Yesterday, I was sourcing via Retail Arbitrage at a local store where the employees are friendly and positive. As I finished up I got in line to check out. I heard a woman start yelling at a cashier about her receipt. Apparently she wanted the receipt put in her bag because her hands were full and “she had a system,” even though she had a free hand. She was yelling about how the cashier was there to serve her and if she could not do that she needed to find a new job. This was all due to the cashier putting the receipt in her hand and not the bag with the goods purchased!
After the angry lady left, there were multiple cashiers who seemed a little rattled. Had I not seen what had happened it might have come across as them being rude or unfriendly. I told the cashier, “Don’t worry, I don’t yell,” and she laughed and smiled. This seemed to snap her out of the shock the angry lady put the cashiers in.
The reason I bring this up is because I hear people talking about how rude an employee was at a store, but oftentimes I wonder if we are really considering what these people go through each day? Consider if you worked at a place where placing a receipt in a customer’s hand could get you lambasted by a vicious woman. We never really know what these retail employees go through dealing with the general public and should not allow perceived rudeness to change us or make us behave differently toward them. We should always be friendly and polite.
Another thing to consider is the mindset this angry woman had. She said plainly that those employees were “there to serve” her. While true in a technical sense, the mentality she had was one of a queen on a throne with these servants scrambling to follow her every whim. We need to ensure we are not thinking of ourselves more highly than we ought to think (Romans 12:3), and that we do not treat anyone like they are beneath us.
I do not know what the angry woman went through that day. Maybe she was frustrated because she had horrible things happen that day and took it out on a young lady who would not fight back. Whatever the reason was this is also a lesson for us to not bring our negative experiences into other people’s lives. Why yell at someone because your day went poorly? Why take your bad day and make someone else’s day bad too? Just because you are suffering, does not mean you need to make others suffer. We should strive to ensure that other people are blessed to be around us and not cursed. We need to make sure that we are so emotionally-stable that even when we are having a bad day people would not be able to tell, because we are positive and friendly as always.
