It's not my first diary, of course, but my first for this group. Hats off to Lightbulb and others who have been writing about labor issues--especially retail labor issues.
I have been a union or guild employee in music for many years. My dues are stiff but a priority for me, because I like being in the union. But, being a professional musician, I have often had to have other jobs, often in retail. That's what I want to talk about tonight.
Follow me over the fold for some more...
Working in a retail environment can be pretty trying. I've been lucky with that, but even in our upscale cheese and wine shop, you really get dumped on by customers.
Where I worked, several different languages were spoken by the staff, and we had customers we served in languages other than English. A customer could walk into that shop and be helped in English, Swedish, German (that was me), French, Greek, Spanish, Armenian, and several others. We bent over backwards for our clients. We made about 10 dollars an hour. And you know what? We were treated like that, too.
For all of our all-out customer service and high end products, for all of our education and fluency in foreign languages, at the end of the day, these people treated us like crap. Any opportunity to put us in our place was taken. Not so much overtly. But the whole subtext was "you just work in a shop. Serve me".
I was just in the grocery store the other day. I love my fishmonger. His name is Bob, and he really knows what he's doing. He's old enough to be my dad. I overheard a woman say to him "I passed three supermarkets to come here because I get good service here". I used to hear that on the other end of the counter, too. And, like clockwork, she proceeded to treat Bob like crap.
I don't want to sound like a jerk here, but I want to ask folks to consider something about retail workers: many of them are highly trained, work long shifts (which are not always scheduled properly), and might even have advanced degrees. Don't be a jerk. You never know exactly who it is on the other end of that fish counter.