I don’t know about you, but I call that outright BRIBERY.

Here’s just a sample of what I’ve seen customers getting away with:

-Leaving trash in shopping carts, ranging from rotten food to…well, I won’t go into detail. But seriously…carts are NOT trash cans on wheels. Why aren’t these people being told to throw out their OWN garbage?

-Taking carts from a store and leaving them in ANOTHER store’s parking lot. Never mind that it just means more stress on the cart attendants, who are often juggling other tasks as well.

-Being favored by managers whenever they complain about employees…never mind whatever THEY did to upset the employee in the first place. That’s never even considered.

-Flagging down random employees when they’re right in the middle of a strenuous task, without even bothering to say: “I’m sorry to bother you, sir/ma’am.”

-Displaying poor hygiene in public restrooms.

-Taking merchandise from some aisle and leaving it in a completely un-related section.

-Assuming that because an employee wears a uniform, they’re supposed to know every single thing about the whole store, including any deals and sales that might’ve been made by the corporation.

-Blowing simple little goofs–like a cart-pusher accidentally nudging against THEIR cart–WAY out of proportion.

I know all of these incidents, because I suffered them. They turned my job into a nightmare. And, eventually, the unfair customer favoritism by my managers ended up in me losing my job, after four faithful years of service. How is that justice?

Something has to be done. Someone’s got to stand up and say, “enough.” Because this is nothing more than the 21st-century form of bigotry…the general public assumes that we retail workers are nothing but mindless drones, meant to smile and do every little thing we want. And that’s got to change.

WordPress doesn’t offer a way to subscribe to comments without first commenting, but I’ll look for a plugin that does that. Meanwhile, you CAN subscribe to the comments feed RSS (see link top of sidebar), if you use a feedreader at all. (I would offer to burn it to Feedburner so you can get email updates, but that service has been 100% unreliable lately, so I’m not convinced you’d get them.)

….

How is that legal? I mean, obviously it is, but I’m left confused.

Customer service jobs up here pay shite and get buckets of abuse. It’s like the theory is that anyone can do the job, so no one who does it matters as a human being, and if you did matter you wouldn’t be working there anyway. Walking into Zellers, a big Canadian retailer, is so depressing because of everything about the store – the colours, the lighting, the merchandise and the employees wearing awful uniforms and an air of exhaustion – that I can’t imagine working there.

Whenever we start having financial difficulties I get the shakes at the idea of going back to working in customer service in general and convenience stores in particular. I was in far more danger from the public working in a gas station (I was robbed twice, once at gunpoint, once at knife point) than I was when I worked at a bar, since bars tend to have security.

Jennifer, is there a way to subscribe to comments without having to comment? Hoyden has that option.

That is what human beings are really like, deep down. That doesn’t mean things are hopeless and we can’t do better – we do, most of the time. But we need a culture that demands we do better, and uniformly punishes acts of selfishness whether they result in a death at Wal-Mart or corporate executives raking in millions from this latest catastrophe (they caused) in the world economy. I see a direct relationship here: we’ve got a couple of generations now who’ve never seen a major player in the power structure held accountable for his or her misdeeds. We KNOW there’s a set of rules for the rich/powerful and another set entirely for the rest of us. We’re disillusioned and angry, and NOW they’re destroying what prosperity any of us were managing to enjoy. We should be trampling CEOs on Wall Street instead of workers at Wal-Mart, but (sadly) abuse usually gets passed on rather than returned to the server.