-ish but through my work years, I've come to the conclusion that the only customers who give a shit about being called customers vs being called guests are those customers
As far as I understand it: It's "The customer is always right in what they want", countering the old practice of salesfolks pushing one potentially useless doodad on customers, rather than having a variety for them to choose from.
Like the fucker who wanted me to slice a loaf of bread for them. I point to the one I'd just sliced and bagged up so someone can take it and go, and they're like "no, I want fresh-sliced." ....So now I had a sliced loaf of bread nobody wanted because some people like to freeze bread for later or slice thicker pieces for themselves at home.
E.S. Levi
: I think my work has a clause of self-defense, but yeah. A person could walk out the door with thousands of dollars worth of stuff and there's fuckall I'm allowed to do about it.
Had a kid crawl under a checkout belt and get her hair caught in it. Needed the fire department to dismantle it to get her out. Parents were catching, checker was begging the parents to please get their kid because we're not allowed to handle them, aaaand boom. Store got fined and we had a mandatory meeting YELLING AT US FOR THE FINE HAPPENING.
To a degree it isn't always even the corporation. Local managers can be famously shifty because they directly benefit from all the shitty penny-pinching work-saving short-changing methods that increase revenue.
Oh yeah. I was always taught to be polite to service staff, but working in retail myself just hammers the point home. I never want to be that customer.
all it takes is one day bad enough - the exact threshold of how bad varies from person to person, naturally - and pretty much anybody can become That Customer if they aren't hypervigilant of their own actions.
the ego is a powerful force and there's something deep in lizardbrains that says "if I double down maybe I can get through this without looking bad, maybe I can make -them- look bad instead"
Unfortunately, as you probably already know, capitalismnot another human, justa soulless automaton of Big Business