I’ve definitely boycotted companies, but try to make sure my reasoning is sent as high as it can, and even then try to direct it to the company itself rather than whoever I have on the phone.
deleted by creator
I’m a big fan of leaving accurate Google maps reviews. Then it actually hurts their business.
today a customer thought I was laughing at them. I just had a mouthful of water I was desperately trying not to choke on 🥲😭
thankfully my manager didn’t believe them
In my opinion, those sort of businesses are also the ones that end up crying out when they lose to bigger players in the space who are willing with those sort of customers. At the end of the day, are you there to feel good, or are you there to get money? Here’s a little secret: nobody cares about those sort of people, it’s just that some care more about the money they can get from them than others.
For me, it’s right up there with tech support that complain about the trivial bullshit they are called for when it is that trivial bullshit that gives them a job.
If this comic was about a small business with the owner stood behind the counter like “I don’t care” then I’d totally get your point, but I don’t think that’s what it is.
This is a comic about a minimum wage slave working at a branch of some faceless retail supergiant, who gets constantly shit on by customers as if they themselves are personally responsible for whatever policymaking at this enormous company has upset the customer, ans as if they could change anything about it even if they tried.
It’s about angry customers putting their vitriolic remarks in completely the wrong place because they just need a human victim and they don’t care who it is. And it’s about learning how to deal with that as an employee so you don’t lose your sanity.
Companies I boycott:
Bank of America
5/3 Bank
Wells Fargo
McDonald’s
Walmart
That corner gas station that never paid their invoice Planet Fitness
John Deere
Verizon
AT&TNumber of store employees I’ve told that I’m never coming back:
0
Trader Joe’s for being fascist union busters. Amazon for being fascist union busters. Target for being fascist hypocrites. Chick-fil-A for being homophobic fascists. Google for being fascists. Microsoft for being fascists.
Target was the hardest one for us. Went from spending hundreds per month (they were also our grocery) to zero. Fuck them for dropping DEI and bending the knee.
You and me both. Giving Target the finger a few months ago stung because Amazon and Walmart were already longtime members of the blacklist. Costco is getting my money now. I also didn’t tell anyone except the stupid online form that asked why I was canceling my 20 year Red Card membership.
When everyone around you is a fascist, the real fascist is you.
No doubt there were muppets in Nazi Germany who said the same thing.
“Tell me you don’t know what a fascist is without saying you don’t know what a fascist is” speed run challenge.
HP, Siemens, Intel, SodaStream and everything else on this list for supporting and profiting off the genocide of Palestinians
- Adobe for being greedy fascists.
- Nestle for committing crimes against humanity.
- Starbucks for being union busters.
- Walmart for being union busters and exploiters.
- Coca-Cola for being the biggest plastic polluter in the world.
- SC Johnson for knowingly selling asbestos tainted products to unsuspecting consumers.
- Oatly for suing a small family business that also made oat milk.
- Airbnb for driving the housing crisis that plagues the entire world.
- Chevron for selling oil stolen from Palestinians.
- Meta for being fucking fascists.
- Nike for using sweat shops to make products.
- Uber for exploiting drivers and interfering with public transit development.
- Whole Foods for being union busters, same as their parent company, Amazon.
- Apple for using exploitative labor practices overseas where they escape accountability.
- Wells Fargo for rearranging the order of transactions in order to cause overdraft fees.
I could go on and on…
Huh. I never really thought about what you wrote about airbnb, but it hit me hard now. My partner actually works for an Airbnb and they have an enormous amount of property and apartments in rural areas which could’ve housed families. And to think there are many more of these businesses doing the same thing.
I rarely use airbnbs, I prefer hotels, so I haven’t done a lot of contribution there but still, this has convinced me to never use one. Unless, the stay is in their house, or in a small house in their garden etc, which I actually have been in some years ago.
I am sad to hear that about oatly. Not disagreeing with you, but do you have a link?
Not sure why you got downvoted, this is a space where reasonable questions should be encouraged.
Here ya go, my dude:
My absolute favorite response to these types of people is “can I get that in writing?”
For real! The ones that make a big deal and repeat that ‘customer-is-always-right’ bullshit while simultaneously demanding something outside any normal accomodation, those ones always come back.
I honestly do wonder where the average person thinks the customer service workers have some kind of stake in the company or something. Getting fired from a job like that is only a minor inconvenience, and the odds of their complaint being anywhere near a firable offense is usually laughable (and half the time the opposite as usually it’s wanting the employee to break store policy).
I can tell you what it was for my mother. To her it was a “cheat code” to talk to a manager and get free shit or a discount.
Which is actually valid, pushing up the chain can get you stuff. So many people just hang on to the minimum wage grunt and expect that to accomplish anything besides making both their days worse.
It might be valid, but not very moral.
Thing is, if you have a valid problem, you can do that politely, not even waste any time with the peon, just say, “Hi, I have a problem that’s going to require a manager, will you please call them for me?”
If you’re just bitching in search of freebies, you should just not.
Yeah. And not only does the person behind the register not give a shit about losing your patronage, if you come out of the gate acting like an asshole, many of them will 100% make your life more difficult just to fuck with you because they’re bored.
It’s amazing how far common courtesy can go in situations like this.
I feel like everyone should be required to work like a year in retail or something, so they know how to behave
The customer service rep is the face of the company, customers are SUPPOSED to complain to them since thats their job.
Looks like we have one of the shoppers from the comic in our midst.
Kinda. There’s usually a complaint department.
But bitching / threatening the worker - who is ringing up your purchase - about something that they specifically cannot control, and making their day worse? That’s an asshole problem that needs plugging.
Uhhhh how 'bout no.
I used to deliver pizza, occasionally someone would open their door and start complaining to me about our (pretty damn low, actually) prices. Like I fucking set them. Like I’m going to say “yes $15 is a lot for a 16in two topping, here, take it for free, I’ll pay for it out of my own pocket.” Nah. You saw the price on the menu, we repeated your total before we even stretched your dough, now you wanna complain to the driver when I show up? You can go fuck yourself, call little goddamn ceasers.
Best part is, our owner’s wife was the manager and ran phones, and you want to complain to the driver? It’s because you know this complaint is bullshit, isn’t it?
I mean it’s by design. Megacorporations put retail workers and customer service on the front lines to bear the brunt of the anger at their shitty policies. People who have no power to change anything.
I had a stake in the company because my parents owned the shop I worked in. But I still didn’t care when some dickhead threatened me with a “you just lost a cistomer.” My dad told me not to take shit from asshole customers if I knew for sure I was not in the wrong. They usually came crawling back a week after pretending nothing ever happened.
Oh and he also told me to provide the best service we could to the normal customers so that they become our favourite customers.
An interaction I had when I was in my final days of my fast food “career”:
Karen: “The service here is terrible I’m NEVER eating here again if you don’t fix this RIGHT NOW”
Me (actually said to them): “Oh no, please don’t, the giant multinational corporation with billions in revenue that is [Big burger fast food joint] will notice and cry”
Karen: “I…yea…well!” Storms off
I only did a little fast food, but a lot of retail in my younger years.
People would “threaten” to call corporate over things that were outside of my hourly hands.
Honestly, most of the time, it pissed me off too. Management wouldn’t listen to me though.
So call corporate. Please. We’re store #1234, and the corporate number is 1-800-COMPANY. Shit was fucked…
To put it in perspective, I worked at a store in a state that bordered Mexico. I quit, but still had an active employee discount card and shopped in a smallish town in a state connected to the Canadian border. The employee asked me which store I worked at, as they didn’t recognize me. I told them the store # and who my store manager was.
This person ACROSS the country had heard about how badly our store was run and knew the manager by name because of the shitty working conditions and how many issues we had with customer “service.”
See, what you gotta do is threaten them with absurdity.
Don’t say “I’m never coming back”. Instead, walk across the street to the bus stop. Wait for them to come out to their car. Memorize it.
Now come back to the parking lot every day for a week. Wait for them to leave their car, and go inside. Once they’re inside, you walk over to their car, and write down their liscense plate number.
Now go home, and use public records to do a search to find their name and address.
Now go back to the store, and take a picture of them with your cell phone.
Now, sit across the street from a police department, and watch for a cop arriving to work. Take note of his liscense plate, and search his name/address.
Now write a letter to the clerk, threatening to wait outside his work with a giraffe. Tell him “Giraffes have 15 inch tongues, thick as a beer can. I’ve trained this one to stick their tongues into your butthole, and grab your waist with their teeth. You’ll be 19 feet in the air, getting tongue fucked by a giraffe. If you try to escape, you fall. See ya at Costco, Gary!”
And you use the cops name/address as the return address. Now if he tries to go to the cops, they’ll protect their own, and find something to arrest him with.
Checkmate, Gary!
I don’t understand. Why doesn’t the Giraffe, the larger of the mammals, merely out-think the other ones?
Giraffes have 15 inch tongues, thick as a beer can
LOL
New kink unlocked
Username checks out, I guess?
Holy shit I love this
Sales are in the shitter, I’m afraid we’re gonna have to let you go.
I don’t care.
Even the tiniest semblance of power can go to a person’s head. You had $25 worth of merchandise in your hands, Karen. The store will be okay without you.
I don’t want to seem like a prick, but all the Internet comics I see are so lazy and devoid of any humour… there’s no joke in them at all, and just seems like someone who wants to post a bland message to get their “comic strip” seen. Is this Calvin and hobbes quality? No. Is there anything groundbreaking and funny? Nope. I just want lemmy to actually have some good stuff on it
I don’t want to seem like a prick
Well you kinda failed.
I just want lemmy to actually have some good stuff on it
You are entirely capable of posting material.
The situation presented in the comic is true, but you have to admit that this is the millennial equivalent of a boomer comic.
I have to admit nothing and, in fact, I disagree with you.
That’s the thing about opinions, they’re subjective. You are not the arbiter of the funny. Don’t mistake yourself for such.
“You have to admit” is a very common figure of speech.
I’m sorry that made you think I was going to come to your house and beat you up if you disagreed with me.
You should probably take this hyperbolic and over-reactive garbage back to Reddit where it belongs.
lol you call me hyperbolic after your “arbiter of the funny” comment?
Here, I’ll say what I guess I should have said instead of trying to make a joke: you’re allowed to have an opinion but other people are allowed to have one too. People posting differing opinions in a comment section that reflect their own subjective perspectives is what comment sections are for. And yes that includes comments like “I don’t like posts like this and I think we should try to have less of them”. Nobody is censoring you or acting an “arbiter” by voicing that perspective; and, in fact, there’s nothing I or anyone else you were arguing with could do to that effect.
👍
Yea! Because everyone knows that every human has the exact same sense of humor and there definitely isn’t any variation whatsoever! /s
If you don’t like Internet comics, you don’t have to be a reader of the Internet comics community on here.
I mean you’re not wrong. The correct thought the employee has is “thank god and good riddance.”
Did you write letters to the editor every time you read Family Circus or Wizard of Id?
You’ve made zero posts.
lmao
I’ll admit it; I want to say things like those customers in the comic. Sometimes I do. But I also understand and appreciate that the person I’m talking to both doesn’t care, and can’t do anything about it. So when possible, I try to take some marriage advice I saw somewhere online:
Never say the first thing that comes to mind. Don’t even say the second thing. Say the third thing.
This works really well in emails or online forums, where you can revise many times until you hit send or post.
And for anybody who has read any of my past replies and feel inclined to point out that I still say stupid shit: just know that those stupid shit were the third things that came to mind. 😊
What was the first thing you were going to write here?
Judging by the comic probably one of these:
I’ll be puttingy comment elsewhere
I’ll never return to this thread
I’ll leave my comment somewhere else
You just lost a commenter
🤣
You sir/madam have won the Internet for today. Please see management for your prize.
“I’M NEVER SHOPPING HERE AGAIN”
“Oh thank gods, I thought you’d never take a hint. You are objectively an awful person and no amount of spending on your part was ever going to make dealing with you worthwhile. Yes, PLEASE leave and never show your face here again.”
This is a bit of a grey area because there are some asshole companies and asshole employees
I’d recently had an experience with a racist aldi employee only bag checking my mother because we where not one of the white people in line and that same aldi employee happened to lie about bag checking the white people ahead that we visibly saw her not check
This happened in Australia, but we live in one of the towns in Queensland not known for progresiveness
I’m planning to move to Brisbane or Melbourne once I am able too just to get away from all of the non progressive people here in my hometown
The comic isn’t about boycotting locations as a whole, It’s just done through a lens of someone working a minimum wage job who has to deal with people yelling at them. Especially about issues they’re having and saying they’re never going to shop there again. It doesn’t impact them personally and getting angry at them personally won’t help.
And they’ll all be back next week, simply because it’s the most convenient for them to drive to.
This, 100%. Their lack of shame is almost envious to those of us with anxiety. Some anxious people would avoid a place for months after an ok-conversation with an employee, because they overthink the interaction and become convinced that they fucked up royally. Meanwhile, the employee never thought anything was offensive at all, and in fact forgot the entire interaction by the time they rang up the next customer.
Then there’s people like in the OP who throw a dramatic fit about how much they hate a place, sometimes even screaming at managers, then they show up the very next day pretending nothing ever happened. The audacity is mind-blowing.
![[ItsMegComics] Those Customers](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/0f7e3f53-8162-4793-a7f5-f4ec2ad41a46.jpeg){kind=link}