Aztec Lady has a blog post up about reader demands (well, more than just that, but go read it to get the entire story) and it got me thinking about the culture of entitlement, Karen's and the grandest of expressions: the customer is always right.
I spent my first decade plus of working in retail. My first job was in Jack in the Box. I've sold books, t-shirts and sundries. It was always a horrible job. Bosses almost never created schedules that were fair (I remember one boss Bob who did, in fact, create a store schedule that was fair, sensible and solid. You could plan ahead for months because Bob's schedule was just that good. Obviously they transferred him and the next manager tossed that schedule and created a terrible one.)
Anyway, I have no horrible stories to tell, really. I was insulted to my face a few times but I have been in medical offices also. I did have a homeless man throw cupcakes at me but it wasn't for a reason. But there were more than a few people who walked in with demands or expectations that were just grandiose.
Anyway, there are always those bosses who say deal with it. For the most part of it, that's because they don't have to deal with it. But the entitlement of 30 years ago and the entitlement today has blown out of proportion. I would love to read a sociological view of why that is. Where did the imaginary crowns all sprout from?
I have a sad, sick enjoyment of watching Karen videos on the internet. Watching people freak out in stores and public areas in the most loud, obnoxious ways. Sometimes it's cringe and I can't watch. But many times there's a crazy aggressiveness that people (so many white women) have where they start to demand information or resolution that they are not at all entitled to.
Obviously there's a lot of racism involved. The number of white women trying to insist that people of color don't live in the apartment buildings that they live in. All the "I've never seen you." The prove to me that you live here, that you belong here, that your black skin is allowed to reside where my white skin calls home.
Similar vibe is the "viral" crowd. The people who haunt spaces demanding that they are influencers or important or just that 10,000 votes short of being president. Oops. That's a different story.
Anyway, that old adage "The customer is always right" is obviously wrong and should be a death sentence if uttered. Attitudes like that just feed into class, racism and white supremacy. The Karen entitlement (which I have been guilty of in the past and now causes me cringe to think of it) is so class based. My Mom was one of those people who saw slight in every situation and caused endless misery to waiters, salespeople and any service worker out there.
I could really go on and on about this. I think it's so engrained in us that we deserve to be treated like celebrities (we're all one tweet away from fame, after all) that we're destroying our little society with each scream fest, private outrage made public and lack of empathy.
Anyway, love y'all. Stay safe.
I really would like to see a few decent sociological studies on this topic; I am not sure myself whether the sense of entitlement is worse now than in decades past, though social media and smartphones with streaming video allows the world at large to witness these freak outs in real time, which may make it seem that they happen more now than a decade or two ago.
ReplyDeleteLike you, I have worked a lot of public-facing jobs, from food service to front offices, and it's wild what some people--especially, in my experience, white women--will demand as their due.
On the other hand, these days, with the destruction of third spaces for people to gather and form community--like, "no children allowed" so mothers don't meet other mothers; inaccessible parks with no seating, so people with mobility issues can't join; town squares without benches and/or trees, so that "undesirables" (aka homeless people) can't sleep there at night, and so on--people are isolated, which may increase their stress and lower their empathy (which of course may already be low-to-non-existent in many).
In the end, the only ones who benefit from destroying people's sense of community are the oligarchs and dictators of the world. I wish more people saw this.
Admittedly this was over the phone when I did customer service, but I had one woman threaten to 'name me and shame me' on national television, because I wouldn't give her access to information on an account that wasn't hers (I think it was a clients, not sure). the funny (no, not really lol) thing was, she was a lawyer and the more I told her I couldn't do it, because of the privacy act, the shittier and more irate she became. In the end I threw my headset to the table and walked away, which was the wrong thing to do but I oculdn't just hang up, my superviser was there lol
ReplyDeleteI don't understand the whole influencer thing. Sure, i get what it is - they spruke products, get paid to do it and lots of likes etc - but I mean, at the end of the day, they're just sharing their opinion, right? I've been doing that for years and my bank balance is so far in the red, it will take a six pack and cut lunch to come back. Maybe I need to create an account, talk about stuff I don't really give a crap about and hope osmeone wants to pay for it...
But anyway, I agree with the whole Karen thing. It needs to stop. Between the entitled and the arsehats who want to ban everything because it's 'inappropropriate/insensitive', we're going to have nothing left.
Good thing I like to share posts that offend the precious but make my all my friends and family laugh. that's what's important, surely.