:

jokes aside it’s important to remember that customers are not mindless automatons that disappear the moment they exit the store, but are in fact real people just like you and me with rich inner lives and who are capable of logical reasoning and rational decision making. so why don’t they fucking act like it

in my experience it’s a mixture of

- they do act like it, but those aren’t the ones we remember

- they’re having a particularly bad day (extra common in my line of work)

- they’re doing something outside their usual routine and are anxious and overthinking a few specific things, meaning their minds are too stressed out to approach any logical puzzles other than the specific ones they’re worried about (relatable, I have made very silly mistakes in similar circumstances)

- they’re doing something so much within their usual routine that they feel like their mind can clock out and become totally unavailable to handle any deviation from the usual (not common in my current line of work but I see it occasionally. also, these include the people who think they can go through a whole cash register transaction while having an unrelated cell phone conversation)

- rest of them: idk. For some reason they don’t think about what they’re doing, and/or don’t care how it affects others. This probably breaks down into lots more little causes but I can’t really guess what the biggest ones might be

like, maybe some of them also have jobs in customer service having to deal with all this, and they reached the fork between the paths where this leads to either “increased empathy for what customer service workers are going through” or “complete hatred for entire world and all its people no matter where they work or what they do,” and they went down that second path.

(I feel that path pulling me too. sometimes. I’m gonna try to keep resisting, though….)