The Ugliness Escalates

shocking, but not surprising

As I’ve said repeatedly, customer service in this country isn’t. Good service has become so vanishingly rare that encountering it is cause for a jolt of surprised gratitude. Professionalism and courtesy are much the exceptions, rather than the norm. Follow-through has been banished from training protocols.

And yet….those of us of a certain age were at least raised to treat servers, cashiers, clerks, and agents on the phone with respect, if only to make interactions more pleasant and workable, aside from practicing basic decency. Trust me, I know from experience what happens if a customer mistreats a bartender, server, or cook, and it’s not pretty.

Now, I’ll admit that when an “associate” on the phone continues to ignore what I’ve said in favor of reciting ad nauseam the script for Situation 17-C, I do lose patience. I’ve been known to raise my voice, especially when the company is clearly at fault and I’m told that there’s nothing to be done. As a customer, being treated with a lack of courtesy, total lack of empathy, or refusal to admit there’s been an error does tend to push my buttons. Even so, I refrain from profanity and personal insults, which sometimes requires superhuman effort. And coming close to losing my temper does leave a bad taste in my mouth for days. As for face-to-face encounters, maybe twice in my life I’ve had a serious in-person complaint with a server or clerk, and I’ve asked to see a manager.

It seems, though, that confrontations with ordinary sales clerks, cashiers, servers, and other front-line employees have multiplied exponentially over the last few years. We’ve all heard the stories about airline hosts and hostesses being verbally and even physically assaulted. And during the pandemic, line employees really had it rough, particularly those who attempted to enforce masking rules.

Evidently, however, abuse of those who face customers every day has gotten even worse than I knew. I might put it down to the universal lack of customer service, because companies seem to have abandoned service standards nearly two decades ago, but somehow, I can’t imagine how cashiers in a big-box-store garden center would consistently fail to….check out plants…?

One evening recently, I stopped at such a garden center to see if they had any pansies left. They’re my favorites, and I’m always late in buying them, because here in Cleveland, it’s dumb to plant them at the end of March. But I digress. There was a long line at the sole cashier booth, and another lady had kindly let me go in front of her with my few pots of pansies, as she had a fully loaded cart. I got to the booth, the cashier confirmed that the plants were on sale, and I ran my bank card. It was then that I noticed the sign next to the payment terminal. It asked that associates be respected and warned that, “profanity and verbal threats to store employees would not be tolerated,” and it urged customers to make shopping there an enjoyable experience for everyone. As the line behind me had continued to lengthen, I didn’t stop the cashier to ask about the background of the sign, but I couldn’t help but wonder. What in the world could have happened to precipitate the appearance of a warning to remain civil? Was it one truly egregious incident, or a series of abusive customers? I could sort of imagine an unattended booth, and a customer shouting for someone to come and check out his damn mulch, but threats?

The more I thought about it, though, the more it occurred to me that many of us experience a vague sense of fear when we’re out in public these days. We hesitate to make that gesture when someone cuts us off in traffic, lest the offender see fit to take a shot at us. We tend to be hyper-vigilant in stores and among crowds, because we just don’t know when violence might break out, for no apparent reason. There was a shooting at our local Costco a couple days ago. Also at a nearby chain restaurant a few years ago; both places we frequent. We were volunteering for the Red Cross at a football game awhile back, and a huge brawl broke out right in front of us, almost sweeping us into it. Turns out that being just a bit nervous when we’re out isn’t a sign of paranoia. We know that an altercation can happen at any time, totally unexpectedly. We quite reasonably hold a silent dread of it. So if we, as customers and observers, are aware of the constant potential for trouble, it stands to reason that the threat is real.

I’ve said before that I believe the Age of Uncivility began back in the ‘80s, with the “me” generation. People who were raised to think that they were all special, and that the world owed them something. It was the onset of the participation trophy.

But that concept of entitlement has morphed into a general conviction for many that there’s nothing that should not be said or done. Rudeness is not only permitted, it’s brag-worthy to an alarming number of people. By extension, so is violence. I won’t say that abusive language and violence are exclusive to bullies, racists, misogynists, homophobes, and xenophobes, but those traits have definitely found a home among various types of bigots. No longer are they constrained by society to keep their hate, their vicious rhetoric, their F-U attitudes under wraps. Instead, they are loud and proud when it comes to nastiness and threats.

Obviously, the current Occupant of the White House represents the epitome of ugliness. He’s an equal-opportunity offender, unleashing insults and threats on any and all who cross him. He has urged beatdowns at his rallies, he has called for executions of Democrats, he’s speculated about all manner of violence being done to “others.” He’s the avatar and the lightning rod for those who have been eager to jettison their cloaks of decency, who’ve been salivating to spew all the n-words and other racial slurs in their vocabularies. The ones who’ve wanted to be able to finally smack, smash, and shoot those around them who they find annoying. They’ve been told that, even if those of their persuasion attack their own government and savage police with flagpoles, it’s OK—they’ll be pardoned. It’s acceptable to rape women and [allegedly] children, steal, defraud, break every rule of decent society, because if you do, you can be President.

Now we have an all-too-large segment of our population who feels free to indulge in every kind of rudeness and violence. Forty-plus years of entitlement has bred, in these times and among those of a receptive mindset, the tendency toward simply not caring about those outside the tribe; that is, one’s extended family and selected friends. That tendency has hardened into an easy willingness to abuse and harm others. Therefore, the need to post a sign in a retail store to try to protect its employees. We are indeed in dark times.