The Customer Is Not Always Right

By Kristina Sossa on June 29, 2014

I see hundreds of customers on a daily basis at work. Some are fantastic while others are average. Then there are the ones you want to smack with attitude. The other day, I had a customer that made me actually have to bite my tongue to keep from yelling at her.

At our store, we have a transvestite. He is in the stages of becoming a woman, so we call her a female. She is a great co-worker and always nice to the customers. She is usually found taking money in the drive-thru. Well, yesterday I overhear a customer questioning one of my trainees at the drive-thru window. I almost could not believe what I was hearing, so I had to step in. Her first question was about the gender term we use for her, and I casually explained she is becoming a woman, so we refer to her as a female. This next question got me: “Your organization is accepting of that?”

Uh…yeah…my organization is not run by small-minded people like you; we accept anyone for who they are. The final straw was when the customer told me that what I told her was disgusting. If I could have yelled at her without consequences, I would have told her to take her food and get the hell out of our drive-thru. I would have said, “If you have a problem with someone else’s happiness, then you can leave and please never come back. I hope your fries are cold and gross.”

How do we still have people around that are so ignorant? This woman had to be thirty years old at the most. Can you please act your age? It is people like that customer who are stunting our society’s growth in accepting one another. It was just shocking to me to hear someone call another person “disgusting” for doing something that makes them happy. Especially someone who you know nothing about.

I guess I should be happy that this was my first personal encounter with a close-minded person (plus this was in hicktown, Ohio). I hope that those type of people are a dying race, but it makes me wonder why it is taking them so long to disappear. I would expect a much older person to say something rude about my coworker because of the time period they grew up in. Perhaps the customer’s world view was shaped by her parents or by the people she surrounds herself with. I’ll give it a few more years and then see how far society comes with acceptance.

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