Workers Share Helpful Tactics For Staying Calm With Aggressive Customers

Ada Elder

Feb 4, 2023 3:00 PM EST

Working retail is not a fun gig. In fact, most customer-facing positions are actually incredibly challenging. It's not just about making people happy. It's about managing the people who aren't happy - and that includes people who, based on their personalities and how they treat others, will probably never be happy. While my favorite job was working at a fish market in Cape Cod, the fun and food also came with having to help entitled rich people on vacation with their white-clad families. It was rough. Rougher still was the art handling company, where I fielded phone calls from insanely entitled art dealers and collectors who seemed to think their every need was an emergency. Spoiler alert: it was never an emergency.

It's tempting to hang up on unreasonable customers (which honestly, I have done) or give them the middle finger. But it's not always good to stoop to their level, as good as it may feel temporarily. Redditor u/kfrom22 seems to understand that, and approached the r/antiwork subreddit requesting advice on how to deal with these retail wretches. The people of Reddit came through. While there's loads of sympathy and good advice to be found in the thread, the most common response has been to kill 'em with kindness. As much as it hurts, we have to agree.