The customer is always wrong

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I used to work in retail and was forever browbeaten with the mantra "the customer is always right" even though we knew better. 99% of customers are pathologically wrong, and the 1% are the equivalent of a broken clock. Complaining customers were invariably vicious little creeps who would lie, steal, cheat, and bully anybody they could, on a whim.....a brain-damaged gaggle of dishonest shitheads who adored making the lives of anybody making $3.65 an hour more hellish than it already was. The only customers I respected were the ones who would grab whatever shit they needed quickly, wait in line quietly, and pay whatever they owed without calling any attention to themselves whatsoever. If you came into my store and I somehow remembered you at the end of the shift, you were either drop dead gorgeous or a complete fucking asshole.

This is America after all. A place where we can't even serve alcohol on planes anymore because these same morons can't handle a few Miller Lite's.

The stupids took over. There are consequences to being stupid. The fog is slowly lifting.

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"People don't want to work!"

Fuck you.

Of COURSE people don't want to work. It's called WORK. People WANT to hump like monkey's and golf and dance and drink beer and take naps on a pool float. We work because we have to......not for some kind of cosmic betterment of our souls. My god, what is wrong with you people? You sound like the Stalinists who managed the fucking gulags.

Are there exceptions? Of course. Charles Schulz so loved creating his Peanuts cartoon that he died of a broken heart the day after he retired....but he was a major manic-depressive weirdo who obviously never lived in NEPA. There may be others, but he's all I got at the moment.

But so much for all that. If you can't afford to pay your people a decent wage, and treat them with some respect, and have their backs when a customer gets abusive, then your business probably wasn't worth starting in the first place. You can blame Biden all you want for your inability to keep waitresses, but he's got a bigger mess to clean up than yours. He has no time for your whiny Tucker-inspired gibberish.

In short, it's not that nobody wants to work. It's that they no longer want to work for YOU.

Nobody wants to be publicly flogged every day at your shitty store or restaurant for pocket change....tasked with managing everything up to and including enforcing CDC guidelines that your Neanderthal knuckle-dragging MAGA worshipping customers refuse to adhere to. No benefits. Unpredictable hours that play havoc with childcare. No chance to advance. How quickly "essential workers" became mere chattel again.....an interchangeable group of faceless drones to be used up and tossed aside......derided for having the audacity to not want to be exploited by yet another greedhead.

That girl bagging your groceries and the kid in that drive thru window allowed you to sit home for a year and hoard toilet paper and not die alone on a ventilator. They know their worth, and if you weren't meme’d and propagandized to within an inch of a lobotomy you'd know it too.

You can't find workers? Pay them more. This really is as drop-dead simple as wearing something on your feet when dashing across blazing hot sand. You say $15 ain't doing it? Well then, how about $20? Find the sweet spot. You're so conditioned to paying them shit that your hand starts to shake when you consider a living wage. But loyalty IS a thing. The better you treat your employees, the better they will treat you. Don't turn something into rocket science because you might not be able to upgrade your boat this year.

It's the "free market" that you've been humping since Reagan quietly made the American Dream affordable to only about 5% of the population. Supply and demand, right Gipper? They don't need you anymore. You need them. I know it sucks, but so does having to work until the day you drop dead to pay your avalanche of bills because Bezos and his ilk don't pay any fucking taxes. Two McDonald's employees, after being verbally and then physically abused for 10 minutes because the customer could not get the slushie she wanted, finally snapped and brought the lady down themselves and held her there until the cops arrived. How is this handled in the new employee handbook? How often do you have to make a citizen's arrest where you work?

***

Change isn't coming, it's already here. This pandemic fucked with everybody's heads, and nobody is the same person now that they were back in March of 2020. Too much has gone down. Too many have died. Too many truths have been uncovered. It intensified everybody's personalities. The good became damn-near saints. The bad turned into wild, hate-filled hyenas, looking to unload their pent-up petty grievances on anybody they can kick down on....because these same people are relentless boot-lickers at the same time.....smooching upwards to soothe the ass of any Trumpian figure that hates the same way they do. It's been an eerie thing to watch.....like living in the midst of a never-ending Poe short-story.

***

Oh....and if $20 doesn't work? Try $25.

In a bit...

--tf