Treat Your Grocery Cashier as a Human

Retail makes the world go round. At least in America where we seldom grow and make our own foodstuffs, this is the reality of those who live in suburbia. Gone are the days of your quaint local bakeries and butcheries. Instead, these mom and pop shops have been eaten out by grandiose corporate super grocery stores. Those that still hang on seem like dinosaurs waiting for their day of extinction; it is nearly impossible to recreate the vast amount of supply and marketing that their big business competitors have easy access to.

What do we lose though when our local watering holes are sold out to big business though? To name a few though, our communities lose their faces of personality. Instead, we have the expectation to get consistent experience regardless of where we are. However, when a store serves thousands a day, there are no memorable faces except for the ones you see in the throes of disgruntled customers. And from a customer's point of view, the person behind the register is just another stranger among hundreds. In American culture, it's worryingly easy to treat a stranger in a retail environment as less-than-human.

Moreover, many American shoppers treat their retail service workers as emotional punching bags. With enough hits, you can vent out the frustrations of your unhappy life, and with finesse, the payout is always in the hands of the customer.

Expired coupon? No problem. A cheaper price that was clearly not for the item you're looking for? Every time. A complaint about a teenager that made a simple, understandable mistake? There's always an appeasement gift card waiting for you at the end of your tantrum.

America's "The Customer is Always Right" ideology is a business practice that rewards emotional immaturity and outright abuse. This isn't a new phenomenon, and this dynamic was always present even in the smallest of grocery outlets. However, the more our culture funnels our time and attention into superstores where quantity is king, we lose the quality of what retail professionals can bring to the table.

When the retail worker is the target of abuse, it is no surprise that the whole industry has enormous turn over. Yet as a country, we expect this field to be the introduction to work for many a teenager joining the work force. The divide between how younger generations are treated by their elders is also a dichotomy of cultural decay as well.

If kids are to learn the hardy ways of laboring for your existence, what does it teach them if they come to see the public as something that is inherently aggressive and mean? Our culture teaches them that respect is never actually earned, but it based on your professional standing in life. It teaches them that elders are aggressive obstacles for a less than sub-optimal pay, and that there is no true value in empathy and care.

Even for those who are not starting out their working lives, these environments and negative attitudes towards retail workers is an ever-present reminder on what American culture finds to be valuable. For those who work hard to make our everyday essentials accessible for the communities that they serve, this is death roll into burn out and depression.

So, what can the average person do to combat this? Be kind to your retail and service workers. A small amount of empathy and grace costs nothing, and can those few moments you have with a service worker that much bearable for them. And lastly, although they cannot call the aggressors out themselves, there's nothing holding you back from reminding a fellow consumer that they're acting like a child.