Customer Servitude: Poverty, Prejudice, and Power On the Front Lines of American Commerce

By Jaye B. Owens

Customer service jobs are the fastest growing sector of the economy, and they’re filled by women, minorities, and the working poor.

American commerce is built on a system which places the most marginalized workers at the mercy of the American public, prioritizes personality over skill, and promises advancement and wage opportunities which don’t exist. Customer service employees know they’re being exploited, but they’ve been effectively silenced through decades of injustice.

It’s time to make some noise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781387485611

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Customer Servitude: Poverty, Prejudice, and Power On the Front Lines of American Commerce

Customer Servitude: Poverty, Prejudice, and Power On the Front Lines of American Commerce

Jaye B. Owens

Copyright

Copyright © 2018 by Jaye B. Owens

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2018

ISBN 978-1-387-48561-1

www.facebook.com/customerservitude

Dedication

To my wife, my framily, and the resistance.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my editors, Brenda Randles, Angie Slavens, and Kaijuanda Sutton, for being thorough, honest, and supportive.

I would also like to thank all of my fellow activists, especially the Southwest Missouri Chapter of the National Organization for Women, for inspiring me to always move forward.

Customer Servitude

Chapter One

When society begins to change, you can see it at the cash register. It’s not a fact I realized before 2016, but small cultural shifts show up in the way people treat those over whom they have power, and the average American citizen wields great power in the places where they spend their money. As a manager in a retail setting, the year leading up to the presidential election found me in the unique position of not just witnessing the ripples in the water through my own experiences with customers, but also through the experiences of my employees when they considered it significant enough to report. And things were certainly changing in late 2015.

That customers can be rude to cashiers, servers, and other service employees should be no surprise to anyone. It’s the stuff of sitcom jokes and internet memes, the I want to speak to your manager haircut and the embarrassing relative who makes unreasonable demands of servers and then won’t tip. It’s such an integral part of our reality that few people question it. Only the blatantly racist, hateful, angry, threatening, and violent customers become noteworthy in the steady stream of arguments over coupons and complaints of lackluster service.

But as the 2016 elections approached, the frequency of those incidents rose. Even very early that year there had been enough notable occurrences of customer discrimination, harassment, and aggression that I needed to speak to my boss regarding my concerns. I wanted to get her approval regarding how I intended to handle the changing climate, which was to tell my staff they were under no obligation to put up with it and should stand up for themselves. I knew, after over a decade working in such jobs and then supervising employees in these positions, that my approach wasn’t exactly textbook.

Specific examples of unacceptable behavior weren’t hard to come by. An assistant manager was being stalked by a regular who had figured out when she worked alone. Someone called a black employee monkey during a transaction. And it wasn’t just directed at employees. One woman commented under her breath that the enthusiastic black man who had held the door for her was probably on drugs as she clutched her purse and hurried to the restroom to hide. An elderly customer complained about a suspicious Hispanic person looking at their phone in their car, insisting I should call the police to report them. I had a long list.

This coincided, too, with a surge of attention being paid to the mechanics of racism and hate as the campaign rhetoric targeted various groups and biased aggression filled the news cycle. As the notable incidents piled up, I began to reflect on my experiences through a different lens. The power of customers over service staff had long been simple fact, and the abuse of that power had always been a frequent occurrence, one I’d dismissed as normal and expected. In all the service jobs I had held over the years, my coworkers and I just understood that rude and abusive customers were unavoidable, that our success hinged in part on learning to endure such behavior. Outside of severe cases of harassment, fondling, threats, and outright discrimination, the hurtful aside or demeaning nickname was nothing noteworthy because it happened all the time. But we all could tell of blatant harassment, fondling, threats, and outright discrimination. Every server, bartender, host, busser, cashier, and friend or acquaintance who worked with the public had a laundry list of horrible customer stories. Those of us who were already vulnerable because of who we were, who had always been subject to racist remarks or lewd advances or the pressure to stay in the closet and watch our words carefully in and out of work, had also always understood that we were under greater threat than our peers. Customers could cost us our jobs if they wanted. And in the pre-election months, the climate had changed even more drastically for us.

There are no truly accurate statistics on harassment because the vast majority of incidents never get reported. But while the numbers may or may not show increased workplace harassment since before the 2016 election cycle, organizations which track reports of hate crimes have seen an increase. Clearly, something is happening. And with our renewed focus on sexual harassment and assault and the growing realization that this behavior has been normalized in our culture, it’s obvious these problems constitute an epidemic.

That normalization has given the American public excessive power over the most marginalized of their fellow citizens. The groundswell of emboldened hate is too easily channeled through corporate hierarchies, creating a culture where the customer is always right even when the customer is a bigot. But customer demands have long fueled a system by which service employees are held to unreasonable and discriminatory standards. The change seemed drastic to me only because my eyes were now being opened to the deeper implications of the system in which I worked.

Though I hope we all, at some level, understand that the customer is not always right, our own complicity in this situation is balanced in our consciences by the conviction that our own individual demands are reasonable. And the system allows us to exert those demands with little push back. But are we assessing our entitlement as customers correctly? When we demand accommodation for our special requests, are we asking for too much? When we demand a specific level of respect, do we have a good sense of what respect looks like? Is the treatment and demeanor we expect from customer service employees a reasonable expectation, or have we been socialized to expect more from other human beings in certain contexts than is fair?

What makes us imagine we are entitled to more from a cashier or server than other people we encounter or deal with day to day? This is the power we are convinced we earn by choosing to spend our money. But we are just party to a transaction, and our participation doesn’t earn us anything more than the service or product we are purchasing. We cannot buy the respect of or control over another human being - not with wages, not with our purchases. Coercion doesn’t result in consent. But we act as if it does. We act as if we have bargained our way to getting more for our dollar in the form of what can only be described as subservience.

That we, collectively, expect subservience from employees shouldn’t have to be demonstrated. If we look at even the most common incidents where customers get management involved to force employees to give them what they want, it’s difficult to deny. We don’t just want what we asked for, we want someone superior to make the involved employee put our desires ahead of even the policies they’ve been instructed to follow.

Recently, while in line to check out at a store, the cashier for the lane next to us turned off her lane light. Despite this, a man in a suit with only a few items to purchase got into her line. She informed him that the customer in front of him would be the last one allowed to check out in that lane and that he needed to move to another. At first he didn’t respond, a clear attempt to defy being told no, but after she repeated herself he moved behind us. As he took his place in our line, he complained that having only three employees on duty was ridiculous, clearly expecting we would agree with him. I pointed out that no business has a magical back room full of extra staff which they can just bring out as needed, which brought an end to his complaining.

A few minutes later, another man got in the closed line. He was also told by the cashier he would need to move. He refused, even after being told a second time by the cashier. My wife and I called him out, the woman in front of him reiterated what we said, and the cashier repeated once more that he would not be helped. When he reached the register and the cashier attempted to take her scheduled break, he demanded the manager. This meant that the cashier was delayed in going on her break because she now had to wait with the customer, thereby delaying the other cashiers on the floor. The cashiers stated this in conversation between themselves, but he did not move. The manager - a woman in her late twenties or early thirties - arrived and, after several minutes of listening to his arguments, told the man he couldn’t be helped in that line, that he wasn’t even in the right part of the store to be helped with his particular purchase, and pointed him to the correct counter after sending the cashier on break as scheduled. This was clearly not the outcome he expected, but he complied.

It’s clear that neither man cared as much about purchasing what they came to the store to buy as they did about getting their way. The first, at least, eventually followed directions and chose not to make a scene about it, but by refusing to accept what he was told and attempting to assert his power by refusing to leave the line he showed that it wasn’t at all about being in a hurry. The other customers in longer lines didn’t matter to him, and neither did the reason he was told to move. The second customer, however, pushed his own will to the point of getting the supervisor involved in an attempt to force the cashier to provide him the service he demanded.

And we can’t pretend this is unusual. This happened in the span of twenty minutes in the middle of a random Monday afternoon in a Midwestern suburb. It happens daily in all types of business establishments from coast to coast and in every income bracket. We all see it. We don’t often do anything about it (I couldn’t help noticing that not a single other customer said a word about the situation as it unfolded) but we see it. In fact, too often we are that customer. And we rarely spare much consideration for how our actions might impact the person on the other side of the transaction.

Neither of the difficult customers that day considered it. Perhaps it’s unusual in that area for retail workers to get breaks and to assert their right to them in such a way. Even so, arguing that it’s not how other employees are allowed to conduct themselves is hardly justification for acting at the expense of a person trying to do their job as instructed. If most cashiers in that area don’t get such accommodations and empowerments, then the defiance we witnessed indicates a reliance on and conditioned support of the status quo in which these employees simply aren’t valued. But if such break policies are common and these men still attempted to circumvent that system, that’s an even worse condemnation of customer behavior.

The public seems to have little understanding of the basic mechanics of business, including but not limited to staffing, pricing strategy, overhead, who selects what products and services are offered, and how much they cost. This leads to customer dissatisfaction, but employees often cannot make the changes people ask for. Often these are impossible demands, anyway. And yet none of that matters to us when we’re not getting what we expected.

But we don’t do this because we’re evil people who have it out for service employees. We do it because these industries have created a system by which we can gain discounts, free items, and other recompense by causing a fuss whether we’ve got a legitimate grievance or not. We know that our dollars are important to the companies we spend them with, and because our dollars are important we know our opinions and desires are important, too. We know companies will compete for our dollars, and each has to be more diligent in winning our loyalty than the next lest they lose our business. If one store gives us something for free that their competitor charges for, we’ll use that knowledge to pressure the competitor to do the same. We understand that we have power, and we’re unafraid to use it to get what we want.

For the most part, I’m sure most people would say they don’t intend their consumer activities to be used to justify the mistreatment of employees. But the chain of causes and decision making that result in the situation just aren’t apparent, and the consequences for those on the receiving end of our complaints aren’t something we generally witness firsthand. Since it all seems so inconsequential to others and beneficial to us, we become accustomed to certain behaviors and ways of communicating, and when our experience deviates from what we expect we’re conditioned to complain and insist that the deviation be rectified. We expect it and we consider it normal and reasonable. And on the surface it seems very reasonable. We desire respect, and when the respect we deserve has not been given, we demand it.

We all benefit from the customer first attitude, and we are eager to use that advantage. We argue prices even if we’re doing so on a technicality, regardless of whether that will hurt the business or an individual salesperson’s commission. We complain about small errors as if those responsible aren’t human. We speak to employees in condescending and judgmental ways. We undertip. We shop at known violators of employee rights. We like to get our way, even over people who don’t have the power to defy us. Giving that up is hard, and the culture we live in puts no pressure on us to do so.

Companies spend billions on studying their customer base, figuring out what we want and how to engineer their operations to dispense our desires like a machine. Not that we can be studied and predicted that way as individuals because, as all customer service employees can tell you, people don’t all want the same things. Many customers want loyalty programs, but then some will yell at cashiers for pressuring them to join the club. Getting rid of an unpopular menu item is likely to anger the handful of people who loved it, who might well take their displeasure out on their server when they hear the bad news. Each change creates upset customers, and businesses should be aware that for every scripted interaction they require of their employees there will be customers who feel less than welcomed by it. And when we’re in the less than welcomed portion of the customer base, we rarely care about anything but our own disappointment.

But whether or not we realize it, even when we don’t intend to complain, we may still cause harm with our feedback or lack thereof. It’s come to light that businesses which rate their employees through numeric rating systems, such as Uber, tabulate scores in ways which run contrary to the assumptions of the average person. Many times we think we’re giving a positive review when we are actually making life harder for the employees we are rating because the company considers our feedback negative. And not only are the scores considered worse than we intended, but the penalty for getting such a low score is often worse than we expect. Much of the feedback given by customers is used to wield greater negative pressure on employees than we intend. But in a system where customers are encouraged and empowered to judge service employees, the powers which enable that system also work to distract us from the impact on those we judge. For anyone who has not worked a customer service job (or at least not recently) how reviews and ratings work probably comes as a surprise. And companies are unwilling to explain this to us. They know we might not be as honest if we suspected an individual employee might suffer because of it. Like I said, most of us don’t intentionally target employees. But because businesses want numbers which are better than their competitors’, the situation puts most of the responsibility for success on the front line workers.

Of course, employees are customers, too, not just of their own employer but of countless other businesses. Many customer service workers become, at the end of their shift, customers who treat their cohorts as badly as everyone else. In fact, sometimes they treat their cohorts even worse since they understand what happens behind the scenes and therefore know precisely what to say to get what they want. And if they are subject to those pressures and choose not to defy them, they have little sympathy for those who do.

Not to mention, we seem to be in the midst of a cultural epidemic of uncontrolled anger. It may not have always been acceptable or expected for someone to become enraged over items being out of stock, a mistake made during a transaction, or a special request not being honored, but it’s more common now. I can’t help but suspect this culture of being able to demand that our disappointment