It’s Labor Day. But WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, wonders whether we appreciate certain types of labor in the way we should.
My mom was a waitress for 18 years at a Denny’s off I-95. She was so good at her job that customers would call her at home if she wasn’t working and ask her to have breakfast with them.
Still, she ran across her share of jerks. Customers who fumed at her if their eggs didn’t arrive instantaneously. Customers who left without leaving a tip, or even worse, left a few stray coins in the dregs of their coffee cups.
But I’m glad she was working back then instead of now.
On this Labor Day morning, I would like us to stop and consider that we, the customers of America, might be collectively losing our minds.
New York magazine had a recent story on a woman in suburban Cleveland who got so angry at a Chipotle that she threw her burrito bowl at a cashier.
That story mentioned an incident at another Chipotle in the Charlotte area, down in Indian Land, where two people were arrested on charges of assault and battery for attacking a cashier who told them they’d have to pay more for extra chicken.
I don’t think this is just about Chipotle. Maybe, as a country, we’ve switched from road rage to retail rage.
For some people, the pandemic broke whatever veneer of civility they had with the people who cook their meals or check them into hotels or ring up their purchases at the big-box store. Those workers are, more often than not, grinding out the workday at places that are chronically short-staffed. But when customers can’t find something on the shelf at Target, they don’t get mad at the CEO of Target — they get mad at the poor clerk who happened to wander into their path.
Allow me to be the old man yelling at clouds for a moment. A lot of us don’t seem to know how to talk to one another anymore. Between the pandemic and our recent politics, we’ve become ever more wary of strangers. And even if we weren’t, we’re more likely to burrow into our phones than try to have a conversation. A lot of us are simply out of practice in basic human interaction.
On top of that, we live in a DoorDash world where we expect everything to be handed to us with a couple of clicks. Some of us have forgotten that server and servant are not the same word.
Maybe, on this holiday when we celebrate the working people of America, we could honor those people working to serve us by simply being a little kinder.
And if you can, leave a big tip while you’re at it.
Tommy Tomlinson’s On My Mind column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org. It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section below. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org.
