The customer is always entitled

Consumer culture is a scourge

Today’s accompanying tune: “bury a friend” by Billie Eilish

My first “real” job — one with a biweekly paycheck and a boss that could be described, most generously, as creepy — was working at a toy store during the holidays in the next town over. That job helped perfect my gift-wrapping skills, taught me the mundanity of inventorying, and, more than anything, provided a crash course in the service industry in which I would work for the better part of a decade.

I started the job in October, just as temperatures were starting to cool and parents were starting to budget for end-of-year gifts. For roughly $7.50 an hour, I manned the cash register, tidied up the displays, and answered questions from parents concerned about which wooden dowel toy would best set their toddler up for a successful college career. It was 2008, and the housing crash was reverberating among our enclave of middle and upper-middle class denizens. Surely this purchase, whether or not they could afford the monthly credit card payments that would persist long after the tree was relegated to the curb, would insulate their children from future worry, future uncertainty. They couldn’t control much, but they could control this, these brief moments in a retail store picking out gifts while berating the staff comprised of high school students.

I almost walked out on Black Friday moments after one mother screamed at me. This was the hey-day of Black Friday, the time of fist fights in Walmart parking lots and screaming matches in Best Buy. The struggle for a deal as much a physical phenomenon as it was a mental or financial one. We’d fully staffed the store in anticipation of our 5 a.m. opening time. We’d been told by the store owners to streamline our usual processes — instead of complimentary gift-wrapping, we were to tell customers to bring their item back in at another time with the receipt and we would happily wrap it for them then — to get as many people in and out of the store as possible until close. If people complained, we were told to direct them to one of the three managers staffed that day, that they would handle it. We could trust them, they’d have our backs. Until they didn’t.

The woman in question refused to accept our offer for gift wrapping. Even writing that sentence feels wholly absurd. She called us names, one of my coworkers burst into tears and fled to the stockroom. As the manager ambled over, he politely asked the woman what the issue was. As she lambasted our shoddy work ethic and low IQ, he nodded along. She berated the store’s less-than-stellar reputation and threatened to tell her peers to never shop there again. Eventually, the manager relented, turning to me. “Megan, this is our customer, and the customer is always right. If she wants her gifts wrapped today, it’s the least we can do to make that happen.” He handed me the pile of toys in her purchase, and I spent the next 20 minutes with her eyes boring into the back of my head as I cut the tape and curled the ribbons. As she left, she smirked at me and said, “That wasn’t so hard now, was it?”

That woman was far from the last entitled customer I’d encounter throughout my service industry career. There were the two men that would come to the fast-casual restaurant I worked at in college, sit in the same booth every week, proceed to order items not on the menu, refuse to let me leave their table to serve other guests, and then refuse to tip. There was the family that left blood-stained Kleenex — and actual puddles of blood — on a table at the same restaurant because one member simply had to have macaroni and cheese minutes after their wisdom teeth were removed. There were the fight night fans that ordered nothing but water and snapped their fingers to get my attention when they required a refill. There were men, so many men, that took my professional demeanor for interest and refused to leave before my shift ended. There were refusals to pay, walk-outs, church cards slipped into checkbooks in lieu of tips. And every time, every complaint was met with “well, what can you do? The customer is always right” by the manager, the owner, the bartender, the wait staff. Sometimes they’d shrug, resigned to the worst of humanity for the sake of a low-paying job. Sometimes they’d roll their eyes, a “been there, done that” attitude from some of the more senior managers who’d waited tables themselves.

But more often than not, they said it with their full chest, full of conviction that their lives’ work was making customers happy. What they were doing — what we were all doing — was simply enabling a system of entitlement that has entrenched itself so deeply in the American psyche that a simple excision isn’t going to cut it out. Maybe its a symptom of something fundamentally rotten — consumer culture overall, lingering pains of economic anxiety, the never-satisfied drive for power over others — that our country has encouraged and outright celebrated. That anyone could feel empowered by lording over a lowly hourly employee running endless refills of chips and salsa and soda to their table with the threat or promise of a tip hanging over the employee’s head was a promise. A promise for control, for superiority. For a moment when they got to be the boss, got to order someone else around and hold their financial future in their grimy hands, they could forget the parts of their lives where the roles may have been reversed. Maybe that’s oversimplifying. Maybe it’s too generous. Maybe a lot of customers truly believed they were better than the employees serving them, helping them, wrapping their gifts. Maybe they thought that their own success was preordained, not by a wooden dowel toy but by the mere fact that here they were, spending money, while someone else was working for it.

Maybe it isn’t a symptom, though. Maybe it is the cause, a deep-rooted sickness that has led to further infections — over-relying on individualism, the mythology of the boot straps, the culture of overwork and burn out perpetuated by corporations large and small but enforced by each and every employee that buys into the narrative of individual success is the best success. Similar to the individualistic approach to climate change solutions, putting the focus back on individual actions makes for a convenient scapegoat to large-scale, corporate-enforced inequality. The penchant for comparative power — the idea that one person’s hard work is what places them behind or in front of the bar, and only that hard work — enables a culture that is overly antagonistic, overly aggressive, and increasingly siloed. It is how the ladder gets pulled up behind people experiencing actual success, financial or otherwise, stopping others from gaining any ground. It is how community-focused government initiatives become pitted against each other for the same pot of funds while others are left pulling from unending coffers. It’s a false scarcity mindset, one that the American public is readily, and happily, willing to buy.

All my first manager had to do was tell the customer to come back tomorrow. He had to stand there in her rage, face her fury, and remain immovable. He could have used his position of authority to assert his support for his employees — that he wouldn’t allow us to be spoken to or reduced to tears over sparkly paper. We would have been grateful for the help, for the support, for the knowledge that we mattered to the small business we were making run. He could have reminder the customer that this small inconvenience was not the end of her world, maybe talked her back down to earth. Told her we were kids, just like the ones she had at home. Maybe it would’ve given her some perspective, made her see us as people rather than less than her. Maybe it’s oversimplifying. Maybe it’s too generous. Maybe it would’ve only made things worse. Maybe the manger thought he was doing the right thing. But all I know is her smirk, her disdain for being in my presence, so beneath her I was. How I almost walked out that day because what was the point in working somewhere that also refused to see me as a full human, a person with thoughts and feelings that just needed to earn a little money.

I’ve seen that smirk a lot the past few weeks. The smirk of those that believe they’re superior to others. The ones that refuse to acknowledge that we are all part of the same community whether they like it or not. The ones that tease the bartender for their outfit and complain loudly when their unspoken expectations are not met. The ones that, most likely, have never worked a service industry job in their lives and feel better than for it. The ones that seek only to have power over those less powerful than themselves, whose dividing lines are nothing more than ephemeral drawings in the sand. Those who see no risk to themselves though they are as precariously balanced as the rest of us, teetering on the edge of a future they’ll decry as completely unforeseen. They attack strangers on social media for something they felt they deserved. They lament friends lost and beg for decency, for coming together in spite of differences, though those differences are the only things they hold dear. Those differences are how they define themselves, differences they are proud of, the way in which they hold themselves up over those they see as unworthy. They are not right, they are entitled. They don’t see humanity other than their own, and we’re all worse for it.

Here’s to being human, and always leaving a fat tip, always.

- Megan