I'm going to keep it real, growing up I thought shitty customers were going to make retail work hell, no..it's shitty management.
A bad customer might throw a fit and cuss and stomp their feet, but they might be there 10 minutes, you are (usually) stuck with a shitty boss for the duration of your employment.
Give you an example, my wife works in retail, and the upper management is always having a circle jerk on how to improve customer experience, it seems like that is all they care about.
But they fucking won't build a team of workers to make that happen. It's like asking someone to build you a shed, then complain they don't have a hammer (when it was explicitly implied you would give them one).
They schedule the least amount of people on the busiest of days, they keep saying they are going to hire new people and won't, and it's not “people don't want to work anymore”, they won't even interview applicants. So it's not like people don't want to work, they aren't letting them work in the first fucking place.
I just..cannot fathom how idiotic people are in management. So many workers have complained they can't get shit done due to lack of staff, and some have even quit citing this, which only further burdens current workers with more work, and they..just don't care.
But yet they (mgmt) constantly bitch and moan that people are waiting in line too long, or walking out due to the line being too long, etc.
But this example of my wife's work is the same shit I always faced. The answer to any issue is always staring them right in the fucking face, yet they will spend endless amounts of time coming up with solutions that no one asked for, do not work, or even make things worse. They needlessly complicate the most simple concepts because they feel a reason to justify their job or something. If you asked them to design a fucking roll of toilet paper it would somehow not wipe your ass.
It's not an issue of not having enough payroll, or any financial issue that would be jeopardized by hiring more people, it's just sheer and utter incompetence.
The other night one of the workers went home early sick, reducing staff from 3 to 2, and despite knowing this, the manager had the balls to bitch the next day that “they didn't get all their work done”, when they know damn well 3 people can barely get it done AS IT IS (should be at least 5 people minimum on every shift), yet they can't seem to understand such simple math problems as 100 divided by 3 is obviously going to be smaller than 100 divided by 2.
If more customers come in on a certain day or night than usual, then of fucking course staff won't be able to get everything done, as they are having to stop to help customers and thus won't have as much time to do other tasks.
What the fuck does management expect them to do? Say “sorry, come back tomorrow, I have 3 hours of work to get done in an hour”?
It's just so much simple shit like this, that any normal person with a teaspoon of common sense can easily fucking see the issue and address it, but stick a manager badge on someone and suddenly all fucking common sense is eradicated from their brain.