When I was a barista not too long ago, this older customer with an Israeli flag on his car asked me (androgynous, gender-neutral name) in the drive-thru: “What’s the name on your birth certificate?”

That exact phrasing. Not even “what’s your real name?” or “what’s the name on your ID?” to achieve merely the most basic level of boomer transphobia. He wants to go way back to the hospital I was born at when my mom told the doctor to write this particular combination of letters on my birth certificate because he must know what that combination of letters is; that’s very vital information for him.

I told him that the name on my name tag at work is my birth name (which isn’t true, but who cares? Not like he deserves a true answer anyway). Thankfully, he took it and drove off with his shitty decaf espresso.

I worked at a grocery store for about 5 years in a completely white southern town with an average age of 68 years old. I don’t even know where to start.

Nearly every day I’d hear the n-word get spoken casually. Often it was in the context of something like “why’d this price go up? It’s all that n-word’s fault” (they meant Obama). Why did they think this was ok to say to the 22 year old shelf stocker? We didn’t take orders from Obama himself. “Uhh lemme be clear. Twinkies are going up 30 cents.”

We also repeatedly got requests to see the manager, even if he wasn’t there and maybe I was the acting manager (since sometimes only two people would be working). Just endless complaints about the most minor things. The store’s AC is too cold, the aisles are too narrow, we should take expired coupons, there are too many Latinos working that day. Just endless parade of white goofy ass problems from people who could barely walk. Like literally barely walk, and then they’d get into their cars to drive home at 70 mph. More than once we had customers who’d shit themselves in the bathrooms and leave piles of feces everywhere.

I got so many pamphlets and DVDs too of insane conspiracy theories. I used to have a stack of the Loose Change movie, the one about 9/11 being a hologram or whatever. A bunch of them were very odd Christian evangelical home movies or church movies or something. Like there was one centered entirely around how thirsty people are in hell, a bunch of short vingettes about what led people to go to hell. Including:

• a woman who goes to college and becomes a liberal

• a man who wears an earring

• A woman who gets an abortion

They’re all shown being tortured in hell by demons with pitchforks. It’s nuts. And it’s terrible production quality, like they were filmed in the back room of a church or something.

I had a giant stack of Chick Tracts too, the pamphlets about how Muslims worship the moon and Family Guy makes you gay.

My favorite customer ever though was a lady who came to the register crying. I felt kinda bad so I asked her if she was ok. She said it’s fine, but she was experiencing culture shock. She had just moved for the first time and didn’t understand our culture or how to do anything. “Everything’s so different here” were her words. And so I did feel really sympathetic, thinking she had just made a huge change to her life at an elderly age. So I ask her where she moved from. Turns out she moved 9 miles, from the neighboring town, and within the same county. She didn’t even change zip code.

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Stocking the dairy section shortly before Christmas and the store is insane, like some aisles body to body. My u-boat tips over twice and I have to clean a bunch of broken dairy stuff (I’m vegan too so not a fan of actually touching dairy stuff). Then a special needs guy comes through the aisle and is telling his caregiver/aide he’s gotta go the restroom but I think she was an immigrant so she either didn’t understand him or she was just ignoring him. A few seconds after he passes by the smell hits and I see poop fall out of his pants. It keeps falling out as he walks down the aisle and around the corner.

I run to my supervisor who tells me to put wet floor cones around the poop so I grab as many cones as I can and set them out while she pages someone to clean it. I was gagging (it smelled really bad) so I went in the back for a minute to pull myself together. Then I go back out to see the supervisor and a coworker trying to ward customers away from the poop and the wall of cones but the customers keep stepping in or rolling through the poop with their carts. Multiple people moved or completely ignored the cones and then went through it despite it being brown poop on a white floor surrounded by yellow cones and was stinking up the whole aisle.

My supervisor tells me to post up in front of the biggest pile to ward off customers while she goes and finds someone to clean it so I stood there over a pile of shit for ten minutes trying to get the most clueless people in the world to stop being mesmerized by the treats for two seconds so they wouldn’t step in the very clearly marked out shit. Like it’s a wonder most customers can even make it to the store without getting hit by a bus or something

I worked in a corner store underneath a housing assistance block. All the customers were either alcoholic, disabled, drug addicted, demented, very elderly, or all of the above.

One guy lifted his top, and showed me his recent heart surgery, which immediately started bleeding once he took the gauze off. I had a lot of instances of them showing me their weird medical ailments, actually. This particular customer was a pathological liar, but reportedly had once murdered a man. He was now approaching dementia, but sometimes attempted to use his dementia to not pay for booze.

The worst, but funniest, was this infamous customer called James. He had inherited a fortune and spoke poshly, but was now a seemingly demented alcoholic. Just hangs around the village charmingly harassing people. Kind of a local myth type character.

One day he comes in and starts calling me common muck and all this other stuff, says he could buy the entire shop, and so on.

Another customer was there, who was friends with all the staff, and also a posh old alcoholic (but still totally functioning outwardly), starts defending the staffs honour. The two old men get into a shouting match. Then it escalates so they’re now both whacking each other with walking sticks. We split them up. James gets banned from the store. As he leaves, he does a big diarrhea shit mostly in his pants but a little bit on the floor.

The boss kindly opted to clean it up for me, given that it was my first few days on the job.

A while back, I’m the only person doing checkout and there’s one other person working returns/ customer service. That person inexplicably up and leaves for lunch without getting a relief person for either of us.

I’m working the long checkout line and a return customer walks over and yells in my face, “Hey do you see us over here!” I politely but sternly say back “I’m not going to do two things at once. I’m going to service the checkout line. You’ll have to wait until a person services the return line.”

Finally, after 15-20 excruciating minutes, a relief person comes up to work the returns. After being helped, that woman who yelled at me walked out right past me with her middle school aged son, no apology, no nothing.

I did feel good for sticking up for myself that day because previous me might have tried to do something stupid like work both lines simultaneously.

I worked at a call center a lonnnnng time ago. The guy was asking for information on his deceased mother’s account, which we legally cannot do without death certificates and probably probate letters. (Fuck I don’t remember). I told him that it was impossible. They guy stayed on the line for 5 minutes calling me shit like “low rung clerk” and “going nowhere in life”. In the end, he agreed to get the government documents, because there was no way he was going to get what he wanted without it.

It was probably my first ever experience with white boomer syndrome.

As a teen, I worked in a supermarket for years. People would always ask if the out of stock item was in the back. Guy, it’s not in the back. I’m aware that this is a meme now.

To this day, I can find items in a supermarket super fast, as I just understand how everything is laid out. I’m usually in and out of the store in 5 minutes.

I work in produce at a grocery store and we often have people ask us to cut roots for one reason or another. My coworkers absolutely hate dealing with customers sometimes and I don’t blame them.

I had a woman shove a yellow yam on my chest and demanded (I think?) in broken english/creole to cut the bad parts off. I guess my autism/tolerance levels were through the roof because I just went and did it for her for some reason. When I got back to her with the yam, she clicked her tongue at me in disappointment and began ranting about how I cut the soul of the yam too deep. She didn’t even buy the damn thing lmao

Worked in a grocery store for a long time. People don’t like being told “no” or corrected in any way.

If I worked in the bulk foods section and told somebody’s kid, politely, to stop sticking their naked hands into the food bins or smearing peanut butter all over the place, I almost always got the stink eye.

Told a customer once that we’ve never carried that item they insist they’ve bought here before and it really felt like it was going to end in a fist fight between me and him until his wife appeared and told him that, “No, we didn’t get that here.”

I once mistakenly told a customer who looked barely old enough to have started college, that it’d be helpful for us employees to not put things on the floor when you didn’t want them, just find somebody who works here to hand it off to or leave it at the register when you check out. The amount of offense that this young person took at being asked for the bare minimum was astounding.

The I couldn’t even guess at the number of times that I told a customer “no,” only to spend the next half an hour being drug back to them by other employees who where asked the same question by the same customer who was just shopping around for an employee to tell them “yes.” Only to be disappointed that I was brought back out to tell them “no, we can’t give you that for free. no we don’t have any in the back. no, we don’t carry that flavor. no, we’ve never carried that brand/size/flavor. no, we can’t mail you things. no, we can’t just get anything at any time we are limited to what is in the catalogs from the distributors we have contracts with. no, us buying stuff from amazon.com and selling it to you will not be cheaper than you buying it from amazon.com and having it shipped to you.”

I was working at this media store where I rode out the beginning of the pandemic and my transition, it was a weird time all around. Not the worst by any means but still retail.

There was this one dude who walked up to me when I was running cash, looked me in the eyes, then down to my tits, then down to my nametag, then back at my eyes and did the sign of the cross. He would later come in on a regular basis to use our restrooms and go to every section, display, and employee that he found objectionable to shake his head and then do the sign of the cross. I had the unfortunate habit of always being there when he came in. He found me objectionable. That guy didn’t piss me off as much as the one dude who started laughing at me as soon as he walked up to my register. That was honestly the first time in my life that I felt rage and indignation over how others treated me for my gender identity, before then I just assumed that I somehow deserved it.

I have a gazillion stories but the full realization that the company I worked for profited off the dissemination of material that called for the abuse of women, children and minorities was a moment for me. Of course we couldn’t send those books back or anything because of the freeze peaches policies the company has. That, and the not-insignificant share of income reactionary and “christian” material represented.

I was working customer service one Christmas and some dude comes up wanting to make a purchase. Like 600 dollars of kids clothes. Kids clothes are very small and cheap and so that was a lot of fucking shit. Literal piles on the register, which wasn’t designed for checkout btw so there’s nowhere to put this pile of shit except back into the counter or in bags on the floor.

I get through it, like 10 minutes later, finally done scanning all this motherfucker’s shit

He’s mad at me for not folding it, all 5000 pieces of fucking bathing clothes

I had to leave and make a manager deal with it, I wanted to scream at him

retail and fast food workers should all have katanas and be free to use them against customers at their discretion

Well, there are some evergreen classics like people barely acknowledging your existence when you’re serving them/running them through the checkout (I love when I say “hello/good morning” and they just shove a coupon at me wordlessly), people taking out their anger over pricing/selection/whatever on me the minimum wage employee who personally sets the prices and dictates company policy (/s), getting mad at me for it being busy/having to stand in line when we’re (almost always) understaffed since corporate is slashing hours, or people asserting that they have been given military discounts or other deals before when the location has never offered that (one of my few pleasures is making guys with military IDs pay full price, makes me smile inside every time).

Then there are the rarer ones, like running an errand in my uniform after work (different store, different uniform color) and being accosted by people demanding my help. I had to explain to someone that no, I didn’t work at this hardware store, I just got off work and haven’t had time to change. That’s happened to me twice, separate jobs and separate uniforms.

Or the time I was working at a theatre in highschool and a guy started chucking 3d glasses at me for politely asking him to stop holding up the line with small talk after buying his tickets.

Then there’s the time at the same job where the same fucking person puked in the bathroom sink three fucking times over the course of the same night. He passed at least two garbage cans and was two steps from the toilets. I will not go into how I knew it was the same person other than saying the “samples” were consistent with each other. I was the one who cleaned it since I was 18 at the time and the manager was a piece of shit who wasn’t going to do it

There are times I really miss working where I didn’t have to deal with people

I used to work at a gas station. One time, a guy wanted to return some used coolant because he needed the money to fix something else about his car. I called my manager on his behalf to see what I could do. Store policy said we couldn’t do anything and I was about to give him the money myself when he just started punching the little stall I was in. Screamed the most horrific profanities at me and then sped off in his truck. He comes back an hour later attempting to return something else we didn’t even sell and proceeded to do the exact same thing.

Another time, an older gentlemen said he paid for his gas already when I knew that he didn’t. I thought it was a hustle so I just called my manager to see what I should do. I told him the guy hadn’t paid but was insisting that he did. My manager told me I probably fucked it up and just give him the gas. The camera recording showed I was right but I still got yelled at for it.