“Violent customers throw items, climb on counter at CA Chipotle,” read one headline projected on screens behind the stage. “Tesco arms delivery drivers with DNA ‘spit kits’ to help trace abusive customers amid rise in violence,” read another.
While much of the programming at this year’s NRF Big Show was the standard fare of industry promotion and cheerleading, one panel was a grim reminder of the plight of the retail workforce segment who aren’t usually treated to travel stipends and networking mixers: frontline workers.
The session, in case anyone still prescribed to the bromide that the customer is always right, was called “Tackling customer incivility: 3 approaches to support and empower your frontline associates.”
While the Karen and Ken memes that proliferated at the height of the pandemic often featured entitled retail and restaurant customers abusing workers over masking protocols, Carol Leaman, CEO and co-founder of Axonify, a training and onboarding platform geared at frontline workers, said that while the memes may have faded, the despicable behavior has not.
There are about a thousand items in a content library for frontline workers and their managers to access on the Axonify platform, and 8 of the 10 top most popular items today relate to customer incivility and workplace safety, “which is astounding,” Leaman said. “Five years ago, this stuff wasn’t even a thing, and now it’s a very big thing.”
Bristle while you work: A 2024 survey by Axonify found that 40% of frontline retail and grocery workers report feeling scared of going to work, while a 2024 survey from Theatro found that 80% of frontline retail workers felt unsafe at work.
“I think that’s a pretty sad indictment of the world that we live in at the moment,” Martin Newman (no relation to author), a self-described “consumer champion” with The Customer First Group, said during the session.
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It’s also, Leaman added, partly why retailers are facing staff shortages.
“I am convinced that some of the labor shortage that we see today in some of these frontline roles is directly related to the risk that these people feel going to work,” Leaman said.
In a 2023 Axonify survey, 63% of frontline respondents said customers have grown more likely in the past few years to ask—yup, this old chestnut—to speak with a manager. Another 60% said customers have grown more irritable than before, while 58% said they’re more likely to start disputes with staff and other shoppers and 55% said they’re more often haggling over prices with associates.
Conflict zones: A generation ago, the extent of training for a retail associate might have been how to operate the register and fold clothes perfectly for displays, but today more retailers are coaching on how to deal with unhinged customers.
“We are seeing trends of having people expert in conflict resolution be leveraged in stores to train managers, to train associates on how to de-escalate a situation,” Leaman said.
Leaman said she was shopping recently when she saw another shopper struggling to ring up her merchandise in the self-checkout line, and then was “extremely rude” to an associate in his early twenties who approached her to help.
“I thought, ‘He’s been very well-trained,’” she said.
What made her think that?
“He just calmly asked her to please give him a moment and he would sort her out” and he resolved the situation, she said.
But maybe the question is not whether store associates need to be retrained as much as shoppers do.
“There’s all manner of situations where people today, for whatever reason, are just far less patient than we used to be,” Leaman concluded. “There’s some grace and some patience and kindness that we’ve lost absolutely.”