From one retail worker to another. My most recent one was a lady who had the arrogance to comment on my weight who then yelled “fatso” at me when I ignored her and walked away.
From one retail worker to another. My most recent one was a lady who had the arrogance to comment on my weight who then yelled “fatso” at me when I ignored her and walked away.
I worked at a grocery store for about 5 years in a completely white southern town with an average age of 68 years old. I don’t even know where to start.
Nearly every day I’d hear the n-word get spoken casually. Often it was in the context of something like “why’d this price go up? It’s all that n-word’s fault” (they meant Obama). Why did they think this was ok to say to the 22 year old shelf stocker? We didn’t take orders from Obama himself. “Uhh lemme be clear. Twinkies are going up 30 cents.”
We also repeatedly got requests to see the manager, even if he wasn’t there and maybe I was the acting manager (since sometimes only two people would be working). Just endless complaints about the most minor things. The store’s AC is too cold, the aisles are too narrow, we should take expired coupons, there are too many Latinos working that day. Just endless parade of white goofy ass problems from people who could barely walk. Like literally barely walk, and then they’d get into their cars to drive home at 70 mph. More than once we had customers who’d shit themselves in the bathrooms and leave piles of feces everywhere.
I got so many pamphlets and DVDs too of insane conspiracy theories. I used to have a stack of the Loose Change movie, the one about 9/11 being a hologram or whatever. A bunch of them were very odd Christian evangelical home movies or church movies or something. Like there was one centered entirely around how thirsty people are in hell, a bunch of short vingettes about what led people to go to hell. Including:
a woman who goes to college and becomes a liberal
a man who wears an earring
A woman who gets an abortion
They’re all shown being tortured in hell by demons with pitchforks. It’s nuts. And it’s terrible production quality, like they were filmed in the back room of a church or something.
I had a giant stack of Chick Tracts too, the pamphlets about how Muslims worship the moon and Family Guy makes you gay.
My favorite customer ever though was a lady who came to the register crying. I felt kinda bad so I asked her if she was ok. She said it’s fine, but she was experiencing culture shock. She had just moved for the first time and didn’t understand our culture or how to do anything. “Everything’s so different here” were her words. And so I did feel really sympathetic, thinking she had just made a huge change to her life at an elderly age. So I ask her where she moved from. Turns out she moved 9 miles, from the neighboring town, and within the same county. She didn’t even change zip code.
white americans are not functioning human beings lmao
A lifetime ago, I watched an old man circle the salad bar from my vantage point on the other side of the deli counter and witness a full sized dookie fall out of his church pants and onto the floor. Either this dude had a killer poker face, or he had no idea he just shat himself…
To be fair, it’s a huge fucking difference being from a small town and moving to a small town. You go from being almost family with everyone you meet to being an outsider to 95% of people.
That could be, hadn’t considered it. I’ve thought about her for a long time though.
The two towns are very interconnected although now that you say that, little pockets or families tended to stay in one place or another. The place she moved from is a dead lumber mill town that once threw a parade because a Chili’s opened up. She moved to a white flight town made up of former residents of the nearby larger (and more black) city.
She also moved to the white flight town right as the housing market collapsed in 2008/09, where America was starting to build its current, even more predatory real estate system. She could have been talking about that, she could have been talking about the lack of churches in town, or the fact there are traffic lights.
It hurts my brain to think about how to handle these people after the revolution 😕
That’s all you needed to say. I’m so sorry.
Yo! Those fucking Chick Tracts lol. I remember finding one in a vending machine in DC (like I grabbed my soda and there was a pamphlet in there too). Me and my friends pissed ourselves laughing at that shit. It was all about this dude who ended up in hell, and what caused him to go there. It was legit like one time he looked at a girl’s ass, and another time he told a dirty joke.