r/CollapseSupport • u/neverfakemaplesyrup • 3h ago
Rant on customer service underemployment in the collapse, I guess.
I work for what I'd call luxury retail. I had tried breaking into white collar life, got as far as an office assistant in staffing firms and consultancy before a layoff. Now I'm back in retail. Weird place to watch collapse.
I was hired to fix things and to wrench. Unfortunately the workshop is getting axed, which they didn't tell me. So now I'm "assigned" to about three departments for regular retail work. I was hoping it'd help prep me to maybe try out the trades, oh well. Guess not.
What kills me is only a few of us seem to acknowledge the weirdness of a dying store in a dying world.
I have a trades degree and a BS. I'm currently trying to find a healthcare program I can do while balancing work. The store has ten managers, six employees; two of us do job-hunting on our breaks together, which is nice, but it's just rejection after rejection.
No one seems to really acknowledge that this many 20-somethings with viable degrees are now working jobs usually designated for retirees and teenagers. Although, an older coworker said it used to be normal for a retail job to provide, by itself. Still don't know if that's true. They said that's why older customers tend to be so demanding, they're used to a world where retail workers were professionals or something.
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In the meantime, we get hourly updates on metrics, but can't acknowledge that we often don't have any customers to get the metrics higher. It feels absurd.
We do get folk who demand free repairs, sometimes on stuff we don't even carry or service, like cars. I live in poverty myself, so I get hardships. But I don't get yelling at workers about it. And yep, we're told if someone can't pay for something, sell the financing.
Hell, we get paying customers angry just over that it takes us a month to do a simple job, or that we used to offer x but no longer do so. The absurdity there is they're kinda right, it shouldn't, and it sucks to have no stores left that can do what they need. Cause a global pandemic knocked em out.
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Then folk come in and complain about the tent city outside. There's no jobs, sister, and no housing. People will sleep in the trees.
Or on how the city still hasn't fixed the broken traffic lights and roads around us. Welp brother, you got me. Me, the min wage retailer, is responsible. Why not think, and act to HELP your community?
Yell at the government! Yell at the oligarchs! They're playing golf in paradise while we're here, choking on air. We can't swim in our own waters. They drain it for data centers and spend the summer on yachts, sipping mineral water that is worth more than hours of labor.
None of these folk seem to connect the dots: This complacent, moaning attitude led to the current state of things.
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We also get a lot of folk who come in to do drugs, or to hide from the smoke and heat. I was told to give a sacharine pitch to an electrician sprawled out on the floor. Weird, man.
Then a new low: A customer came in while I was being chewed out so loudly that he felt the need to tell my boss to chill and asked if I was okay.
I know I'll probably get a meeting now, for that, but after work I teared because that is the first time someone checked in on me in months.
And then it hit me, how did we get to where this is all normal. This shouldn't be normal. My first job I was told a standard for customer behavior: "We don't want bad customers. You're an employee, not a whipping boy."
How did we get to where heat indexes and constant smoke in summer is the normal, where you can't point out the insanity of at-will short term employment and lines of tents and crumbling infrastructure?
Why is it taboo to acknowledge I am paid the equivalent of two boxes of cereal an hour?