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You'd be amazed at the shit customers pull these days. I don't wait tables anymore, but in the time I did, I had customers:
Bartending wasn't much better.
My partner still works in the industry and it seems like not much has changed.
I have a modest proposal that service workers shouldn't have to deal with that.
For example, maybe if a customer is rude, the business can forcibly fine them. A customer can challenge the fine + court fees, and is presumed innocent, but since it's a private establishment the business can present video evidence.
Thus, business owners are incentivized to let employees refuse to serve rude customers, rather than the other way around (importantly, the customer can't be fined after a sale).
It's a small thing, along with letting factory workers wear headphones.
I believe this one's actually OSHA banning it, not the factories.
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Even without the modest proposal part, ask yourself "exactly how could a business (particularly a small business) abuse this against customers, if the business owner was petty enough to want to do that?" (And plenty of business owners are petty. That's one of the advantages a big box store like Walmart has over mom and pop stores.)
If your proposal is vulnerable to such abuses, it's a bad idea.
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As someone who worked in retail years and years ago, hollow laughter.
Managers won't take the side of staff because customers bring in money while staff cost money. And nowadays, with your business living and dying by online reviews, and anything less than 5 stars being seen as terrible, there's even more of a perverse incentive to appease even the loudest mouth, because that's precisely the person who will leave 1 star reviews everywhere and get up an online campaign to boycott your business. Throwing staff to the wolves is easier than telling bad customers to buzz off.
Used to be the right of refusal of service, but that got neutered after all the lawsuits about equal treatment etc. (just think of the gay wedding cakes argument for one). You can technically refuse service so long as the reasons are non-discrimination, but today everything can be turned into "that's discrimination!" (e.g. Kamala and Hillary didn't get elected because sexism and racism, in Kamala's case, not because nobody wanted them as president).
Some places will protect staff, but generally customer facing is low ranking, high turnover anyway, and you're disposable.
To illustrate the point from my own retail experiences from years and years ago: We had to do customer service training every year. I worked the service desk a lot, and my first year there I was always baffled by the manager's willingness to give refunds for stupid shit. For example, it was a grocery store, and we sold deli pizzas that you took home and made yourself. Someone tried to return one that 1. Was already cooked and 2. Had two pieces left. The couple's stated reason for the return was that it "wasn't as good as we remembered it being". I had to call the manager because I wasn't allowed to refuse refunds (this wasn't normally an issue since most refunds were pretty routine), and I was incredulous when he gave them store credit.
It wasn't until they started the customer service trainings that I realized that $3 was a small price to pay to keep from pissing these people off. They shopped there every week and weren't constantly returning items, and it would probably cost the store a lot more in the long run if they decided to go somewhere else. We had already disappointed them with the pizza, after all. Add to it the fact that stores will spend huge amounts on advertising without even thinking about it and then try to nickle and dime the customers as soon as they get into the store. I was told that we needed to provide an absolutely flawless experience to the extent possible. If someone asked where an item was we weren't allowed to tell them; we had to walk them to the location. The thing is, it's not like it was that great of a store or anything. Good service is just a customer expectation, and if you can't provide it, and can't make up for it in other ways (like having rock bottom prices), people will take their business elsewhere.
I think providing good service is reasonable, as long as the customer is polite and not asking for something particularly demanding.
The refund wasn’t your problem, the manager is the one who’s losing from giving customers extra.
My focus is when customers are disrespectful, or the boss is disrespectful, or otherwise causing the employee unnecessarily difficulty.
I think that pettiness is particularly evil, because it’s clearly unjust, loss without gain. Whereas even a robber baron, while unjust, at least gains the money others lose, and can donate it back to society. I wonder why society doesn’t focus on tackling pettiness more than other issues.
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That’s why they were proposing a legal framework where it becomes profitable for the restaurant to go after rude customers. If the restaurant gets most of the fine and there is an additional even more punitive fine for reviewing a restaurant after you’ve been found against (and running an anon review service is banned), you could reset the incentives. I would be mostly fine with all of this except for the banning of anon review sites because I don’t like the idea of ID gating the internet, even a small part of it.
I don’t want ID to be part of the internet either.
Anon review sites are already untrustworthy. Ideally, people revert to paid trustworthy critics or form paid webs of trust, so rando nitpicking and shill glazing are both ignored.
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