I'm lucky with my job. I don't need it to pay rent or buy food. I don't even need it to pay for school. I'm not in debt, I'm not poor, even relatively speaking, and I'm at work because I choose to be.
None of that would be relevant, except that I talk to my coworkers, and a lot of them aren't as lucky as me. One has thousands of dollars in credit card debt. Many are on food stamps. Several would like to go to school, or go back and finish a degree, but they can't afford to. Some don't have health insurance, because they can't afford it or don't work enough hours to be eligible. Many work multiple jobs to cover basic necessities. A lot of them don't want to be there, but they don't have a choice, because they need to eat.
A lot of customers understand where we're coming from. They're young, or they work minimum-wage jobs too, or they're just nice. But they understand, when they come through our lines, that we're people, first and foremost. They understand that working for a major corporation for $8.65 an hour is not first on the list of things we'd be doing with our lives, if all of us could choose.
What's interesting to me is the people who don't get that. I'm not talking about customers who are quiet, or don't want to talk, or upset or a bit standoffish. I understand people might be in a hurry, or having a bad day, or on the phone or whatever. I understand people get mad or confused and I'm used to checking prices or explaining complicated sales to people. And some of that's not fun, but you suck it up, because it's part of the job. What I'm talking about is people who come in acting entitled.
Some people act entitled because they think they own the store and have a right to get whatever they want. They're the ones who storm in demanding to speak to a manager and get incensed when you inform them that it's 10:30pm, and there aren't any managers in the store. They're the ones who believe fervently that it's your fault they read the week's ad wrong and thought something should be cheaper when it doesn't go on sale until the next day. They're the ones who make it very clear that there's a "you all" separate from the "me" that deserves to be served immediately and perfectly. These people, I see a lot at my Queen Anne store, because the store is in a fairly affluent neighborhood in a decent sized city. They bother me, because they don't seem to have any capacity for empathy, not to mention common courtesy. But at the end of the day, I can just forget about them.
What really sticks with me are the people who either judge you or feel uncomfortable interacting with you because of your job. This, I got a few times in Walla Walla, mostly from (presumably) Whitman students. I'd ask people about their finals or comment on profs and they'd be taken aback for a moment, as if going to Whitman and having an off-campus minimum wage job were somehow incompatible. Some of them almost looked like they felt guilty for having me serving them, or uncomfortable because they were reminded of the fact that not everyone can afford to go through four years of college without working.
One incident I remember in particular, I was talking to a young man who either went to Whitman or had graduated in the last few years. I mentioned that I was also a Whitman student, and he said something like, "I bet you have an advantage over the townies--showing up to work on time and everything." He smiled at me, friendly, but conspiratorial, like we belonged to a group that set us apart from my coworkers.
That was a really interesting moment for me. He was right in a way--we did belong to a different group, a privileged group. We have parents who can pay for the $50,000 per year that it costs to attend Whitman. But how did he extrapolate from that to decide that my coworkers must be in some way inferior? Why did he assume I'd automatically be able to get to work on time and my coworkers wouldn't?
Working at a grocery store is not exactly rocket science, so to assume my coworkers were too stupid or incompetent to show up to work on time seems like quite an insult. Besides, even if it did require a significant amount of thought, attending a private liberal arts school doesn't mean you have a monopoly on intelligence. All it means is you're damn lucky compared to a lot of people. And at the end of the day, that's half the reason I like having my job. It forces me to think about that everyday--both to acknowledge that I have privileges and opportunities a lot of people will never get, and to understand that I'm not a better person because of it.
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