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Originally Posted by EnderD_503
^ Honestly, I saw the ad for the new Marketplace in the lunchroom at work yesterday...and in a way kind of pissed me off. I wish there was a show that revealed how horribly employees are treated by customers. A lot of times when customers claim that employees are "rude" to them, it's because the customer was more than rude from the get go. I've had customers make racist comments about my co-workers, sexist comments about my co-workers, I've heard all kinds of homophobic comments by customers who "aren't getting what they want," and yeah I might act a little "frigid" toward them because my company won't allow me to outright refuse service to the jackasses...which I would if it didn't jeopardise my job. Honestly, I feel more companies should be like Ikea where they allow you to refuse service to customers who are more than distasteful as far as their treatment of employees. Maybe then, people would get better customer service. Keep your employees happy by empowering them to refuse service to some idiot who sees fit to cuss up a storm just because they think you should be licking their boots.
Let's face it, Canadian society is not as "polite" as we claim to be, and when people go shopping they can often be downright assholes. A lot of the employees they deal with are getting paid minimum wage in a shit job where they are regularly treated like crap by both customers and their employers. If I'm going to work a job where I get treated like a piece of shit on the bottom of a customer's shoe, they're going to have to pay me more than minimum wage, and the government should at least raise minimum wage rates to an amount that actually allows people to survive and not have to work more than one job.
Marketplace claims to be "protecting Canadians" yet fails to realise that its a lot of low income folks that get stuck in these jobs that are accused of "not giving good customer service." Fuck that. When I go out to a store I actually make sure to treat employees there with respect because I know what they have to deal with a hundred times a day...and in return I get respect back the majority of the time. Yes, there are some people that just don't give a shit, but I'd say they aren't the majority.
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You certainly make a good point. I know from experience that customers can be difficult and employers are generally unsympathetic. I remember getting suspended for three days at a job I had just out of high school where I worked as a telephone operator. A customer asked if this was the asshole operator and I said as polite as pie, "Why no sir. She went home at 5:30." It was just anther incident of my smart mouth, my supervisor explained, when they suspended me. It sucks how businesses don't care about their employees or their customers. Seriously, what can an employer expect an employee to say to a question like that?
I think businesses don't care about customer service that much because there's no reason for them to care. A good many of the corporations have close to a monopoly or share a monopoly with another corporation. In Montreal, grocery stores are all owned by the same two corporations. If you don't buy from one particular store because of some incident, you still have to buy groceries and chances are they will get your business anyway. Eventually it gets so you hate them all equally so you shop according to sales. You can't win so you learn to ignore the poor service. So they can cut back on how many employees they have on per shift with impunity. They put the burden right on the back of employees and the consequences of being served by overburdened employees right on their customers. And they continue to reap the profits. Pisses me off.