Things Men Have Told Me While Working Retail
six tales of audacity
Standing behind the register is vulnerable. You must be friendly and attentive, but not overpersonal. You are at the whim of the next customer. Depending on your management, you can’t stand up for yourself because the customer needs to feel like a special little prince. Yes, I am a bitch. Yes, it’s all my fault. Would you like paper or plastic?
A coworker—a single mom who’d worked at a respective grocery store for upwards of a decade—was fired after defending herself from a customer who called her a bitch. The customer called corporate and told them she’d threatened him, which was untrue, and without any investigation, she was called into the office that same day and fired. It’s one thing to be degraded by the public. It’s another to be degraded by your boss, who sits in his office on his phone but watches the cameras to ensure you don’t do the same thing. To put it bluntly, retail and food service managers don’t give a fuck about you.
So I smile, wave, and be as friendly as possible to keep my job. As someone with a natural RBF, I have to put in extra work to seem excited and enthralled in every encounter, otherwise I get “have you ever smiled?” or “show me your teeth!” from an elderly woman who followed me and demanded I smile for her. (This did not make me want to smile. This made me want to slap her backhanded.)
It’s especially infuriating when the degrading behavior comes from older men. They’re used to a time when every working woman had to be overly friendly, well-groomed, and, basically, fuckable. Fatigue can’t be shown around them or else you’re ruining their cute-grocery-store-girl fantasy. This is the demographic that tests my patience the most because there’s an undertone of violence in male anger that makes me both want to scream profanities at them and run away.
So here are some contenders for “older men who had the audacity and I couldn’t do anything about it.” Some are worse than others. This is a collection from several jobs over several years.
The Snap-Master
We’d just survived a rush and I sat down with a loud exhale to look at my phone. I read a single text message while my coworker took a bite of her sandwich when we were approached by a 60-something bald man who slammed his things onto the conveyor belt and said, “Hey, you better get off your phone and stop eating, you have a customer and you better make it snappy.”
Make it snappy? I thought. I started ringing up his things without a word. Did he know my friend? Was this banter? She wasn’t laughing.
The Walking Corpse
An elderly man who looked like he’d blow away in medium wind walked up with his son. I’d been at the register for four hours and was losing my energy, so I just said, “Hello,” and started scanning their groceries. Could I have asked how their day was? If they found everything okay? Yes, but I was losing the will to live.
“Do you ever smile?” The walking corpse asked after a beat passed.
I paused to process what I’d heard from a man I’d never seen before. Older men telling women to smile has always pissed me off. I didn’t reply.
“Guess not.”
His son raised his eyebrows but didn’t say anything. At least he, too, knew it was rude.
The Fucking Idiot Man Baby
A man walked in through the front door with a receipt in hand—never a good sign. He put the receipt next to me and pointed to the 4-pack of beer. “You charged me for the wrong beer.”
“I’m sorry. All I did was scan it but I’d be happy to refund it for you.”
I don’t know if he thought there was a secret “wrong beer” button on the register or if I’d mischievously entered the code for a different 4-pack, which is a code upwards of 16 numbers that I must have maliciously memorized. “Yeah, I’d like a refund,” he says.
“Okay. Do you have the beer with you?” I asked. “I have to scan it again to refund it for you.”
“What?” He said. “I have to have the beer?”
“Yes, I’m sorry, that’s how refunds work here.”
“Come on,” he said. “You’re gonna get it.”
“Oh,” I said. “No, I’m sorry-”
“No, come on, come with me,” he said. His voice rose with each word until he yelled loudly enough for everyone nearby to stop and look over. “It was your mistake,” he said, pointing a finger at me. There was a forcefulness in his point, like it was the closest he could get to hitting me. “So you have to come out and fix it. It’s your fault.”
He left without waiting to see if I’d followed. I’m not following an angry man to his car. I called a manager and she came to refund him while I tackled a different line. The man returned with his beer and realized he bought the wrong beer. Wow. It’s almost like I scanned what he gave me!
I’m ringing up another customer when the angry man-baby comes onto my side of the register and puts a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry about yelling like that,” he says.
I’m about to cry (the confrontation, the attention put on me, being yelled at) and all I can do is give him a brief, stoic glance and then turn my attention back to the customer I’m helping.
“Fucking bitch,” the man says before sauntering out of the store.
I went into the walk-in freezer and sobbed.
The Creep
One of my coworkers was a friendly sixteen-year-old girl. She was helping bag groceries for an older man, at least fifty or so. The man and I were going back and forth about the weather and I handed him his receipt.
“Have a nice day,” I smiled.
“Thank you,” he said. He looked at my coworker and grabbed the bag from her, grinning not five inches from her face. “You have a nice day, too.”
His eyes trailed down her chin to her waist and down to her feet. She smiled, because she was a child and that’s all she could do. Smile and wave. “You have a nice day,” he repeated to her. “With your lovely hair and…lovely everything.”
I watched him walk out the door and made eye contact when he looked back, a hand on my hip. “I was ready to grab my taser for you,” I told my coworker.
“Thank you.”
My Meth-Head Coworker Who Was Fucking Our Boss
I was finishing up a transaction while a coworker broke down cardboard boxes next to me. He had a stupid name and a big ego.
“So,” he asked, in front of the customer. “Are you on birth control?”
“What?”
“I’m just asking.”
“Um, yeah, Nexplanon.” I was twenty at the time. Now, four years later, I would have keyed his car.
“Oh, so your boyfriend hits it raw?”
The Coal Miner
I’d been warned of this man. They said he came in covered in dirt and ash, and he’d say the same thing to every female cashier, and only the women; “Making $80 an hour for that smile, yet?”
At first, I didn’t know what that meant. That our service was worth $80 an hour? That we’re beautiful? Is this a prostitution joke? Am I fucking stupid?
“Don’t smile when he says it,” my coworker, an older woman, warned. “I stopped reacting and he stopped saying it to me.”
When I saw him come in for the first time, it was like seeing Bigfoot in person. The myth. The local legend. The coal miner. He came through my line and I tensed. Was I nervous? Excited to be confronted by this grocery store celebrity? I still don’t know. He was friendly enough and I bantered with him. Then he said his famous line.
“Making $80 an hour for that smile, yet?”
I didn’t say anything. He left soon after.
I think it was a prostitution joke.
There are certainly more encounters I’ve had and many more to come. Thankfully, I’ve started working at a different grocery store with a much nicer clientele. I didn’t include the smaller annoyances—like someone mansplaining the produce code for ginger or the many, many times I thought men twice my age were hitting on me—and maybe I have worse memories that I suppressed. Wouldn’t be the first time. One day I might yank them out and write about it. To cope.
Most of my day is pleasant. I ring people up and send them home with a “Have a great day!” I have regulars that make me laugh. My coworkers have been the best part of every job (except for the man mentioned above.) I learn a lot about my community and it makes me happy. Someone gave me some Oreos once. That was pretty cool.
I’m thankful to have not been filmed, thrown at, followed to my car, or hurt. That happens all too often, especially to young women. And yes, there are annoying and shitty female customers too. The Karens, if you will. But I don’t feel threatened by Karen. She’s entitled, snobbish, and rude, but she’s also five feet tall and wearing khakis.
The men scare me.
I wanted to reach through my screen and punch a few of these mongoloids
It’s always the men 😩 I worked in retail for four years but it was at a woman’s boutique so I managed to avoid some of the worst interactions. I’m so sorry - these are awful. I seriously don’t understand how people can treat another person like this.