What Mistreating Retail Workers Says about You
Today I will divert from my usual more goofy posts to write something a little bit darker and closer to home.
I have worked retail almost my entire working life. It is a miserable experience fraught with having to deal with most of the worst that humanity has to offer and unlike everything we are taught growing up about how the best way to defeat bullies is either to ignore them or stand up to them, neither of the above are possible in this job profession.
You cannot ignore a bully when they are the customer. You are forced to listen to their every need, even if that need is making you feel awful because they have nothing better to do. If their needs is venting extra stress with their own life, guess how little say you have in defending yourself?
Even worse is the idea of standing up to a bully when they are the customer. Standing up to a customer, no matter how outrageous their demand, no matter how horrible they are treating you, is a quick way to lose a job. For many people in retail myself included, we are just one paycheck away from poverty. We have no choice in the matter and the choice we have to make here is obvious.
Whenever I complain to friends and family about the horrible work conditions, their generic response is to find a job. Finding a job is like a full time job of its own and when all your energy is being expended by a source that is required for you to survive, how likely do you suppose is possible to muster up energy to do anything else?
A mini show I once watched really summed up the way that retail workers are treated and also more revealing, shows much about these bullies who mistreat them.
Retail workers are seen as the refuse of society. One tends to associate minimum wage workers with failure. They are seen as a waste of space in society. In some countries, they are even considered part of the group of unspeakables. In these places, low wage workers are ignored by everyone else to the point that they almost don’t exist at all.
Instead of going the way of many movies that already beat to death the idea of how much society needs retail workers to function, instead I will talk more about the people who tend to mistreat them instead.
Going back to the example of the mini show I watched, while the low end workers are ignored and pick up the slack (and trash) of the rest of the world, the people who mistreat them the most, are only at most two steps on the economic ladder than their victims. Most are actually only one step above.
The poor mostly just exist as a tool for the wealthy to hang as a constant threat to slightly more successful people that if they don’t keep working for the top, they will become part of the bottom. It is quite amusing thus, that the people only a few steps from being victims themselves are the ones who victimize their under payed, highly improvised workers.
That should serve as a warning to these people instead of allow them to continue their cycle of misery. There is another part to this puzzle that is what keeps me working and putting up with their torment. This ladder of elevation does not have one line up. I have noticed quite obviously in the difference between the retail workers intelligence and the customers own. (I will let you take a guess which is higher of the two) that the bullies will stay where they are forever, while many of the retail workers will skip up to higher points of economic success.
So to all my fellow slaves in the retail industry, do not let these bullies bring you down, for you were born smarter and better than them. The customer may be right for the time being, but soon, you will achieve your potential and leave them down below and reveal who the real waste of space is.