I saw this earlier and I’m glad it was removed almost immediately.
Working retail/service in the US is a joke because people have become so entitled that they don’t even think of service workers as humans anymore. When I used to work retail at a certain big blue box electronics store I was screamed at, yelled at, belittled, called names, and in a couple very extreme cases had items thrown at me and one person took a swing at me.
This is just another example of that. People here in the US are so detached from reality and laser focused on their routine that they literally cannot comprehend that workers may want to spend a holiday with their family too. Or worse than that, they think workers don’t deserve to be at home with their families on a holiday, because they deserve service more than you deserve to see your family. God forbid they microwave a meal that one day.
It’s pure entitlement and it’s disgusting. Surprisingly I found that the lower income/societal class the person is the more entitled they would act towards me as a service worker.
One time I was dealing with a really bad migraine while I was running register at Walmart. I was barely functioning and could barely stand up straight. This lady comes through my line starting out all compassionate until she suggests that she lead me in a prayer that Jesus might heal me. I try to politely decline because I’d rather not hold up the line forming behind her. Well, also because I’m atheist but I had been in customer service for years at that point and knew better than to bring that tidbit up.
This lady starts into the most hate fueled tirade I’ve ever heard. Talking about how I’m a heathen, my migraine was a punishment directly from God, I deserve every second of my suffering, and calling me everything but a child of God. All because I tried to politely decline a performative prayer from her because there were now 3 people in line behind her. Like 20 minutes later I got taken out in an ambulance because I fainted from the pain trying to stand up after using the bathroom on my break.
Another guy tried to get me to discount his entire order because he supposedly knew the guy that owned the contacting company that built the store. Try to tell him that I don’t have the ability to do that and he’d have to talk to a manager. He gets right up in my face and starts yelling about how no one else ever had a problem with it and how with one phone call he could make it so I would never be able to work at Walmart again. Along with several threats to my person. If I never set foot behind a cash register again it’ll be too soon.
Despite never really having any problem customers in my 14 or so years of working in food service, I’m right there with you. Between the stress of dealing with people day in and day out, working every holiday with no overtime or holiday pay, and being expected to do the work of 2 people and not take any vacation time because “the company can’t afford to hire more people,” I will never work retail/service again. People talk about dreaming that they’re back in high school, I dream that I’m back working there. Even 3 years after I left the industry.
Living in a place where stores are shut sundays, ther isnt any service for my restaurant (beer/wine, or problems with keg equipment) and it’s actually quite refreshing.
If I run out, I run out. If there is no keg beer because the cooling unit stopped working then there isn’t any. No ribs on sunday night because we were busier than normal…on saturday. People understand.
it’s amazing.
*ps, if they dont, then thats their problem, not mine.
Man, around here restaurants are also closed on Sunday AND Monday…
Most here open Sunday for bunch/late lunch, close in the evening, then close Mon & Tue. This is why (during off season) we close wed & thur.
It’s simpler than that, and worse.
You are beneath them.
In their worldview, there is The Hierarchy,™ and everybody’s role is to do as they’re told by people above them. There is no other force in their moral universe. Nothing else decides what is real.
People stuck in this mindset are vicious when they have so few opportunities to be the boot instead of the face. It’s identifying with the aggressor.
when education isn’t liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor.
t. Paulo Freire
The chain of screaming
A good number of people assume retail workers choose to be there and are getting overtime.
Clearly untrue for most.
You lost me entirely on the last point. That’s pure propaganda, mate.
Yeah, I’ve had the opposite experience in my 20+ years of customer service work. Most of the times I’ve been screamed at by an entitled customer, they’ve been upper-middle class.
Self loathing doesn’t respect socioeconomic class.
Nope. I worked retail for years at the same yellow-and-blue themed electronics store and they’re spot-on. The absolute worst are the ones carrying tacky designer bags. Think the giant LV logo ones. They were almost universally nightmares to deal with that had $1000 deposit requirements for cell phones.
You’ve dealt primarily with low/middle income customers and you don’t think that sways your “findings?”
I dealt with quite a range of incomes. I pull their credit reports to qualify them for service. I knew exactly what their financials looked like.
Sorry man, but no, granted that’s my personal anecdotal experience.
That doesn’t mean there weren’t people who were complete assholes at all levels, but generally speaking the most entitled people were the ones who didn’t deserve to be. I guess I could clarify that people who wanted to act like they were happy with life were the worst, most entitled people I came across. The people who either did actually hold status or didn’t care if they did were more tolerable.
I won’t pretend to be an expert and understand. The only things I’ve thought over the years were either 1) They needed to feel more important than someone, and service workers are a good scapegoat there or the more unfortunate one 2) There are just more points of contention. Someone doing well won’t react as badly to their laptop being fried compared to someone who isn’t doing well - they have different impacts on the people. That one is more important, but I don’t think that excuses the pure abuse that was hurled at me either.
Similar question to what I posed the other person; do you really think you’ve serviced an equal number of low income and high income customers to back up your conclusions?
A bit difficult to make that claim when I imagine you didn’t know each customers background, noted it down, and accounted for how proportinal your compared groups were.
Poo rolls down hill. It’s sad, I think that is the only way certain people can feel some sense of experiment. Working on ourselves and our own perceived inadequacies is hard, dirty work.
That’s my personal belief as to why. As long as they can think they’re better than someone else they don’t have to actually work on themselves.
That last sentence is the exact opposite of my experience having worked a decade in various retail positions. Aside from the people who were on drugs, I never had any big issues with lower income people, all the arrogance and assholery and entitlement almost always came from the douchebag in the Audi with the flashy gold watch, not from Peggy who came down to the store in the family’s broken down Olds to grab a pint of milk and half a gallon of gas… Lower income people tend to know what’s up, and be the most attached to reality. Money is what allows you to dissociate from the struggles of everyday people
This seems like there’s more going on than what either you or Scrubbles are seeing.
I think it’s part of what I’ve seen called the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” effect. There’s a certain group of poor folk who have been convinced that, any day now, they’re going to come into wealth (through some nebulous means and no real action of their own), and so act like they are already part of the wealthy class. Even going so far as voting for benefits for the wealthy and against their own interests, including voting for the destruction of the very social programs that support them.
Just an assumption on my part, but I think you would find a correlation between political affiliation and treatment of service industry staff when it comes to lower income people.
There’s a world of difference in disposition between new money and old money, in my experience, and flashy-car-and-expensive-jewelry rich is decidedly new money. Families with generational wealth tend to be more discreet about it, and often have a “noblesse obligee” mentally about how they engage with the world. New money’s much more likely to pull the “don’t you know who I am?!” card.
Similarly, there’s a split between working class folks who know the score and recognize that they’re all in it together with the guy behind the counter, and the sort of temporarily-embarrassed millionaires who have themselves convinced they’re better than they are.
Where I live our stores are closed on Sundays except those located in larger railstations and gas stations.
And right in the time where people should be with their families, in Advent, stores are allowed to open up on the four Advent Sundays and everyone goes fucking wild.
Now, the retail store lobby or whatever it is called here is rallying for stores to be allowed to open up 8 Sundays a year, because ‘people want the convenience to be able to shop on a Sunday’. You know what? No. Fuck those people. Get your groceries on a Saturday or during the week and chill the fuck out on a Sunday.
It’s insane to me how people apparently just can’t go one day without getting something from a store.
I think it’s beautiful to have one day in the week where (most) people just don’t have to work at all. I really don’t like how the hypercapitalism of the US just swaps over to Europe more and more.
Oh no, not a single day in the year where some shops have closed! If they visited my country they would probably have an aneurysm. Nothing is open on Sunday or public holidays. On Saturday most shops close at 18:00 many close much sooner. It depends for the rest of the week but you can not be open after 21:00.
Even in my own country, Australia, where our retail culture is quickly copying the US, customers can be so entitled. People get mad about reduced hours on public holidays.
But just 50-60 years ago, most stores were closed on Sunday and only open for a few hours on Saturday’s. They’d be closed for the entire day on public holidays. The people I often see getting angry at shops for closing at 10pm instead of 12am on Christmas day are usually old enough to remember the “good old days” (as they themselves call it)
The same entitled people will complain about self serve checkouts, robot janitors and AI stock management systems. They complain that there aren’t enough human staff, But then they go and treat the few humans there are with more cruelty, abuse and disrespect than they’d ever consider using when talking to Siri. Do you want humans working here or not or not? How about you treat them like the human beings they are.
Did Elon Musk make the top image? Fuck any store in the US that was open Thursday or had crazy long hours Friday, and DOUBLE fuck you if you went to one.
Fellow Americans, remember: if you eat out for your Thanksgiving meal, leave a fat tip for your wait staff who is working on Thanksgiving. Minimum 25%.
Naw man, 0% that shit.
I’m not playing this “oooh our food is cheap” bullshit game only to find out that is because the wait staff is underpaid. I came here to eat, not do math in my head while looking over the menu, INCREASE THE DAMN PRICES. I don’t give a shit if it ends up costing MORE than tipping as long as the cost is fucking upfront.
I’m not your employer, I’m not paying you. And if your employer can’t keep the restaurant afloat without underpaying you then that bitch should SINK. I’M SICK AND TIRED OF THIS SHIT.
We’re all sick and tired of it. That doesn’t mean you have to fuck over the wait staff to make your point.
The customers are not fucking over the wait staff, the owners are.
Yes, but until we have a systematic change to remove tipping and pay them a livable wage, not tipping results in them having less money. So either don’t go to the restaurant, or tip. With the knowledge of the system that we have, Going to the restaurant and not tipping is a scummy move in the US. Doesn’t matter who’s at fault for the situation being shitty.
Then you should attempt to convince other people in order to make change instead of being a dick to waitstaff.
Sorry you’re justifiably angry. Doesn’t give you a free pass to be a piece of shit tho
Are you seriously saying that the customer who pays full price and no more is “a piece of shit”, and not management who chooses to underpay the staff?
I’m not having any of that. I’d rather just not eat out. Enjoy no tip AND one less customer.
I’ll pay extra when I get extra. I paid over 150% yesterday. I’ve given big tips for free services. People sometimes give my cash tip back assuming I accidentally gave them 10x my intention. But not when it’s a simple transaction when I get what I ordered and I’m paying the advertised price.
Yes, I am saying that "the customer who pays full price and no more is “a piece of shit”.
“and not” ??
“management who underpays staff”.
Both of those people would be peices of shit.
I don’t really understand why you would expect anyone to think that only one of those could possibly be shit at the same time.
Fair enough, they can both be shit. I just don’t see how it’s my responsibility as a customer, to fix the problem that the resto is underpaying its staff.
The way I usually do my part to help workers who are not treated well, is to boycott the employer. If tipping is seen as a solution to that problem, I’d call that enabling. Tipping is the only reason restos can get away with grossly underpaying their staff. I don’t want to support that.
Either you don’t understand anything about wage lawsin the US or you just aren’t grounded in reality. Yes, lowering somebody’s income because you don’t like their boss’s business decisions is a dick move. Indeed, the solution in this case is for you not to eat out in the US because you are apparently incapable of thinking about the consequences of your actions and who they really affect.
Are you really that stupid/shortsighted? Or is the anger at the system just clouding your judgement as I had suggested?
The person who pays “full price and no more” in this case is @Shayeta… who was just suggesting that the price be increased so the “more” is in the price. “Full price” is whatever the shitty owner says it is, not whatever the product or service is worth and definitely not what the customer thinks it’s worth.
So $10 plus a $3 tip is “paying extra” to you people but you’re gonna happily pay the same shitty owner $15 “and no more” for the same meal literally because they said so. I think the clearest I can be is to point out that they’re offering the “extra,” just exclusively to the owners and never to the workers.
Now I’m wondering whether it’s some shamefully covered-up phobia of maths or just licking some capitalist footwear under the guise of a kind of false consumerism.
So $10 plus a $3 tip is “paying extra” to you people
Yes. The price is 10. I pay 13. That’s 3 more. Simple math.
you’re gonna happily pay the same shitty owner $15 "and no more
That’s a straw man argument. I probably won’t support a shitty owner at any price.
What I want is to know the price up front, without checking for loopholes, adding tips and whatever. I don’t care how simple the math is, or how much I love math or how good I am at calculating in my head, or how big the impact is to my personal economy.
I see a price, I either pay it or I don’t. There’s a reason that anything else is literally illegal where I live.
You’re welcome to have your opinion, this is mine.
Again, I don’t mind tipping if I actually get extra. I’m a big tipper, if I get more than I’m paying for.
just licking some capitalist footwear under the guise of a kind of false consumerism
Wow, that’s American level defense of capitalism. Where I’m from, we pay a lot more attention to consumer rights and employee rights.
Knowing how much food+service costs up front benefits the customer by allowing them to make an informed decision.
Having a higher pay benefits the workers by making their income consistent and allowing them to more easily compare salaries offered by different restaurants.
Tipping in its current state benefits only the owner by lowering operational costs and forcing the workers to depend on the generosity of the customer, conviniently making workers feel like they are getting shafted by the customer instead of the person who actually hired them.
The only way to institute change in an industry is by changing the supply/demand dynamics. If servers are underpaid, there’ll be less people willing to be servers (supply goes down) which will drive prices up. Every time you tip, you are intentionally interfering with the fair market for service labour.
The solution to the problem is not to grin and bear the status quo, but to convince other people to not tip. At least, according to typical economic theory.
Tipping is inherently part of any fair market service, as are cultural customs. Your misunderstanding of the scope and intersectionality of economics isn’t atypical tho.
There are a million solutions to any problem. Government was formed in order to make the unifying process of solving problems easier.
This problem hasn’t been solved for a hundred years by ‘market forces’, maybe it’s time for the government to change something, especially when restaurants are already a struggling business type.
Do you live in the US and actually understand the laws and cultural problems surrounding this issue? I understand you think economics is all econ 101 but it ain’t lol.
I’ve seen restaurants that add a per-person Christmas booking fee for dinner on 24-26 December. I’d assume it is for the wait staff, but the union conditions aren’t really all that great for the service industry.
Country: NL
Working on holidays like christmas and new years in the netherlands means 150% hourly wage.
The difficulty is that tipped employees, in some parts of the United States, can (and do) make as little as $2.13/hr. Laws ostensibly exist to ensure that tipped employees make minimum wage (federally mandated at $7.25/hr), but, due to a variety of factors, this isn’t always the case (to say nothing of the fact that $7.25/hr is hardly a living wage).
I spent 25+ years in food service. It was a lot of fun and seemingly good money when I was younger. Now that I’m 40, things like dependable pay and benefits trump the fun I had waiting tables and bartending all those years.
Did you see the part where we were talking about the Netherlands?
You are, but the original comment specifically said Americans eating out on Thanksgiving. Naturally, they assumed you were talking about overtime laws in the Netherlands in relation to the lack of holiday pay in the American food service industry, but apparently you weren’t.
So, I guess the question is, did you see the part where we were talking about the US?
Completely missed it. My mistake.
Americans are struggling with the idea that other countries exist. I’m pretty sure most of them think that the Netherlands is the island from Peter Pan.
No no no it’s Michael Jackson’s Themepark!
Same here in my part of the US
Being an asshole doesn’t change societal expectations you’re just fucking over your server. If you want to protest tip culture then stop going to sit-down restaurants entirely.
Hey asshole, if you don’t want to tip waiters then you can stop eating out. Especially on a holiday. Fuck this entitled attitude that you get to punish workers because of cultural/business decisions out of their control… And fuck lemmy for upvoting you.
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Exactly. While I normally eat at home with family, the last time I ate out, I left a 40% tip, because my waiter was a college student that could not afford to fly home, but still treated us absolutely awesome, and the math came out to about what she would have paid for a flight home at the time.
Fuck that
It’s always ironic and super self aware wolf when a customer says they “feel bad” for you because you’re working on Sunday, Christmas, etc, or working in the dead of night for 24/7 establishments.
Also, Catholics and many other Christian denominations literally believe that people who work on a Sunday go to hell for violating the Sabbath, yet after Sunday mass tons of them flood into restaurants, causing the cooks and wait staff to go to hell.
Isn’t “Arbeitsnehmer” one who takes labor? I would think the worker gives his or her labor, and the industrialist takes it.
Here “arbeit” translates to “job” better than “labour”. One provides the job, the other takes the job (and consequently does the labour).
They’re job providers, we need to give them all the tax breaks
Arbeitnehmer (job taker) is employee, Arbeitgeber (job giver) is employer.
Takingoffspacesdoesnotmakeaword. Changemymind.
English is an inferior language because it does not combine words into one when it would make sense to do so to avoid confusion.
Change my mind.
They use dashes, which is more readable (“self-sufficient”, and similar stuff), although idk if that’s what you meant
I’ve been trying to think of an example, the only one I could think of is “assault rifle”. In Swedish, where we contract words, it would be “assaultrifle”, so it’s clear you’re not encouraging someone to beat up a rifle.
It’s just combined words which would be in english single words. Nothing magical.
Average English natives when they realize other languages exist
Soy español. Los alemanes y su sentido del humor.
I’m not german bro
In Dutch we have werknemer and werkgever.
Werknemer takes work (person with a job)
Werkgever gives work (company hiring people)
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A lot of Americans’ lives rely on going to a place to spend money or work for money.
The funny thing is that the Arbeitnehmerrechte will costs us den Wohlstand and the reason why we’re getting abgehängt in sectors like the automotive industry.
Hahaha suuure. I mean that’s what the großaktionärs and their pathetic lobbyists tell you, so it has to be true, right? I mean, why would they possibly lie to you about something that makes them richer and all workers poorer?! The actual reasons why german wirtschaft suffers are not related in the slightest to Arbeitnehmerrechte. There are many reasons, here are just some of them:
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HUGE lack of staatliche Investitionen (that’s the main difference to the wirtschaftlich successfull states in the world). This is something that piled up during the last decades actually, because the former regierungs were even worse in this regard that the current one, basically destroying whole industries that could have had a bright economic future in this country. Instead, the current FDP dullis that run our Regierung mostly gift 39Mrd. to Unternehmen (by lowering their Steuers) which mainly benefit said Großaktionärs (who don’t spend the money so it’s not in the Wirtschaftskreislauf at all) and only lead to approx 11 Mrd. of private investments by those Unternehmen. So it would have been much more productive to invest that money directly as Regierung.
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Dumb as fuck decisions by EZB to raise Zinsen through the roof (because they don’t understand the difference between a temporary Energiepreis-Schock and Inflation), making private and public investments more expensive and thus hindering them.
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Low wages leading to low Kaufkraft in Mittelschicht, leading to very little Konsum, which in turn becomes a problem for local Wirtschaft.
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(Not a small point): External factors like china not buying as many cars from our zurückgebliebene Autoindustrie anymore (that completely fucked up by trying to milk their last century dampfmaschinen technology for ever, missing the anschluss)
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Who’s Wohlstand? I’ve worked 40, 60, 80 and even 100-Hour weeks and at the time I’ve always had to live paycheck-to-paycheck because my Bosses would pay close to minimum wage (less than if gerechnet auf die Stundenzahl), invent breaks I didn’t take to balance out any overtime I had or just not pay overtime in the first place (but still demand it).
Explain how my Wohlstand was diminished by having too many rights
You were richer than 80% of the earths population. What else do you want? Most countries don’t even have minimum wage.
Just because somebody has it worse doesn’t mean that it’s okay. If you stub your toe, should you not be able to complain because I broke a bone in my forearm when I was 6 and the doctor had to snap the other one with no sedation/painkillers so it would heal correctly?
Plus, cost of living is a thing. They may have been richer than 80% of the population, but I bet their cost of living was higher than most of them as well. Minimum wage in my state is $15 USD, twice the federal minimum, and somewhere around 80% of the workforce in the state capital has at least a bachelor’s degree (the highest percentage of workforce by city in the country). Despite this, the vast majority commute from outside the city every day for work, because the cost of living inside the city is so high most people can’t afford to rent an apartment. I made more money in 2022 than the bottom 51% of Americans, and I can’t afford to move there.
Maybe. I still don’t see how not having rights as a worker (or in this case my rights not being respected) helped to develop my personal wealth.
If your claim, that workers rights diminish wealth, is true, I should have become more wealthy instead of less. Right?
Yeah actually it’s the opposite
White liberals when the cashier is “rude” to them.
Tony Stark: They rant about it for 3 hours straight
Lol the amount of angry conservative farmers who yelled at me far outweighs anyone else dude. Some of the most miserable people on the planet from what I can tell.
Get out of here with your obvious baiting.
[whispering] Conservatives are liberals too [even quieter] in fact, they’re even more liberal than the democrats
[Speaking at a normal volume] It doesn’t matter. You sound like an asshole in any case. And racist to boot. [Continuing at the same volume] Words become used in different ways over time and always will. Get over yourself.
Shut up, cracker.
Hell ya dude.
Are you high?
It’s times like this I realize that americans becoming a majority of the userbase is the sole reason why websites go to shit.
Na, that’s mostly due to corporate enshittification.
