Retail staff in Sheffield have voiced their concerns over increased aggression and verbal abuse from customers during the pandemic.
Olivia Redfern, 20, a retail worker in the city, said: “Customers don’t see retail workers as people. They see us as objects just there to serve them. But we are people too. We are also struggling through this.”
Olivia Redfern, a University of Sheffield student.
She started her job in 2019 and left a few weeks ago. She added, she ‘100%’ found customers more aggressive during the pandemic than before.
Olivia said: “I’ve had a customer on the phone ask me where an item was and I’ve said, ‘it’s out of stock.’ They then asked me to go check in the back and I said, ‘no, I know it’s out of stock because I’ve just checked the same item for another customer’. After that, they just started swearing at me. They were like ‘Oh you fxxxing Bitch!’”
Olivia added that sometimes people would pull their masks down when asking questions because they think staff can’t hear them.
She said: “A lady came up to me and pulled her mask down to ask me something and I said, ‘please don’t do that.’ Suddenly, she got into this huge argument about how Covid-19 didn’t exist and how this was made up and how she couldn’t wait for everything to go back to how it was.
“It’s just crazy how me telling her to do one thing evolved into a whole barrage of comments against me.”
Charlotte Crompton,19, another Sheffield retail worker, said: “I was once behind the tills and a woman was about five metres away. I coughed quietly just to clear my throat and she ran away from me.
“She said if she came close to me her daughter could die because she had asthma. Then she made me find someone else to serve her.
“There was another lady who said that surgical masks were poisonous, and it was a means of government control when asked to wear one.”
Credit: The Institute of Customer Service
The Institute of Customer Service launched a ‘Service with Respect’ campaign in July 2020 calling the government to take action, after their research found that more than half of customer-facing staff were subject to abuse from customers since the pandemic started.
They have had 133 campaign supporters so far.
Data from the institute on the UK workforce showed: