In the 90s I worked for a national coffee chain at a shop in a mall, just when fancy coffee was getting trendy. I did not work for St@rbucks, but for one of their Canadian competitors. (It was fashionable at the time to hate the Seattle-based globalist, but I have since come to realize how much better off I had been working there instead of where I did.)
Anyhoo, the mall I worked in was in a ‘new money’ neighbourhood. Most of our customers were women, with fingers covered in bling and wallets stuffed with black credit cards, and a terrible attitude towards the people serving them coffee. I didn’t think much of it because I had never worked customer service before, so I assumed that customers were just like that and it was part of the job.
Once I started working in other stores in the chain, and talking to people who worked in other coffee shops, I realized how bad it was. They talked down to us, snapped their fingers for our attention, demanded fat-free lactose-free half-caf double decaf lattes, and then freaked out if we put more cinnamon on it than the last time they’d had one. Someone once poured their coffee down my back when I was cleaning out the garbage can (and then apologized to the woman whose fur coat had been splashed when I jumped). A colleague got yelled at by a customer who didn’t believe him when he said all our botted fruit juices were fat-free. People would bring food from all over the mall and leave major messes in our seating area, and then bolt without acknowledging us at all as we mopped up their spilled root beer and wasabi peas. (We did not sell root beer or wasabi peas.) I mean it was bad. There was a lot of crying in the bathroom. (Do people outside of food service know this is a thing? Like a standard cliche among people who prepare and serve food? It’s nicer to have a walk-in fridge to do it in, but bathroom stalls work too in a pinch.)
And not only were the customers awful but we were busy. One of the highest sales stores in the country, and all this from the tiniest little space. Every fourth Sunday the mall hosted an event that brought in the very worst of the worst customers, the most clueless and cruel and entitled people I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter.
We couldn’t keep a manager because whenever they brought one in from another store, they would find the treatment from the customers intolerable, and demand another transfer or quit outright.
Other stores’ customers were not like this. In downtown stores, most customers were people on breaks from their office jobs. (Many of them, I’m confident, were husbands of the people tormenting us during the weekdays in our store.) They were so delightful. They were happy to be out of the office for a minute, they got to have a little treat (a coffee and a cookie or whatever), they always returned my smile, and they didn’t linger unless we weren’t busy. It was a genuine pleasure to work in those stores and I said even at the time that if the pay had been better, I would have been happy to keep doing it.
There were other stores in wealthy areas, but they were more old money. Those customers were also lovely, they didn’t have anything to prove by talking down to the person serving them coffee. They acknowledged us, our humanity and our professional skills, and were polite and friendly. They even tipped!
But I started out at the terrible place before I knew any better. So I didn’t even have to develop a thick skin – it was quite thick to start out with, because of this trial by fire. I could see how unreasonable the customers were, so I let it roll right off my back. Everyone has bad days. You cannot take any of this stuff personally. At the end of the day, the person in front of you just has a problem that they need your help solving. At a coffee shop it’s so easy to solve it – just give them their free coffee! If they’re going to fight with you, that’s a them problem! Leave them to their bad day.
I had a number of other customer service jobs after that one, and the ‘terrible customers’ that upset my colleagues so much would not have even pinged my ‘terrible customer’ radar. I was a customer service superstar in England, where polite customer service is not part of the service that customers pay for. Here I’m going to share my secret for the benefit of other customer service people out there:
Even if you don’t care at all about your job or your customers (like so many of my barista colleagues didn’t), it makes your life so much easier if you do everything you can to make the person happy – so they’ll leave.
Customers can be difficult but they’re just people who need something that it’s literally your job to provide. If an interaction with someone is unpleasant, do not take it personally. They are having a much worse day than you. Imagine how miserable a person you would have to be to throw a temper tantrum in a coffee shop.