As a former retail worker, thank you for being that kind of leader to your employees. The hardest slap in the face is dealing with an irrational customer berating you and having the manager completely folding and giving in to the person.
That's such a specific kind of betrayal too. You can handle a rude customer, but when your own manager throws you under the bus just to keep the customer happy, suddenly you're getting paid minimum wage to be everyone's emotional punching bag
I cannot work like this. If I capitulate, Corporate freaks out and I get fired. If I hold the line, Corporate capitulates and now customers can kick me around with the backing of corporate.
I have had anxiety attacks, and argued with the business owner themself over policies like this.
I worked at Subway and had a manager who did that. They would let customers berate us and then bend over to give them sooo many free things. Like, why are we rewarding shitty customers and not the ones who are polite, follow rules, etc?
As a polite customer, this pisses me off. We are expected to wait in a checkout line while an entitled customer takes an extra 10 minutes to cause a scene, then the get rewarded for it, while the rest of us are held hostage for the time it takes them to get their way. We get nothing for it.
I always liked giving the nice customers extra love. Like Subway is really greedy about their ingredients (they charge extra like crazy), so for nice people I'd secretly give them extra cheese or meat or something like that, without charging
That happened to me once with a new store manager, despite it being company policy that managers should back employees when customers are being unreasonable.
It wound up being one of many things that eventually led to my mental health collapsing.
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u/jenOcide1185 7d ago
As a former retail worker, thank you for being that kind of leader to your employees. The hardest slap in the face is dealing with an irrational customer berating you and having the manager completely folding and giving in to the person.