Being a cashier you’re going to become accustomed to people
complaining and bitching to you about certain things (pricing, selection, etc.).
The bitching and complaining is typically held to a minimum at my workplace,
but lately there has been a certain group of customers (where I cashier we get
the same customers almost every day and these customers are also sort of
co-workers, as well) that haven’t done anything but complain.
Complaining is one of those things that can have a slow
build before it finally irritates you and this situation is one of those. At
first the complaining didn’t bother me at all. Then it started to slowly bother
me. Then something happened on Thanksgiving that finally did it.
My work, in a showing of appreciation to employees working
on the holiday, was giving each employee that had to work a free meal. The
employees had the choice of having one entrée (either turkey or ham), two
sides, one roll, one drink, one dessert and one salad for free. If the employee
decided to take advantage of the entire meal than the price would approach
upwards of $10 per employee, which is way more than fair, if you ask me. Most
places probably don’t do this for employees working on major holidays, but my
place of employment likes to spoil (to a fault much of the time) most of their
employees.
During the dinner shift I had a group of customers
(employees) come in and get their free meal. This group typically complains
about prices of the food, which they always erroneously claim have gone up,
when they haven’t budged a single cent in the 10 months I’ve worked this job.
One of the customers in this group began to bitch about the fact that we didn’t
have bacon bits on our salad bar this particular night. Bitching about such an
insignificant thing while in the middle of receiving a free meal frankly pissed
me off, so I decided to call this customer on it (even though I probably
shouldn’t have) saying, ‘Are you seriously going to complain about a free meal?’
The customer continued to bitch about the lack of bacon bits until finally
going about their way with their free food.
It’s unnerves me that on a day when people are supposed to
be thankful and on a day where the workplace is being so gracious as to give away
around $1000 worth of free food that somebody would be this ungrateful.
However, it seems to be coming commonplace in this world of “me, me, me” and “more,
more, more”.
There are millions of people in this country and even more
around the world that are in dire need of a meal right now and we have fools like
the one bitching and moaning about something as inconsequential as bacon bits.
This customer didn’t deserve a free meal, even for working on Thanksgiving,
because they clearly didn’t get the meaning of the entire day.
People need to learn to show a little bit of gratitude in
their lives. Unfortunately, gratitude is something severely lacking sometimes
in my place of work.
