. Most of us don't snap and snarl at our bosses or at doctors or cops or lawyers - people with social power. We know, however, that if we pitch a big fit at some poor schmoe working behind the counter we can at minimum make their day a lot worse with no pushback and at maximum actually get them fired and they basically can't say or do anything.

If you go to France or Germany it's still a lot harder to fire people and if they do get fired there's still a reasonable safety net so they don't need to grovel.

I mean, I think there are some other cultural factors and of course there's the pandemic, but the underlying thing is that if you deprive a group of material power, they're going to end up being victimized.
posted by Frowner at 8:40 PM on August 8, 2021 [76 favorites]

We're large enough as a country, there are probably (tens of) millions of exceptions to any theory about American culture. I agree it's not always an entitlement issue, but whatever the cause, the effect is disrespect: From businesses that provide shoddy goods and services, to customers who scream at workers, to workers who respond to customers in surly ways and on it goes.
posted by Violet Blue at 8:41 PM on August 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

The only thing that has gotten me to act in a way I'm embarrassed about later is this thing that several fast food franchises started doing around the initial "end of lockdown," where they stopped letting me pick up delivery food from outside (I drive for an exploitative gig service) and would straight up make me wait through the drive-through line and then park and come inside instead of just handing the bag out the window. There was no plausible reason for this; just purely "you are less-than because you are here for work and not spending your own money directly". I feel bad because I know the people I grouched at were not the ones making this absurd, demeaning, and - given how the spikes have recurred - potentially hazardous policy. But it was hard not to feel resentful when they stuck to it while I'm sitting right there in the car five feet away and all they'd have to do is turn and pick up the bag that I can see through the window.
posted by Scattercat at 8:50 PM on August 8, 2021 [11 favorites]

I will not make excuses for rudeness to clerks but for years, service in many stores and other businesses has gotten worse because, I believe, corporate owners think they can get away with understaffing, lousy responses and so on. After all, you shouldn't take out your frustrations on the clerk, right? So now, people are. Plus so many people seem wildly angry at things beyond their control that they're lashing out at the nearest person. And I believe social media behavior is backing up into our actual lives.
posted by etaoin at 8:57 PM on August 8, 2021 [19 favorites]

It’s also possible that everyone is horribly stressed and short fused because of the pandemic. I'd be wary of drawing definite conclusions about a long term evolution in the middle of a global crisis.

This. Very much.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:58 PM on August 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

I’ve wondered if isolation just makes everyone a bit weird and slow to adapt to others. I react that way and I enjoy solitude. If we’re mostly out of synch, as well as stressed and angry and full of the fear of falling (economically) and insults to our consumerist self-construction, it’s going to be likelier that people spin out of control.
posted by clew at 9:03 PM on August 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

It's kind of hard to yell at someone through a mask, so I assume most of these people were not masked or took the masks off for the occasion.

Those people are a particular demographic, and since we're talking about the last six months, are fairly likely to be Trump voters who are angry at the rest of us for voting him out.

This is another front in the very strangely slow moving Civil War the US is currently fighting with itself.
posted by jamjam at 9:18 PM on August 8, 2021 [19 favorites]

It’s also possible that everyone is horribly stressed and short fused because of the pandemic.

I’m absolutely sure that’s made the situation worse. But it didn’t create the situation.

My Hot Take Before Reading the Article

(I may come back and write more after reading.)

I’ve worked retail, food service, and a reception desk. And I had an abusive parent. And I spent thirteen years being bullied and occasionally assaulted at school and by missing stairs in the extended family. There wasn’t a single day of working those three jobs when I wasn’t sharply reminded of the abuse and bullying, or when some stranger or supervisor didn’t scare the hell out of me. I was never personally involved in a situation that felt physically violent to me, but I did witness a few*.

Some days the only thing that got me through was telling myself that these people had to have something terrible going on in their own lives to make them behave this way toward fellow human beings. And I still think that’s true in some cases; people who seemed more well-off socially or financially were often kinder than those who were just a rung or two above jobs like my own. Maybe there was a touch of the old noblesse obligé going on. But for many, I think it was just how they watched their parents treat service workers, so they thought it was normal.

I wept with relief the day I got my first non-public-facing job. That was also the first job where my full-time salary covered all my medical expenses, and where I was not required to perform tasks that were physically damaging to me, and where any of my disabilities were even partially accommodated.

If I could take only one lesson away from the 2020 election, it’s that a large number of Americans just really want to stick it to somebody, and they don’t much care who it is,m as long as they think they can get away with it.

I’ve never personally witnessed a violent altercation on an airplane like the ones I’ve been seeing on video for the past year, but the last few times I flew I could feel a real sense that it was a powder keg just waiting for the fuse to be lit. In 1978, Dr. Alfred Kahn, the man behind airline deregulation, said, "We either demonstrate that we are an American people, or that we are just 200,000,000 people at war with one another." It looks like war is winning out.

And don’t get me started on the sexual harassment or the customers who assumed I would enjoy their vile jokes and comments about racial minorities just because of my own melanin shortage.

*I’m not counting having small objects thrown at me or having my hand slapped by a small elderly woman as “violent.” YMMV.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:26 PM on August 8, 2021 [49 favorites]

Service workers can be abused with impunity. They can't tell you no or do anything but smile and say "May I help you?" They are there to take abuse with a smile. You can't abuse anyone else in your life but you can absolutely be shitty to the service worker and get away with it forever, and if they do anything even remotely to stand up to you, that bitch is fired, yo! The customer is always right, yo!

Service = abuse. Service workers are the cumbuckets of the world. It has always been like this and always will be like this. Mask rage is just another aspect of the same old shit.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:31 PM on August 8, 2021 [25 favorites]

I'm sorry, "people are stressed" as an excuse sounds a lot like the Atlanta mass murderer was "having a bad day". It normalizes violence.

I hope that the current job market allows some of these abused workers to use what limited power they have to find better jobs, bosses, and customers.
posted by meowzilla at 9:33 PM on August 8, 2021 [50 favorites]

I think there are a few jumps to be made between "people are stressed out" / "we're out of synch" and the incidents of people being physically assaulted, shot, teeth knocked out, and shot which are being mentioned in the article.

I think I disagree. All humans revert under stress, and the longer the stress continues the further back they go. We’ve got many many people who are currently working with a toddler’s range of emotional control while driving cars and carrying firearms.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:35 PM on August 8, 2021 [7 favorites]

This article looks at one symptom, but I think recent events in American history have thrown back the curtain on the fact that there are just simply a great number of self-centred, ignorant, uncivil, violent Americans.
posted by dazed_one at 9:55 PM on August 8, 2021 [43 favorites]

OK, I am back after reading the article. It said a lot of the same stuff I did, only much better, more well-organized, and presumably with access to much more statistically significant research.

During the height of the Industrial Revolution, many workers were afraid of being replaced by machines. That did happen to a great degree, but other workers have been forced to try to turn themselves into machines just to cope. And many customers have been more than happy to help that process along by ceasing to think of service workers as human beings, much in the same way many people who could afford them had been treating their domestic servants for years.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:03 PM on August 8, 2021 [7 favorites]

And to the people saying that these conditions were caused by the pandemic and that service workers weren’t being abused before then, I just want to say thank you. Because that means you were most likely not one of the customers being abusive pre-2020. You were one of the nice ones (or even just the neutral ones) that made a worker’s day go just that much better.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:12 PM on August 8, 2021 [8 favorites]

It's so weird to me - do people not understand there's a difference between being "firm" and being "combative". My family is absolutely willing to bend in favor of recognizing mistakes happen and not blowing up at people who have little power.

I have never gotten so upset with a server/bartender/clerk that I was rude to them. With the airline/travel world - and really everywhere - you get so much further by genuinely being pleasant and thankful. If it's a messed up situation and you have the genuine need, most folks will go out of their way to help you. If they can't, well sometimes you have to take the blow.

But yeah, this growing throbbing sense of awful entitlement is bizarre to me. Get some empathy folks.

(As a side note - about customer care - I worked for a company once that got absorbed by a much larger company. Our smaller company had a reputation for sterling customer service. Larger company did the usual and cut costs - particularly out of care, restricted things the agents could do/offer - and absolutely tanked the smaller company's reputation and value) The side effect is you could see online the jump in frustrated customer reactions and rude language levelled at the company - usually with a caveat that things used to be better.
posted by drewbage1847 at 11:12 PM on August 8, 2021 [3 favorites]

I actually disagree and tend to define consumers as another kind of oppressed category. Consumers today have diminished consumer rights, recourse, and purchasing choice and purchasing power.

If you carefully look at the typical arguments in defense of workers, it becomes clear that workers' ideology is always ends up in service of their bosses. Very often complaints about "bad customers" ignore this fundamental power imbalance. Customer service exists to protect companies and the market, not to serve customers.

Do some (many) customers inhabit a false consciousness w.r.t. this structure? Sure. But it's not hard at all to empathize with customers' frustrations once you understand that their complaints (or yelling) is not really about the front workers, but a kind of last-straw reaction to corporate exploitation and hyperconsumerism. This customers v.s. workers dichotomy with only one side being right, is exactly the interpretation that capitalism wants because it deflects attention from ownership of capital and production.
posted by polymodus at 11:44 PM on August 8, 2021 [29 favorites]

It's partly that frustration is built into almost every retail transaction these days, I think.

Corporations routinely cheat their customers by promising better quality than they'll deliver, hiding extra charges in the small print or deliberately understaffing their stores and call centres to maximise profits. All this is garnished with a layer of sanctimonious PR bullshit which we're all quite capable of seeing through, but powerless to do anything about.

The corporate executives whose decisions create this situation are careful never to expose themselves to the public, leaving the poor bloody infantry of till operators and call centre staff to take the inevitable flak from pissed-off customers. That's no excuse for shouting at someone who's trying to serve you - let alone for physically assaulting them - but it does show how such behaviour is cynically baked-in to the system by those in power.

Executives use this to deflect responsibility for their own policy's consequences on to the very customers they set out to cheat in the first place. To paraphrase an old Leninist slogan, a till is weapon with a worker on either end of it.
posted by Paul Slade at 1:45 AM on August 9, 2021 [34 favorites]

I know there are a lot of long-term trends about American consumerism that aren't sociologically healthy, but I read the article and I didn't see any evidence at all against my idea that the elephant in the room, as it were, is the whole source of the rise in these incidents:

Anti-maskers. They're agents of a political movement, they've been enabled and supported by politicians, and they're just as likely to be trying to get on the news with a political statement as they are to be genuinely at the end of their rope.

Once you rule out those bad actors, as well as genuine pandemic stress in the rest of us, you could maybe really write about some societal trends.

On the other hand, the REAL evidence that America has no respect for the service industry is that we decided to call them all "Front line heroes" and expected them to face a deadly virus (and some out-of-control customers) for exactly the same low pay and benefits they were getting before the pandemic. Instead of, you know, actually doing something to make their lives better.
posted by mmoncur at 2:43 AM on August 9, 2021 [22 favorites]

I'm sorry, "people are stressed" as an excuse sounds a lot like the Atlanta mass murderer was "having a bad day".

This isn’t really about excuses; we’re talking explanations. And you can do the second without doing the first.

I tend to agree with Scattercat that at least some of the tension comes from mounting demands from management — when I go into my chain pharmacy, I have to run a gauntlet of pitches and tricks to get me to agree to changes in service that I have already rejected numerous times. This is a tedious waste of my cognitive resources in a place I already find stressful due to the pandemic, and I have to be very attentive to who is really doing this. It’s not like the pharmacy clerk wants to fuck up my prescriptions, after all, they are just the face of the rotten machine.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:36 AM on August 9, 2021 [12 favorites]

Do some (many) customers inhabit a false consciousness w.r.t. this structure? Sure. But it's not hard at all to empathize with customers' frustrations once you understand that their complaints (or yelling) is not really about the front workers, but a kind of last-straw reaction to corporate exploitation and hyperconsumerism.

But is it? It seems like you'd need some pretty detailed data that we don't have. An awful lot of the bad behavior that I observe is, eg, sexual harassment, yelling at racial minorities, expecting things that are flat out unfair (usually "going first and getting most because you're white"), etc. Do really rich people treat workers better since they can so easily afford whatever they want?

Additionally, who gets treated badly at work? In one instance, I had the opportunity to talk with the Black woman who was hired into an old job after I moved to something else, and she was treated much more rudely than I was.

There's obviously customer upset over getting jerked around and exploited, but I'm not really sure that's the primary root of the actual yelling and abuse.
posted by Frowner at 4:13 AM on August 9, 2021 [13 favorites]

> A lot of it is a "no unions and no meaningful working conditions law" thing.

I'm a unionized public librarian (in Canada), and I can tell you that lots of "problem patrons" have asked to speak to my manager over the years as a threat; i.e. "do what I say/let me do what I want or I'm going to get you fired." And if I didn't have the protections of a union, these sorts of requests could very well be a threat because, you know, the customer is always right. I still have a public-facing job, but I can also tell you that my happiness and job satisfaction has gone up as my exposure to the public has gone down.

I've told this story in other threads, but when I met my wife she was working in a coffee shop and at the time she told me "A lot of people aren't paying for the coffee, they're paying for the privilege to boss you around for a few minutes."
posted by The Card Cheat at 4:36 AM on August 9, 2021 [44 favorites]

This is more to the point, for me. No pandemic stress about it, just regular old American classisim, sexism, and racism.

The notion that at the restaurant, you’re better than the waiters, it becomes part of the restaurant experience,” and also part of how some patrons understand their place in the world. Compounding this sense of superiority is the fact that so many service workers are from historically marginalized groups—the workforce is disproportionately nonwhite and female.
posted by tiny frying pan at 4:43 AM on August 9, 2021 [12 favorites]

The last time I worked a service job, it was a year at a grocery deli counter, before the pandemic. That's a position that invites chit chat, since it takes a minute or two to fill an order. Most customers were politely businesslike, a few were sweethearts, but there was a subset of people who came in often and spent that time making themselves feel better at my expense, making it clear that they were superior because I had a shit job, most likely because of no education or poor life choices.

Talking to my former co-workers at the beginning of the pandemic, they were putting up with much worse, plus worrying about their lives.

My son-in-law recently moved for my daughter's career, and stepped down from a high-status position. He took a restaurant job until he gets his education plan worked out. He's miserable. I told him it's temporary, but for many of your co-workers, it's their life. This will do wonders for your class consciousness.
posted by Miss Cellania at 4:46 AM on August 9, 2021 [15 favorites]

I've told this story in other threads, but when I met my wife she was working in a coffee shop and at the time she told me "A lot of people aren't paying for the coffee, they're paying for the privilege to boss you around for a few minutes."

As someone who was a barista for pretty much the entirety of my 20s, this is entirely correct. I would like the axiom "the customer is always right" to DIAF. It's bullshit.

I can tell you for a fact that the result of me having deal with the public in various ways throughout my life has sure made me treat other people like the people they are, not the peons others want them to be.
posted by Kitteh at 5:15 AM on August 9, 2021 [13 favorites]

I am reminded of reports that a lot of people *resist* the idea of patronizing no-tipping restaurants, presumably because losing that chance to be an asshole to waitstaff while dangling the possibility of a whole extra $0.25 of tip is just too much for them.
posted by rmd1023 at 5:34 AM on August 9, 2021 [11 favorites]

Sometimes resistance to restaurants that don’t allow tipping is a worry that the workers are not getting paid enough - like, if the restaurant published its pay scale and I knew the employees were making a reasonable wage not just minimum wage, I’d be (and have been, in such cases) quite supportive. But otherwise I worry that the owner is one of those jerks who doesn’t tip even when workers are only paid a tipped wage based on a misguided and definitely not worker-friendly principle of “why should I have to pay ‘extra’ for something that I think is my right?” Because there are definitely customers who think that fawning service is the basic, and thus won’t tip for such service, and sometimes they start restaurants.
posted by eviemath at 5:45 AM on August 9, 2021 [8 favorites]

A.C.A.B!

“All customers are bastards”.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 6:30 AM on August 9, 2021 [17 favorites]

> The flight attendant had noticed our stalemate and offered to roust the man from my seat, but the situation felt too combustible to me, and 25C like too stupid a hill on which to die.

One of the factors which contributes to this hell is that for a lot of people there is no hill too stupid upon which to die.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:31 AM on August 9, 2021 [23 favorites]

From the FPP:

80% of us work in the service sector

Didn't buy that on trace, and reading the link, their definition of "service sector" seems to extend quite broadly:

Among the major service-industry sectors, the biggest was trade, transportation and utilities (27.8 million workers), followed by education and health services (24.3 million), professional and business services (21.5 million) and leisure and hospitality (16.7 million). Outside of the private sector service industry, about 22.5 million Americans worked in government in July, with nearly two-thirds at the local level.

I think a better percentage of folks caught in the eye of this storm -- wrestling with the American axiom of "the customer is always right" while earning close to a minimum wage (to say nothing of lack of benefits, unpredictable schedules, etc) -- would be closer to 20%. Per the Atlantic article:

In 2019, one in five American workers was employed in retail, food service, or hospitality

---
My objection to a percentage is not an attempt to minimize the problem. As noted in the FPP, it's not about the workers -- whatever percentage are in service industries -- it's about the shoppers.

To that point, where on earth did the "customer is always right" axiom arise from? The Atlantic article seems to lean into the (1994) book Merchants, Power, and the Rise of A New American Culture by William Leach to explain that. Duly noted, and reserved from my local library.
posted by Theophrastus Johnson at 6:37 AM on August 9, 2021 [8 favorites]

One of the factors which contributes to this hell is that for a lot of people there is no ~~hill~~ till too stupid upon which to die.

FTFY
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:41 AM on August 9, 2021 [3 favorites]

I feel like this is not a mystery. We have proof positive that there are at least 74,216,154 Americans who have little to no emotional regulation and a child-like sense of superiority. They're currently in the process of trying to get us all killed.
posted by ob1quixote at 6:45 AM on August 9, 2021 [21 favorites]

> I've told this story in other threads, but when I met my wife she was working in a coffee shop and at the time she told me "A lot of people aren't paying for the coffee, they're paying for the privilege to boss you around for a few minutes."

Hence the complaints and resentment, at least in the US and other countries were tipping has been a thing, when restaurants switch to a system in which the tip is included in the total cost of the tab.
posted by virago at 6:48 AM on August 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

I have so many thoughts.

First is that right now, people are carrying trauma loads that are higher than they were before the pandemic. This is not an excuse, but it is a reason for some increased volatility. I keep reminding myself that denial is also a legit, recorded response to trauma and so the mask-hating Covid-denying crowd may actually be carrying the higher trauma load because they can't even admit to themselves that they are experiencing trauma. Except, of course, the specious/displaced trauma of being asked to wear a mask or having to wait for their food.

On that note, I was on the front lines both the day we reopened for (small) daycamps and re-opened for regular classes and the parents, in particular, of kids under 7 coming in really looked like they had been in a war. In the Before Times parents would drop their kids off and take off; right now they are hovering, eyeing our cleaning products, and in some cases, listening to each and every other camper's Covid screen at the door. Their eyes were scared over their masks.

And yes, they were unusually cranky.

The first two weeks, I couldn't even talk or eat at the end of the day (I'm sure anyone who's worked food service, as I have in the past, can relate) because I had thrown myself in front of my front-line staff, used every drop of empathy and communication, and was so done.

So that's the sort of right-now side. Like most people who have never developed a habit of yelling at front-line people, I do find it really hard to empathize at the point that you are standing there yelling.

But I ALSO think the article nailed something particular to certain cultures and countries.

In Canada, we obviously compete with and are surrounded by American companies (Walmart and Costco are just as prevalent here etc.) I get it a lot from my boss that he wants our team to deliver a customer experience equivalent to Disney, Great Wolf Lodge, etc., and he's involved in a lot of American associations that inculcate ideas about the way to do that.

But Canadian baseline customer service is different than many parts of the US, as anyone who has wandered around Hudson's Bay trying to find a salesperson or even, you know, PAY for something can tell you. Or visited a Shopper's Drug Mart on 20 points day.

My perception is that our lines are big longer. And there's a level of cheer that isn't as required at most counters -- like, sales people are expected to be polite and check you out, but they don't have to make you feel like the centre of the universe that day. (That is regional. In Toronto it's like 'be around but don't engage until asked.") My brother-in-law, after about a year of living in Fort Worth, completely lost his mind in Toronto because he had adjusted.

Because I'm Canadian-adjusted, I honestly don't like the American customer service feel, except as a kind of "wow, really not at home now" experience when I travel. For me it reads as...I'm not sure how to put this...on the staff side it reads as fake and scripted a lot of the time, and like a comment above, a cover for trying to upsell or scam me. On the customer side it strikes me as a kind of pettiness of mind from the customer, like "if this experience is not Great then something is wrong!!!!"

I mean, I just want my food/gas/clothing. I don't need an Experience or even a smile.

Like one example - the "understaffed" comments in this thread -- which I don't doubt but I wonder what the standard for that is, is it how long the line at the counter is? Because even pre-pandemic here in Toronto it wasn't unusual for me to stand 10 minutes in line at Winners and I just had to plan accordingly and it didn't really occur to me to frame it as "insufficient staff" but more like "there's always a line up at Winners."

I'm not sure it's a class thing, but I think it is a...relationship to time thing. Sometimes I think Americans are raised to believe that if they do everything right/have grit and determination/get up at 5 am and have 3 side gigs that they will be able to optimize everything. And as a result, there's a demand to optimize their every purchase for them. I worry about that as a baseline.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:11 AM on August 9, 2021 [29 favorites]

And to the people saying that these conditions were caused by the pandemic and that service workers weren’t being abused before then

I’m not sure if that was addressed to me, but I think it’s clear to most people that even in the best of times abusing service workers is endemic. It is just particularly hard to separate out the "why" of the situation at a time when people are being abusive in general. It’s like trying to find the fox that’s been eating your chickens while a major forest fire consumes your entire property.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:13 AM on August 9, 2021 [3 favorites]

virago: "Hence the complaints and resentment when restaurants switch to a system in which the tip is included in the total cost of the tab."

Some years ago, MeFi had a link to a series of posts by a restaurateur who opened a no-tip restaurant . Key quote: "A certain small number of very vocal men (and it was always men who were vocal about it) resented that we were not letting them try to exercise additional control over our team members." He expands on the point in Part 5 of the series (link in sidebar of story).
posted by adamrice at 7:23 AM on August 9, 2021 [10 favorites]

I'm in the camp that doesn't really see it being either-or. Ongoing stress amplifies sick systems by weakening the healthier governing processes against them; as the individual, so the society, to really oversimplify.
posted by Drastic at 7:28 AM on August 9, 2021 [4 favorites]

As best I can tell, the stress of the pandemic has been an amplifier of people's previous behaviors.

The folks I knew who were kind to service workers are now exceedingly kind. We're talking $10 tips on a $20 order kind of stuff.

A lot of us are lighting up owners, managers, and corporate accounts like never before, but doing our best to extend ever more patience and kindness to the service workers who we know have it worse than ever.
posted by explosion at 7:40 AM on August 9, 2021 [28 favorites]

When I delivered mail, I learned that 98% of dogs are sweet and kind, even if they bark, but 2% are irredeemably malevolent. When I owned a retail business, I found the percentage of malevolent humans was much higher. This isn't a pandemic thing, or a class thing. This is a human nature thing.

The thing about customer service is that the bad customers stick with you long after they've left the store. Or rather the trauma they cause does. And when you run into them again, the red flag goes up, your heart quickens, but they don't even recognize you. They may have traumatized you, but it is also true that they just treated you like they treat everyone else. They forgot about you the moment they left your business. (Unless they are especially cruel, taking the time to call the owner to try to get you fired, despite the fact that you're the owner.) If you want to retain your faith in humanity, don't work retail.

The other side of the coin is giant corporations cutting customer service to increase profits. Those billions of dollars of profits going to the CEOs and shareholders are paid for in human misery.
posted by jabah at 7:42 AM on August 9, 2021 [23 favorites]

Or how about the media ecosystem of the antimaskers, that is purposefully stoking fear and anxiety, and turning interactions with staff at the grocery store into a momentous battle for the soul of our country, where being hostile and violent is okay bc the stakes are just that high and what they're doing isn't being jerks, but fighting a holy war?

And the messaging is like that on purpose, to the people in the cult, because if they act that way they'll be met with hostility back, which will draw them further into the arms of the cult, which will advance the interests of the cult leadership?

What about the thing where you go into the store, and mess up the mask display, so you can take a photo and go home and post it on twitter/instagram/facebook and receive validation for your action?

Or go into a museum where some gender nonconforming or woman or minority person tells you to wear a mask, so you retaliate by coughing on them and then going around to every exhibit and purposefully breathing on it, while getting your children to do that too?
posted by subdee at 7:44 AM on August 9, 2021 [11 favorites]

The airline industry seems to be going through a crisis brought about by the realisation that while the endless CRM-driven stratification of customer service can theoretically possible - the upper layers can unsustainably expensive to provide. See Why First Class is Disappearing yt and also The Death of Business Class yt .

While I agree with the assessment on business class and the airline industry's model, I have to look askance at someone who makes shitty anti-worker arguments to justify his opinion that American airlines suck. When you script out that you don't see servers over the age of 40 on ME based airlines as a positive, that should be where you start rethinking things.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:46 AM on August 9, 2021 [5 favorites]

There's a whole media ecosystem right now built around making people as angry as possible and encouraging them to commit violence as a way to further the political goals of a small minority, I think it's a mistake to overlook that. And not just in the USA either.
posted by subdee at 7:48 AM on August 9, 2021 [30 favorites]

Or how about the media ecosystem of the antimaskers, that is purposefully stoking fear and anxiety, and turning interactions with staff at the grocery store into a momentous battle for the soul of our country, where being hostile and violent is okay bc the stakes are just that high and what they're doing isn't being jerks, but fighting a holy war?

The media, and frankly, certain religious organizations, are definitely stoking it. In the utopia of my mind, every. broadcast. media. would have to run 5 minutes every hour of Schoolhouse Rock-style education straight from some utopian department of indigenous, scientific, math, logic, humanities and arts education.

But I have to say...I spent my early to mid 20s in the kind of volatile, every-battle-is-significant kind of thinking that's being stoked (not so much religious exactly), and it was 95% trauma-based. It's a horrible way to live. You do get the adrenaline rush of being right, and having lots and lots of people cheer you on for being right and fighting the good fight. But does it ever isolate you in a very weird way.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:52 AM on August 9, 2021 [21 favorites]

And I'm not saying they made the anger up out of whole cloth, obviously there was already anger there, a strain of american culture that also upheld a system of slavery for 200 years through violence. But the media ecosystem amplifies what is there.

And warriorqueen yeah absolutely on the drive towards fighting the righteous fight, and I think it's easier to fall into than a lot of people realize.
posted by subdee at 7:53 AM on August 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

I remember being in England years ago and being a bit nervous to approach staff anywhere after a while because they had no obligation to be nice. If they didn't like Americans or didn't like their job, they could be a dick about it. At the same time, I could see that people were more themselves at work, and I appreciated that. I wish that were true here in the US.

I think it still is in isolated enclaves. We were trying to park a rental in Brooklyn. We drove all over the place looking for cheap street parking and finally gave up and went to a garage. We pull in, there are three men standing there, we stop, they look at us. We roll down the windows, they look at us. We get out of the car, they look at us. Nobody rushes up to the car, "Welcome to Popeye's Garage, is this your first visit with us? We're so happy to serve you! Let me explain how we care for your vehicle!" We read the signs and provided payment, they accepted payment and keys and drove away in the rental. The whole transaction occurred in absolute blissful grumpy silence. It was unnerving on one level but on another profoundly reassuring. A rare serf-free commercial zone in America!
posted by Don Pepino at 7:56 AM on August 9, 2021 [13 favorites]

Like one example - the "understaffed" comments in this thread -- which I don't doubt but I wonder what the standard for that is, is it how long the line at the counter is? Because even pre-pandemic here in Toronto it wasn't unusual for me to stand 10 minutes in line at Winners and I just had to plan accordingly and it didn't really occur to me to frame it as "insufficient staff" but more like "there's always a line up at Winners."

Sometimes the environment sets these time expectations. When I'm in, say, a moderately sized local grocery shop with 4 check-out lines and 3 are open with a bit of a line, I think, oh well, I'm going to stand in line for a while and that's normal and ok.

When I see a giant Wal-Mart with 15 check-out lines and 3 are open with long lines, I am pretty grumpy about the management cutting hours for staff and making customers stand in line. I don't take this ill temper out on the staff but the bad mood is still there.
posted by tumbling at 8:18 AM on August 9, 2021 [20 favorites]

First is that right now, people are carrying trauma loads that are higher than they were before the pandemic. This is not an excuse, but it is a reason for some increased volatility.

I have worked in war zones and refugee camps, where people were repeatedly, directly traumatized for years. While you can't really apply the customer service context in the same way, I did not see people acting like this to shopkeepers or merchants, healthcare workers or teachers.

Americans are a specific breed of nightmare; trauma does not explain that.
posted by quadrilaterals at 8:22 AM on August 9, 2021 [41 favorites]

One thing that is also a contributor is that corporations often structure things such that service employees are disempowered to fully help customers. The decisions that result in the angering customers are being made at such a distance that the customer has no hope of having their grievances heard by anyone who can actually do anything. Some of this is simple "I can't control that" stuff that you get from a associate in a Wal-Mart.

But it can also be engineered. I worked customer support for AT&T years ago - however I didn't technically work for them, I worked for the company they contracted out to handle their customer support. Every day there would be at least one instance where the caller was justifiably angry but we were literally incapable of helping them. If a tech ran over their dog we weren't even provided local phone numbers for them to contact the local branch. Escalation to a "manager" was just playacting - they didn't have any more authority than we did. Our job was literally to act as a defensive wall between AT&T and their customers.

So among all the other issues also consider the massive untouchable monolith that is the modern soulless corporation and the frustration that comes from dealing with it.
posted by charred husk at 8:24 AM on August 9, 2021 [33 favorites]

It's cynical to consider but there is real money in making people feel insecure by giving them a status (object) that can then be taken away from them. The more precarity is perceived, the more valued a sense of security. And what is a sense of security if not knowing the other person cannot hurt you (back)?

Sometimes I think it's no coincidence that many products/business models these days are little more than a (thin) wrapper around a core promise of security/trust/belonging. There's been been a real push to destroy un- or poorly-monetizable sources of security (our natural resources, our skills and knowledge, the relationships with our friends and neighbours, ...). If you can restructure trust relationships so as to divest yourself off the responsibilities, you can sell the product at a profit and call it liberty. Trust as a commodity, at the expense of the community. But then I drink my premium coffee and I feel a little better.
posted by dmh at 8:33 AM on August 9, 2021 [9 favorites]

Turns out when you “disrupt” business models by using technology to squeeze out humans, the humanity goes with them.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:38 AM on August 9, 2021 [4 favorites]

Years of bitter experience in customer service have given me a spinal cord and brainstem level awareness for the posture and expression of a customer engaging in some fuckshit. Out in the world as a customer myself, I can recognize it at any distance. The forward hunch and the rise of the shoulders. The flush in the neck and the wild, expanded eyes. The hand that arises like a hook - jabbing and raking across the counter, pointing many places, but mostly the register monitor.

The monitor itself is twisted around at an unnatural angle for the operator, as it is positioned for the customer to better supervise their purchase, and panic about coupon codes and loyalty cards not applying to the balance until everything gets totaled up. I try not to watch this monitor when my own order are getting rung up, as I find the anxiety it provokes in me shameful. Of course the fellow ringing my purchase will apply my discounts - he operates that device and software 40 hours a week, he knows what he's doing - but the monitor is as large and bright as an arrivals and departures board, its font a bold san serif, all its colors blazing primaries, and I'm already expending quite a lot of focus on not reading any tabloid headlines.

The monitor merely being there communicates to me that this person at the register is someone to watch for mischief. It also communicates to the operator that any errors will be known instantly, and by all. It's grotesque, so I prefer to keep my eyes down on the card reader monitor and await my own instructions. Do you want to donate to our prearranged tax write off that incidentally involves a charity? (No) Would you like cash back? (Sometimes) The limit is $60. (That's reasonable, but I can't remember when it changed) Would you like to take a survey about your experience today? (No, Jesus, please be content with continuing to harvest my loyalty card data and stop asking me to inform on your workers)
posted by EatTheWeek at 8:38 AM on August 9, 2021 [25 favorites]

Americans are a specific breed of nightmare; trauma does not explain that.

I read a book a while back called A Brief History of Anxiety that looked at differences in anxiety in different cultures (I think it was just one chapter, and I'm not at all sure it was definitive) that talked about how in some societies there were still different outlets for coping with anxiety (lots of them ritualistic or kind of philosophically based) but in certain Western societies the only coping mechanisms left were mostly pharmaceutical.

I'm not sure I agree with the specifics but it did leave me with the question, actually in my own life more than applying it to other people, about what things and ways of seeing the world would help me feel better/more grounded.

I think the trouble in comparing one traumatized group to another is that you can't remove the way that trauma is narrated and shaped socially from the trauma itself. For example, the trauma I had as a child, which was not acknowledged or able to be spoken at all, has rested in me differently than losing my daughter.

And even being able to say casually, "oh, I have PTSD," and knowing that people can attribute that to my very public loss and not having to tie it into the shame and stigma of childhood abuse and incest, has helped me personally a lot, even though I would really rather not have gone through the second trauma (and would like my daughter to have been ok.)

So although I totally hear you and I think there is indeed something specific to the American context (although I note even in this thread people are pointing to other contexts), I think it is context-driven. In a society where a number of people truly believe if Jesus loves them they will be materially rich (and therefore if they are not, what does that say???), that sick people deserve not to have care if they are poor, and that the way to security and participation in society is to be driven to create businesses that exploit others and our resources, it's not really surprising that the expression of trauma isn't always pro-social.

However, as an American-Canadian I also want to say that you can point to a lot of American generosity and stepping up in the face of trauma as well. Particularly in the face of intergenerational trauma.

None of that makes abusive behaviour as a customer okay. And yah, I can spot an upset American in Toronto's Union Station at 20 feet.
posted by warriorqueen at 8:42 AM on August 9, 2021 [18 favorites]

research has associated this kind of work with elevated levels of stress hormones, burnout, depression, and increased alcohol consumption. I've done a lot of customer service jobs, not tipped. I have a very part-time job doing call center work. It's rare for customers to be really unpleasant, and if a customer gets abusive I will either drop or transfer them. Some customers are demanding, needy, unpleasant, but that's what people are like. I am super courteous, not obsequious. The thing is, it takes so much energy. You'd think the work would be easy, but it's exhausting. I hate being scheduled 8 hours, and more than a few days a week, because it takes all my energy. If I had to rely on tips, it would be soul-draining.

Being in the service class at work equals low status, which makes the worker subject to bullying, and is really stressful in measurable ways. The wealthy sometimes have a smooth noblesse oblige, an assumption that they are exempt from many rules, and it's maddeningly, not least because it's accurate.
posted by theora55 at 8:43 AM on August 9, 2021 [8 favorites]

What [bullshit corporate jobs] do provide, though, is income, the use of which can feel sort of like an identity.

Bingo. I can buy, therefore I am. I can buy more than you, therefore I am better than you.

Working as a cashier in my youth, I once heard a customer tell a fellow cashier, "I could buy and sell you." Boy, did we drink a lot that night.
posted by scratch at 9:09 AM on August 9, 2021 [10 favorites]

But it can also be engineered. I worked customer support for AT&T years ago - however I didn't technically work for them, I worked for the company they contracted out to handle their customer support. Every day there would be at least one instance where the caller was justifiably angry but we were literally incapable of helping them. If a tech ran over their dog we weren't even provided local phone numbers for them to contact the local branch. Escalation to a "manager" was just playacting - they didn't have any more authority than we did. Our job was literally to act as a defensive wall between AT&T and their customers.

It is engineered. I could write a book about this. I'm thinking of writing a book about this, only it's such a depressing fucking topic I'm not sure I want to invest a few years in it.

I try not to watch this monitor when my own order are getting rung up, as I find the anxiety it provokes in me shameful.

Er...if you grew up poor/poor-ish, you know to watch that monitor like a hawk. You can't afford to absorb anyone else's errors, be that the individual cashier or the corporation's. Sorry.
posted by praemunire at 9:18 AM on August 9, 2021 [4 favorites]

Some days I want to open a coffee shop just so I can reassure the staff they have full freedom to tell every entitled piece of shit who walks in the door hoping to make someone's day bad to walk right tf back out again.

Yes!! I worked at a very small, most excellent bakery/cafe like this owned/run by a married couple close to me in age. The stuff they made was sooo good people would drive from out of state to get stuff. We didn't even have a phone because we would sell out of our goods before we even opened if we did. But yeah the owners' attitude was "if you're rude to our staff you can GTFO, you're not entitled to our labor/product if you can't be nice" and it was extremely fucking refreshing. If people threw a fit and left because of our policies, their attitude was "good, we don't want your shitty attitude money anyway, and we don't need it because we're so good." And that business model worked. Don't patronize the babies and we don't need their patronage either.
posted by erattacorrige at 9:42 AM on August 9, 2021 [23 favorites]

Yeah the people who were poor didn't scream at me when a coupon applied incorrectly, they usually talked to me like a human with whom they wanted to discuss a problem. Well to do people on the other hand devolved into screaming petulant children.
posted by Ferreous at 9:44 AM on August 9, 2021 [9 favorites]

Whenever I get the "we are experiencing unusually high call volumes at the moment" response from a call centre's automatic system, I mentally translate it to "we've understaffed the call centre again". Also, if that call volume is unusually high every single day (as the ubiquity of this response suggests), what's so damned unusual about it?
posted by Paul Slade at 9:44 AM on August 9, 2021 [17 favorites]

And I believe social media behavior is backing up into our actual lives.

Just wanted to mention that this is a common, but false, distinction: online behavior is actual, real-life behavior. The only difference is context, whether an interaction is in-person or technologically mediated. But all behavior is real.

To wit:

There's a whole media ecosystem right now built around making people as angry as possible and encouraging them to commit violence as a way to further the political goals of a small minority, I think it's a mistake to overlook that.

I think a fair part of what’s happening lately is that people are doing what the TV and the Facebook (etc.) tell them to do, and right now millions of Americans consume mediated content that tells them they should be very angry, even violently angry, and so that’s how they feel and how they’re acting.

Those billions of dollars of profits going to the CEOs and shareholders are paid for in human misery.

QFT QFT QFT
posted by LooseFilter at 9:49 AM on August 9, 2021 [9 favorites]

there is real money in making people feel insecure by giving them a status (object) that can then be taken away from them.

I think it’s a combination of this, and how the media sells an image of normalcy that few if any people can afford. In the pandemic, that’s much more obvious.

I was chatting with a friend, and she was talking about how she was watching a TV show that was showcasing ostensibly working class people in my high cost-of-living city, and they had a guest bedroom, a master suite, etc. a host of things that could never be afforded. Or look, for a generation back, at the Brady Bunch, which was pitched as the height of normalcy except for their gimmick, which had a housekeeper. Media portrays eating out as common and normal. Meanwhile, eating out is getting more and more expensive for less and less food as computer capitalism optimizes their profits in every possible slice.

So people take their family out to eat, and instead of a 40$ meal, it’s a 100$ meal, while wages have not significantly improved. People are crammed into smaller spaces that aren’t just small but they are told makes them below the norm of humanity even if it’s not true. People feel their perceived “middle class” slipping, except they don’t have class consciousness so they think it’s Just Them. And they get afraid. And people in fear do lash out - more than people who have been traumatized and have a very specific and intentional response to handling fear.
posted by corb at 9:54 AM on August 9, 2021 [12 favorites]

Honestly though, I've done jobs where I was knee deep in sewage, jobs where I've had to lug thousands of lbs of wood a day, and by far the most degrading shitty job I have ever had was working at a barnes and noble. That is a company that fucking exists to export misery onto its employees. Getting told I have to take returns of romance novels that have been read and are covered in bodily fluids, having a guy draw swastikas in the bathroom every weekend but not being able to ban him, my manager screaming at me because I had the audacity to look at my phone when there were no customers in the dvd section I couldn't leave. The entire model of that store was you existed to be treated like shit for the amusement of people who loved to exert what little hateful influence they had in life. That's what retail/food service is in America, irredeemable human garbage taking out their hate on people who can't fight back.

I don't buy that it's trauma, it's just self loathing and spite directed onto someone with no recourse in a system that reinforces and rewards that behavior. If every person who screamed at a service employee because they could was banned from the store you wouldn't see it happen all the time, but screaming at employees is treated as a valid way to get your way. It's a positive feedback loop for sick fucks who get off on abuse.
posted by Ferreous at 10:00 AM on August 9, 2021 [19 favorites]

If every person who screamed at a service employee because they could was banned from the store you wouldn't see it happen all the time

I have to agree with this because that's my workplace - we don't permit it, it's antithetical to our business.

However, even with those policies as I said, right now we've seen an uptick in volatile clients...not to the level of abuse you are describing, for sure, but kind of primed for increased conflict/upset.
posted by warriorqueen at 10:12 AM on August 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

Oh also, I have legit diagnosed PTSD & I have a cultural background of entitled parents who treated waitstaff etc etc horribly (like my mom would actually yell at the cops if she got pulled over, I get not liking the cops but actually yelling at them takes it to another level) so all of that shitty behavior was modeled to me AND YET -- in spite of an actual PTSD dx & in spite of cultural factors -- I can actually control & maintain my composure when frustrated in public-facing interactions because I know it is simply not OK to dump on people. Like, come on people. (Oh and I am poor so maybe that's another reason because I have actual compassion for people who are ALSO poor). If anything I work extra hard to be pleasant & kind to those helping me out because I assume that they're like 1 paycheck away from homelessness & they need this job even though they hate this job because that is literally the equation for 99% of all people.
posted by erattacorrige at 10:21 AM on August 9, 2021 [10 favorites]

Most of us don't snap and snarl at our bosses or at doctors or cops or lawyers - people with social power.

I'm with you on bosses and cops - people who have immediate and direct power to inflict consequences on us. I'm less sure about the other categories - I have no insight into lawyers, but my wife is a primary care doc, and patients are shitty to her on the regular. In the last year this has run the gamut from people being vaguely disrespectful, to folks making absurd and self-centered demands (both in terms of their actual medical care and in terms of the "quality of service" they received), to actual and repeated threats. The last of these fortunately did not ultimately result in violence, but was particularly concerning because it was both very close in time to a shooting at a nearby clinic and also handled very poorly by her employer (the same organization that owns the clinic where the shooting occurred).
posted by nickmark at 10:21 AM on August 9, 2021 [6 favorites]

I’m absolutely sure (the pandemic) made the situation worse. But it didn’t create the situation.

The article's point is that something has fundamentally changed about shoppers in recent years that makes them even more horrible than they used to be. I think rather that it’s the same base level of mistreatment as before, amped up to 11 by the stress and horror of pandemic. That’s not an excuse or justification for the behavior, by any means.
posted by Galvanic at 10:23 AM on August 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

Whenever I get the "we are experiencing unusually high call volumes at the moment" response from a call centre's automatic system,

I just assume it’s a lie and it’s the standard greeting. Sometimes I’ve idly wondered if that would support an unfair trade practices class action. It would certainly be a gratifying admission to force.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:29 AM on August 9, 2021 [3 favorites]

America tolerates, endorses and rewards abuse towards service industry workers like nowhere else. The only real solution to it is to actually punish the actions of abusers but no one wants to do that because abused employees are scared and stressed and easier to manipulate. If you think you're going to lose your job if you aren't sufficiently obsequious to someone screaming slurs why would you think you're worthy of a raise or better working conditions?

More than anything I think the main reason that people are getting worse isn't that they're more stressed at home, it's them running into situations that you can't solve by abusing an employee. Screaming at the cashier can't make the store carry something they can't get, 20 cars in line at the fast food place won't go any quicker if you throw a drink at the person behind the service window. The reward for abuse isn't always there and these fucks need their high, one way or another.
posted by Ferreous at 10:29 AM on August 9, 2021 [8 favorites]

with 15 check-out lines and 3 are open with long lines, I am pretty grumpy about the management

At one of our national grocery chains here in Canada, they have a banner proudly proclaiming that on Sunday afternoons, all check-out lanes will be open! (So proud! So bold! Such management! .... except... well, people have observed that it's rarely correct)

I don't care - I don't know why people get so upset after having to wait in a line, when most of us have a device in our pockets to entertain us at any whim or waiting period.
posted by rozcakj at 10:37 AM on August 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

If you carefully look at the typical arguments in defense of workers, it becomes clear that workers' ideology is always ends up in service of their bosses. Very often complaints about "bad customers" ignore this fundamental power imbalance. Customer service exists to protect companies and the market, not to serve customers.

Very true. When I worked in service, one of the biggest grievances we had was that the bosses always took the abusive customers' side against us.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:59 AM on August 9, 2021 [7 favorites]

The British Psychological Society happened to publish this article on their blog within the last day or so: "Service With A Smile" Requirement And Reliance On Tips Puts Workers At Risk Of Sexual Harassment.
posted by Lexica at 11:13 AM on August 9, 2021 [9 favorites]

Er...if you grew up poor/poor-ish, you know to watch that monitor like a hawk. You can't afford to absorb anyone else's errors, be that the individual cashier or the corporation's. Sorry.

Point taken, but it's probably best not be making assumptions about anyone else's family background based on an internet comment or two, don't you think? The sense memory I have of making grocery purchases during my intervals of poverty is still of watching the card reader window in nauseated suspense, and feeling a little flush of relief and triumph when it said "approved." It didn't always, in those days! I still get a minor version of this nervous rush when making larger purchases; feels like I've gotten away with something, somehow.
posted by EatTheWeek at 11:16 AM on August 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

Parallel study on Covid-19 stress and political anger

"We were also surprised to find that COVID-19 burden does not need additional triggers to motivate political violence," said Bartusevičius. "It is seemingly enough on its own."

In contrast, the research revealed no consistent correlations between the COVID-19 burden and the motivation to engage in peaceful forms of activism.

posted by clew at 11:34 AM on August 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think the pandemic has really emphasized the dark side of individualism in American culture- like people refusing to wear a mask because it's their right, even when complying with public health recommendations like wearing a mask or getting vaccinated literally saves lives. The individual thinks that their "rights" (in reality, their opinions or expectations) are more important than a functioning society, and that attitude translates into people with this mindset treating service industry workers like crap. They feel justified- how dare this lowly worker disrespect me and my rights? There have always been jerks, but now a lot of people feel more righteous and justified about acting like jerks, as it seems like it's more acceptable in a variety of contexts. I hate it. Politeness can cover a multitude of sins, but it can also make a service worker's job a lot less terrible.
posted by emd3737 at 11:34 AM on August 9, 2021 [26 favorites]

The experience of buying a new television or a double cheeseburger in a store has gotten worse in your lifetime.

I'm not sure I agree with this. First of all, ordering a tv in ye olden days often was a commissioned sale, and a tiny black and white tv cost more than a 60" flatscreen on a black Friday sale (and the color version the rest of the time). Businesses literally advertise "no commissioned sales force" as a reason to shop in their stores.

Also blanket condemnation of ordering screens is not really called for. The Taco Bell taco computer is an amazing ordering experience due to the sheer amount of customization it offers. It's like everything else, it depends on the experience and the design. The QR menus are an example of bad design, but it was a short-term stopgap when people still needed to eat but didn't want to die touching a menu.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:36 AM on August 9, 2021 [3 favorites]

> Very true. When I worked in service, one of the biggest grievances we had was that the bosses always took the abusive customers' side against us.

Library management usually doesn't take the side of abusive customers, per se, but they will move heaven and earth to avoid doing anything to address the problem in all but the very worst cases, which in practical terms usually amounts to the same thing.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:53 AM on August 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

The idea that American customer-service models operate on the desire to cosplay being rich resonates with my experience like a mountain-sized bell.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 12:52 PM on August 9, 2021 [10 favorites]

If you complain loudly enough and ask to speak with a manager "The customer is always right".

That's what retail has taught folks....that yes, they are always going to get their way.

A bunch of bad yelp comments will behoove the business to cowtow to your whims just to quickly resolve the negative review.

It's appearances over reality; YOU have been WRONGED, which is echoed on media and news. Over and over again. Every day and in every manner possible to garner more followers and croud-base the TRUTH; preach it.

The hammer rings out as the billboard is raised. It's the hammer of justice and war as it nails the essential worker's coffin shut.

And, so, we cannot get workers. They are worthless, anyway. But we neeeed them. Where are theyyyyy?
posted by mightshould at 1:07 PM on August 9, 2021 [3 favorites]

Bartender/concessions supervisor here.

Americans leaned towards generally being shit customers before the pandemic.

All covid did was rip the translucent veneer of civility off.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 1:18 PM on August 9, 2021 [12 favorites]

Content warning for descriptions of personal violence in this comment.

I read this part of the article...

> I had arrived at my assigned seat to find a man who had no intention of getting up.

...and I knew without a doubt that the author was a woman.

It's not the pandemic, or America, or stress, or Twinkies, or any of that.

BULLIES DON'T LACK EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE, THEY ARE DEMONSTRATING IT.

They are strong and the target they have selected is weak. This isn't an accident. When Amy Cooper didn't like a black man in Central Park telling her to put her dog on a leash, she sized up their relative statuses accurately and immediately, and knew exactly how to threaten him: "I’m calling the cops... I’m gonna tell them there's an African American man threatening my life."

There's random violence to Asians and Asian Americans: I'm not personally worried for myself because no one is going to attack a 5' 9" man with a shaved head and resting angry face and a penchant to stare at people. They attack elderly people. That's a choice.

A man "loses his temper", pounding the wall next to his wife's head, getting saliva on her face as he screams at her, breaks her things of sentimental value, shoves her to floor (careful not to bruise her in any place that will show). But when the cop shows up he's all sheepish smile, "I'm sorry officer, we were having a heated family argument. I didn't mean to worry the neighbors but I suppose it did get loud."

The change is instantaneous. He didn't "lose control", he was always in control.

None of this is new. The pandemic didn't cause it, just like Trump didn't turn anyone into a racist genocidal fascist: they just became an impolite racist genocidal fascist. The only thing that's changed is the signals from authority: "You can now add 'tried to force me to wear a mask' as a new excuse for what you've always been doing." It's a new tool along with "religious freedom" and "stand your ground" and all the other plausibly deniable lies that conservatives use to justify their cruel barbarism.

This guy sat in an airplane seat and when he saw whose seat it was, he knew he didn't have to get up. He knew it with certainty. He knew it in his brainstem.

I continued reading the article: It turns out he was right.

The problem with liberals is you think you can win and get what you want through talking.
posted by AlSweigart at 1:59 PM on August 9, 2021 [48 favorites]

The problem with liberals is you think you can win and get what you want through talking.

Personally, I mostly just stopped caring about "winning". Because the conditions of victory and loss are artificial, 99% of the time I'm never going to see this person I'm "losing" to again, and even in the few times in the distant past when I "won" it certainly didn't feel like it. Also, some Americans are just way too prideful and concerned about "winning".

But I know this isn't a solution that everyone can afford, which is why I began with "personally". So, caveat emptor too I guess.
posted by FJT at 3:17 PM on August 9, 2021 [6 favorites]

My mother gets unreasonably angry at many people, including customer service people, about extremely small things. She doesn't always react in the moment, sometimes it's just that she has a temper tantrum about it later, at me or at my dad. In her case, I think that she is missing some of the basic social skills that are necessary to support productive conflict, and so she experiences basically every minor surprise as having been pwned, a threat to her autonomy and an offense to her sense of order and justice. I could tell a just-so story about what it means that these skills are missing, but ultimately I'm not sure that level of explanation is helpful. Bottom line is, she lives in society, but she is bad at society, and it has had pretty predictable effects on her quality of life.

I can tell you, it is challenging, having been raised by a person with this problem. I'm in my forties and I'm having to pay someone to teach me about productive conflict and how to manage strong emotions. I know more than my mom does, but less than I should.

I can't say whether the generic "ugly American" also suffers from a skills gap. Maybe not. I hear you all that sometimes people do profit from being this kind of asshole, turning the rage on at will, and I believe you, but I also believe that that is not universally true.
posted by eirias at 3:59 PM on August 9, 2021 [10 favorites]

Think what's made the pandemic so particularly ugly with regard to service workers is that so much of what corporations offer us is a reassurance fo where we are in society by how their front line workers treat us. And that is especially true in (shudder) casual dining restaurants, where the food is mediocre and the "experience" involves waiters pretending to have a fun banter with us. So being made to take affirmative measures for your waiter's safety, while waiting longer for a table in a barely filled room adds up to doing away with all the trappings that tell you that you made it in life, and remind you that you're actually not that much less precarious in your place as the waiter. And people just can't deal.

Getting that kind of reassurance about my station in life is not something I can draw from interacting with people, because, well, that involves interacting with people, and that is not my cup of tea for the most part. But this isn't something that can just abate as the pandemic does.
posted by ocschwar at 7:27 PM on August 9, 2021 [7 favorites]

When I was in college, I worked as a server at this fancy restaurant in NYC where a single dish cost more than half than what I made in a busy day.

On a particularly busy Saturday after a ten hour shift and just as the kitchen was about to close, this couple came in for a full 3 course dinner. Anyone who’s worked in a restaurant knows the feeling of having a single table extend your shift by another shitty two hours while you were looking forward to go home.

Anyway, so I serve the table but I’m exhausted and my face is mostly neutral. I’m not rude, I’m not giving them shitty service, there is nothing late coming to their table and nothing missing. I’m just not putting on any facade of enthusiasm and I’m just politely cold. At the end of the service, they went to complain to the manager, who incidentally was a POS, that I ruined their expensive fancy NYC meal because I wasn’t acting enough like a circus monkey. I got let go the next day by said POS manager.

My point is, the service industry is not too far off from actually being a servant industry and for every normal customer there are 100 petty, rude brutes who think their shitty 20$ or 200$ entitles them to actual human beings groveling at their feet for a tip. It’s a disgusting , dehumanizing industry where abuse of workers by every piece of shit that enters a store or restaurant is seen just as part and parcel of doing business. This was a long long long time before the pandemic and I cannot even fathom what service industry workers must be dealing with now.
posted by Riverside at 6:29 AM on August 10, 2021 [15 favorites]

Even if it isn't universally true that people turn on the rage at will it is almost always rewarded with the results the party that sees themselves as aggrieved wants.

Being bad at society isn't an excuse at being shit to people with no ability to combat that abuse.

I in no way mean to excuse my mother. I don’t think the world has excused her. She has exactly the social life you would expect for someone who gets angry over nonsense on a weekly basis. She has so little interaction with other human beings that when I recently visited she was worn out and sick of me and my family within hours. It is grievously sad to me.

This gambit clearly works for Donald Trump. However, I don’t think it’s a good plan for most people to get what they want. It’s definitely not a good plan for most women. It is much, much more effective to be nice.

Would you rather have your way in a series of one shot interactions with strangers, or have a skillset that affords making and keeping friends? I know which I’d pick. Pro tip, if you have the second one you can ALSO often get the first. My in-laws never lose their cool, and everywhere they go they make friends who are happy to do them favors later, so they almost always get what they want. It’s unreal to me every time I hear one of their stories, having grown up the way I did. To me that’s actually what privilege looks like. I have no illusions about how easy all this would be for them if they weren’t from the majority culture. But they also have a ton of emotional skills that I think are hereditarily absent in my family. And they put in the work. And with all that at your back, there’s truly no percentage in losing your temper.
posted by eirias at 6:33 AM on August 10, 2021 [9 favorites]

Personally, I mostly just stopped caring about "winning".

I agree. I generally let those people win. Clearly it means more to them than it does to me, they will make my life hell until they win, and I am a woman, I am going to lose no matter what anyway. Might as well get it over with.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:42 AM on August 10, 2021

On a related note: "I made a joke that upset him and he started yelling and calling me names. I have learned that when Tom gets like that, it’s best to just agree with him."
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:51 AM on August 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure it's a class thing, but I think it is a...relationship to time thing. Sometimes I think Americans are raised to believe that if they do everything right/have grit and determination/get up at 5 am and have 3 side gigs that they will be able to optimize everything.

We are; but that teaching is how they condition us to survive/accept the very real material need for the 3 side gigs to pay for the ability to, for example, maybe not die horribly of treatable illnesses. A lot of comfortable people are able to look at someone who's flipping out about a long grocery store line or bad traffic and say "what's yer hurry, bub."

But the hurry is "the daycare charges me FOUR HOURS of my wages every 5 MINUTES I am late" or "I have 2 tardiness strikes at the job that provides my health insurance." Peoples' shit is precarious. Like actually precarious, not perception-of-precarity. Everything is hostile, in the US. Every last goddamn thing is literally out to ruin you.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:38 AM on August 10, 2021 [15 favorites]

Restauranteur Tom Colichio ran an experiment at one of his restaurants, eliminating tipping and instituting a 20% service charge per check.

His opinion? The people who complain the loudest about removing tipping are the ones who want to use not-tipping as a stick. “How can I compel good service from the wait staff if I do not threaten them with a bad tip?” But more importantly, “How can I punish bad service if I can’t withhold a tip?”

That last point was the strongest motivation amongst respondents who resented the flat service charge. The urge to punish those who serve them insufficiently well.

I hate tipping. As a professional, I would rather we just pay people a living wage.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 8:39 AM on August 10, 2021 [11 favorites]

I can tell you, it is challenging, having been raised by a person with this problem. I'm in my forties and I'm having to pay someone to teach me about productive conflict and how to manage strong emotions. I know more than my mom does, but less than I should.

Ugh, yes. Both of my parents have/had such strange and unpleasant relationships to these kinds of interactions and it has been a lot to unpack over the years. Both of my parents work/worked in the service industry their entire lives. Both of them can/could also be absolute fucking nightmares to other service workers.* I spent my childhood dying of humiliation as they yelled or nagged or otherwise just refused to deal with some suboptimal service experience.

My siblings and I have overcorrected to the point where I think we'd rather cut off our own ears than send something back at a restaurant, even if it's the wrong thing entirely or like...actively on fire. But that isn't a productive conflict mode either, merely something we're able to absorb because by chance and good fortune we have less precarity than our parents did at our ages. We are able to pick our battles because a $25 baggage fee or a hidden service charge, however unfair it may be, isn't going to overdraft our accounts.

*My father could also be an absolute dream customer; it just depended on when you caught him. But he was the kind of person who could Not turn the anger on or off at will--he regularly mouthed off to bosses, doctors, cops with the results you would expect.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:27 AM on August 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

My daughter is a server at an exclusive tennis club, and would emphatically disagree that the ultrarich are nicer to the help.
posted by lumpy at 12:01 PM on August 12, 2021 [2 favorites]

I was surprised by just how much "being served" matters to some people. When the pandemic was in full swing and service businesses closed in my state, there was some talk about the effect on small business owners, but really the focus was on lack of service.

I am weirdly the other way, I hate being served and will do anything to avoid it, I overly identify with the server and get weird, it's something I'm working on. But my personal issue made me completely oblivious to just how many people out there make their ability to be served by others an important part of their identity. I think a direct line runs from American slavery to the current obsession with service. I really think these people construct an identity around being 'better' than others, and a big part of that is being able to afford to boss people around and make them feel small.
posted by chaz at 12:59 PM on August 12, 2021 [8 favorites]

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