Plenty of young people have worked a customer service job to help afford the expenses that come with being a college student. Anyone who works a job that requires interacting with the public understands how truly taxing it can be.

For these students, having to deal with customers who won’t listen to the word “no” or will yell at them for getting a coffee order wrong is just an added stressor.

As someone who has worked multiple customer-facing jobs, I have never felt the need to demand that workers force a grin when interacting with me, and I don’t care if someone stocking shelves has their AirPods in. It’s unrealistic to expect Ritz-Carlton-level service from your local 19-year-old Culver’s employee.

If you think it’s feasible for a retail worker to cater to your every whim and make all of your dreams come true, you’re going to end up disappointed when someone can’t meet your impractical expectations.

University of Minnesota fourth-year student Sam Boime said he often has to over-explain himself to customers who get annoyed when things aren’t done a certain way.

One instance involved a movie theater customer who insisted on having a free refill of a large popcorn before she had even started her first one. After explaining to her that he would just be giving her two large popcorn buckets, the customer still wasn’t satisfied.

Fourth-year student Aubrey Bolton says it can be hard to stay positive at a job when customers are rude. Bolton recalled a time when a group of girls was continuously loud and disrespectful.

“Especially when they’re doing something horrible or saying mean things,” Bolton said, “Just the lack of respect I had, it felt like they’re not treating me as a human being, and that was pretty hard.”

In the digital age, it has become more common to record everyday interactions, including those of service workers just trying to make it through their day. Bolton still remembers the frustration she endured while working at Chipotle during a 2024 trend where customers would film themselves walking out if they didn’t like their portions.

Filming employees for TikTok trends makes for an uncomfortable experience for everyone involved, and it’s time we start taking into consideration how forcing workers into stressful situations demonstrates a fundamental lack of empathy.  

Even though you get to leave when your shift ends, the repeated poor treatment you endure at a customer service job can put a strain on your mental health.

Additionally, the customer service jobs that students get near campus often don’t pay well. In Minnesota, the average retail worker makes around $15 an hour, and students looking for a quick way to make money in a poor job market can’t afford to be picky about where they work.

Instead of showing patience toward our peers, we take out our personal frustrations by being rude to workers earning minimum wage. People forget that the person behind the counter also deals with their own struggles.

“I’ve had a lot of things going on in my life, and when someone doesn’t have any empathy or sympathy towards me, it will make my problems at home feel worse,” Bolton said. “I mean, yeah, you can brush it off, but still, when someone says something horrible to you, you’re going to think about it.”

Respect for customer service workers is important for many different reasons, Boime added.

“It’s important to be respectful to people in general, and I think just when there’s people who are working to make sure you’re getting service, I think the least you can do is show kindness, ” Boime said.

At the root of the issue of how we treat customer service workers is our lack of understanding of how to interact with the people around us. In a post-COVID world, our social skills are invariably fried.

The pervasive sense of loneliness felt by Americans in recent years has been described as a public health epidemic, and I would wager that it’s also a huge reason why we’ve become so comfortable treating others poorly in social situations.

When you don’t bond or create community with the people around you, you develop an inability to view others as being similar to you.  You lose the ability to have basic levels of empathy for others.

Next time you feel the need to get angry at a customer service worker, remind yourself how you would want to be treated if the roles were reversed.