I once took a child to McDonalds. The place was busy, with numerous patrons waiting patiently in line to order. A young teenager was working the register and clearly doing the best she could. Suddenly, a customer rushed the counter, hitting the teenage employee in the face with fries while screaming obscenities and demeaning the girls’ abilities. What had set off the 40-year-old customer? She was upset about being given the wrong size fries.
I am not making this up.
This could have been resolved easily and politely, but it wasn’t. The manager apologized for the error and gave her the correct size fries. The message sent to the teenage employee was that the McDonalds manager found abuse of her employees acceptable. The message sent to the angry customer was that treating other Americans poorly over minor matters is acceptable and gets you what you want. These messages were not lost on the long line of customers, nor were these messages lost on the employee. Her message was this: service industry employees must accept being treated poorly and even assaulted – this teenage girl was assaulted when the customer hit her in the face with a package of fries. The appropriate thing for the manager to do was to demand (in a professional way) that her employees be treated with respect and dignity, and therefore police should have been called for the assault, which was captured on camera. Americans regularly treat waiters, bartenders, hotel check-in clerks – anyone in a public service industry – disrespectfully. Americans are regularly rude and disrespectful to one another.
Why does this poor behavior continue? Because there are rarely negative consequences for being a jerk, and often the rude American is rewarded by a manager who merely wants to placate the customer.
The customer is not always right. In fact, the original quote is that “in matters of taste the customer is always right.” In reality, the customer is often wrong. Americans will continue to behave badly until the public and employers stop allowing people to treat our fellow Americans rudely or unprofessionally.
Without negative consequences for poor behavior, you are reinforcing that poor behavior works and is acceptable. Here’s an idea: Demand that customers behave appropriately on your premises and treat you, your employees, and their fellow customers in a professional manner – at all times. What kind of boss is ok with their employees being disrespected and abused anyway?
Without negative consequences, the behavior will continue.
Too often businesses cave in to unprofessional and disrespectful or rude behavior – this not only reinforces the bad behavior for the bad customer, but it reinforces for everyone that observed the incident that bad behavior works and is acceptable.
You have to teach people how you want them to respond to you. I assure you, if employers and businesses stopped rewarding bad customer behavior and implemented negative consequences, i.e. being removed from the business, denied service, banned from the business, or arrested, then Americans would start to behave far better. Part – at least part – of the reason Americans treat one another so poorly is because we too often accept and reward such behavior.
We also treat strangers poorly. Someone is wearing a hat for a politician you don’t like? Ignore it. Someone has a yard sign for a political party you don’t like? Just ignore it. What possesses some Americans to insult complete strangers over something like a shirt or a hat is beyond me. Surely these people were raised better than this.
One would hope, but apparently not. See a post on someone else’s Facebook page you disagree with? No response from you is being asked for or is required. If you disagree with it, just move on. There are more important things in life than someone else’s political or religious beliefs, and your comment is 100% guaranteed to not make them change their view anyway, but will likely just make them dig in. Do you know how you change someone’s beliefs? By listening to them and getting to know them, not by arguing, attacking, or demeaning them. Such behaviors only add to the hate in the world. It serves no useful purpose. Just look at how some politicians weaponize hate for Americans who don’t support them. Nothing good will come from such acts. I talk about how we Americans treat one another because our daily interactions with one another set the tone for our society. If we cannot even be kind to one another, how can we love one another?
America cannot be great without also being good. Can you honestly say we treat one another well? You and I must be the change we want to see in our country, and that means being kind and professional with persons in customer service and hospitality jobs, and kind to everyone all the time. Kind people are kind even when others aren’t. Are you up to being kind and professional to everyone you meet?
Dr. Beaux Bonhoeffer
Find me also @beauxbonhoeffer.bsky.social and at beauxbonhoeffer.substack.com