Be Kind to Retail Workers This Holiday Season - News

Be Kind to Retail Workers This Holiday Season They already have too much to deal with Photo by Craig Whitehead on Unsplash I worked as a cashier at a Dollar Tree for two and a half years. I quit a few days before last Christmas, actually, so I had to experience three holiday seasons working retail. As a result, I think I know what hell is really like. I knew what it was like to have customers blame me for the prices of our merchandise as if I and I alone were responsible for how much our items cost. I mean, it was the Dollar Tree, where everything famously costs one dollar. How can you even really beat those prices? Anyway, I had customers yell at me for the most ridiculous reasons. All that was made worse by the fact that I got sensory overload way too easily during the holidays, multiplying all the stress that I normally got by at least five. Retail workers always have to deal with the worst of humanity, especially during the holiday season. However, I did have one customer warm my heart last year. It was an older man who came in to buy a couple of rolls of wrapping paper. Just a two-dollar purchase. But when I was done scanning his items, he held a finger to his lips and motioned for me to ring up the next customer’s purchase. So I did. The next customers were a young couple with a screaming child. They looked like they’d had about enough of this world, or at least this holiday season. Joy radiated from their faces when they realized the kind man in front of them paid their thirty-dollar ticket. It warmed my heart. It made the rest of my shift bearable, which was about as good as could be expected at that job. I’m not saying you have to pay it forward to make your cashier’s or some other customer’s day. I’m just saying, do something nice for them. If you get frustrated, maybe don’t take it out on some poor retail worker. I can almost guarantee you they’ve already had someone yell at them that day. They don’t need to experience any more of that. Just treat retail workers as human beings. This is true all year round, but especially during the holiday season.