The holiday season is upon us; which means, for me, some pretty long days working on the coffee service side of retailing.
One of the things that's been keeping me busy is that I've been dividing my time between a couple of different Starbucks locations in my area (and some weeks, more than that), mostly because has been promoted to a new store, and I am helping her out in both the old store, and the new one (on my way to working fulll time in the bigger, busier one full time).
I haven't mentioned it much - I don't talk about the coffee work here often - but the chance to work in a variety of setttings has been eye opening in realizing that even in a small radius, the types of customers, and retail exoperiences can be quite different.
That's been especially true this week, with many college kids home on Thanksgiving breaks, as well as many high schoolers on reduced schedules at school.
In addition to finding "Black Friday" to be a bit of a bust this year, the various groups of kids with extra free time got me thinking about class dynamics, and the assumptions people make.
While both the stores I work in are in pretty upscale sections of a generally wealthy enclave (Westchester County, which I believe is still one of the five richest counties in the nation), there are differences. My new store is adjacent to some of the wealthiest of the wealthy (as evidenced by what we laughingly term "au pair night" - when dozens of nannies imported from Europe descend on our store for their night off, turning us into an especially loud version of a Euro-cafe), and the differences in attitudes and espectations is palpable, compared to my other store.
The class feelings we experience are a general topic of discussion amongst the workers - the impatience, the occasions of deep disrespect for who we are and what we do - but I find, with the kids, it hits home especially hard. And it's not, for me anyway, the experience of rudeness or impatience that gets me; what gets me is the faux politesse, the extra larding on of "thank yous" and giggly inattention that are a special way to condescend to who we are and what we do.
I don't want to make it sound as if I'm loaded with resentment or suppressed rage over this; it's mostly tiring, especially late in the evening, when we are trying to close things down and clean up after a long messy day. I don't take it personally. Indeed, I think of it as a lesson in the person I was, and the person I've become. Every time I find myself annoyed trying to pull a drink order out of a group of girls too busy talking amongst themselves, on their phones and texting (usually all at once), I remember... you were there once, too.
Back in my collegiate days, it wasn't Starbucks; it was McDonald's, or places at the mall, or the food court. But I remember the occasions of feeling smugly superior to the checkout clerk, the drive through attendant, the waitress or whoever. Not, really, trying to be rude or ugly about it... but just... oblivious. Unconcerned. Impatient and inattentive, all at once. We were the smart ones, the ones with a future; and even if we worked some little job in the mall,we probably condescended to it, knew that we would be leaving it, one day, to go "off to school." And the rest of our lives.
I remember a vacation when I joined friends of friends in Rehoboth, Delaware, shortly after college for all of us. We were catching a late bite in a McDonald's after a night in the bars, and some of the people with us were just impossibly rude (and drunk, but still) to the people behind the counter. And I remember being appalled... but in a way that was like "that's really a tacky way to treat the help."
Whcih, of course, is just another way to be superior... but nice about it.
I'm different now, in my way; I don't think of these things in terms of "better than" or "different from". I try to be a nice customer, a decent customer, someone who doesn't make the job harder for the person doing it behind the counter; but I do expect good service, because that's what I try to give. I know, from my job, that you can't generalize about workers in retail establishments, working for something close to minimum wage. We're there from all kind of backgrounds, all kinds of life experiences... many of them not that different from our customers. Even in a tony, ritzy section of a wealthy county. It's not that I hate you, college kid; it's that I was you... that I am you.
I don't think today's class tensions are necessarily that vastly different or new... and yet... I don't think we necessarily think about them enough, don't raise them enough, or confront them enough. In the nice liberal enclaves in and around the major coastal urban metroplexes, we talk about right wing prejudice and intolerance... as we blithely ignore the workers smoothing the path before us. Before you. Before me. We make assumptions about class, about educational backgrounds, about life choices... and we rarely do the work to even confirm those assumptions, never mind examine why we carry them or why they might be wrong.
And I suppose - or at least I gently excuse - that one can't necessarily expect in a youth of 17, or 19, or 22, the ability to confront one's own class prejudices. On the other hand... I did kind of think that raising awareness and teaching kids to think was the goal of getting an education. I know... silly me. But then, I just work behind a coffee counter... what do I know?
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