Consumerist messaging that declares “the customer is always right” does not just skillfully encourage citizens to empower themselves through consumption, it perpetuates the dehumanization of retail workers too.
There is a common joke amongst retail and customer service workers that you can often tell whether someone has worked in the customer service industry. With several years of retail experience under my belt and now having spent over a year outside of the customer service industry, I can affirm that this sentiment holds weight.
Before working in retail, I heard this discourse swirling around, but it was too abstract for me to understand how deeply resonant it would be just a few years later. I had always assumed that this joke might be rooting from certain customers displaying arrogance or rudeness, but I now realize that, in many cases, the joke stems from something much deeper. In my experience, some customers will treat service workers with less than the basic human empathy they deserve. To some, employees become reduced to faceless vehicles to assist in consumption, undeserving of respect or any niceties, especially if the customer encounters issues with their purchase that the service worker cannot control.
If you’ve worked in the service industry, you’ve likely experienced the frustration of a customer getting angry with you because they do not agree with your company’s return policy, blaming you for the cost of their goods or exhausting their frustration surrounding a lack of stock onto you because they really want an item that they can very much live without.
All of these experiences are frighteningly common — nevertheless, it shouldn’t take working in the industry to start treating service workers with basic human respect and understanding.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that everyone who goes to the mall as a customer is inherently evil. Further, I can’t say that my retail experience was all so bad; I loved the store I worked at, and I adored all of the wonderful people I got to work with along the way.
What made customer service so frustrating was the demeaning entitlement with which so many customers would approach myself and others with. The widespread mistreatment of customer service workers is yet another consequence of the advertising discourses declaring that “the customer is always right,” no matter what.
Evidently, honouring the message that customers will always get their way only benefits employers; in making customers feel as though they can treat service workers however they’d like since they’re spending money at the employer’s establishment, customers get to exhaust their frustrations onto underpaid (and often overworked) individuals who only get to see a faint fraction of the profit brought in by said establishment.
These pro-customer discourses initially seem to uplift the consumer, making them feel as though their prospective profit warrants the royal treatment. However, at the end of the day, treating service workers as if they are lesser than you because you’re interacting with them while they’re on the clock ultimately leaves you with a limited capacity for human connection. How sad it must be to lose the opportunity to enjoy a social interaction with another person just because of discourses imposed by employers who seek your money.
Implicit in the widespread mistreatment of service workers is the assumption that these individuals do not exist outside of their jobs. Though it seems incredibly obvious, service workers have lives beyond serving you at work. Despite oftentimes being concealed by a forced smile and the “customer service voice,” you never know what someone is dealing with outside of their shift.
The day you get upset with a service worker over the end of a sale beyond their control could be the same day that they received life-changing news while heading into work; the day you decide to stay far past closing just so you can leisurely shop around could be making someone late to their own birthday dinner.
Even though employers want customers to feel like these things are okay to ensure that they’ve racked up all the profit they possibly can, treating service workers with blatant disrespect will never be okay.
So, yes, sometimes it is clear when someone hasn’t had the customer service experience needed to fully debunk the discourse that “the customer is always right.”
I have faith that if people are more aware of these discourses regardless of prior work experience, the work environment can be made a lot less stressful for many of those in the service industry.
Going forward, reconsider whether whatever consumer good you’re purchasing is truly worth verbalizing frustration at a worker who likely has very little control over your dilemma anyways. All in all, empathy is key to shutting this discourse down for good.
Getting emotionally invested in consumerist endeavours will only uplift the higher-ups at the corporation you’re investing in, so I’d suggest using the moment to instead make a connection with someone to brighten their day. Despite the relative quickness of employee-customer interactions, kindness doesn’t go unnoticed to anyone.