#i had an old dude accuse my coffee bar of being in on a seattle-wide conspiracy to discontinue decaf coffee For Him Specifically

[lathrine]

im reading an article about how vitriolic people visiting the national parks have gotten, and it is SO cathartic to see my exact experiences in grocery retail be restated by the customer service reps working in the parks.

like its awful, obvious. the average customer has gotten so nasty, and the employees Do Not deserve the treatment they’re receiving. but during 2020/2021, people seemed to think that those viral Nasty Customer videos were 1) not common and 2) relegated just to grocery/retail. and i cant speak for every single hospitality and customer service sector and store, but i can say that at my store that sort of vitriolic outbreak became VERY common. not constant, but common enough to bump the baseline up.

my manager and i had a conversation where she said a lot of her friends-- some of whom had been in the hospitality or customer service industry for over a decade-- were considering a career change because it was SO BAD and no one could even fathom how to move forward. none of us could imagine it ever getting better. our New Normal was people screaming at and berating us every day, blaming us for mask mandates and vaccines and supply shortages. threatening legal action and physical violence. of people intentionally trying to get us sick and terrorizing us. everything was an argument with no hope of de-escalation; it genuinely wouldve been less inciting to tell some of those customers “go fuck yourself” than it was to tell them “im so sorry, but.” and all that while we were surrounded by the extremely smothering reality that no one cared if we died and everyone considered us sub-human.

everyone i know who gave a fuck quit shortly after i did, because none of us could handle it anymore. this includes people who’d worked at that store since it opened, some of our most decorated and knowledgeable coworkers.

like. i dunno yall. its kind of like how you cant describe how things just Make Sense as you near the latter half of your 20s; i cant put into words just how horrifically awful customer service was at that time. if you didnt personally experience it, everything we say sounds like an exaggeration and hyperbole.

and i cannot stress this enough: its still that bad. i would imagine most customer service and hospitality places had the same thing happen: a mass exodus of everyone who knew what they were doing because they could not stand the abuse anymore, and a rotating door of new hires that Refuse (rightfully so!!!) to tolerate the abuse. there is a new breed of customer that genuinely Does Not Care about employees and see pleas of humanity and kindness as a challenge to see how quickly they can break the employee at the desk.

this is especially relevant now, with it being the holidays. employees are more short staffed and overworked than ever, and customers some how have even less patience. customers dont plan literally five minutes out, and then blame employees for not materializing their needs before them on a silver platter.

anyways. i dont know how this article ends, but i have a pretty good guess.

#ive mentioned this before but right before i quit i was having massive disassociation episodes and 8+ hr long anxiety attacks #then my work place announced they were ending employee mask mandates on what basically amounted to a pinky promise of vaccination #i Broke and i wrote up my resignation on the spot and i was out two work-days later. #i was so scared that it took me a month to even write up a new resume and start applying to jobs #blocked / forgot a LOT of the shit but like. we had to call the cops on a Bunch of people. #we had a whole group of like 20+ individuals come in maskless in like may of 2020 who didnt buy anything and just wanted to terrorize us #i had an old dude accuse my coffee bar of being in on a seattle-wide conspiracy to discontinue decaf coffee For Him Specifically #some lady berated me for ten minutes because she didnt like the answer i gave when she asked what filling we used for our eclairs #a regular had been banned from the local ulta for abusing the employees so NATURALLY she came to our store and rammed people with carts #threw shit at us and repeatedly pressured the cashiers into committing fraud #like it just. it Gets To You. #i genuinely loved that job. i planned on staying there for Years. #but it was so soul crushingly awful. #take prepandemic retail and triple how bad it was and you'll probably be close to COVID era customer service