By Lucy McCallow

Picture this: you’ve completed another week of university and conquered some coursework. You’re feeling good. The end of the week brings a few shifts at your part-time retail job, where you hold your positive attitude strong, waiting for when you can finally finish and go home to rest at last. Should be easy, right? Well, it would be if you weren’t a young female standing in a shop, trying your hardest to serve the array of middle-aged men who see you as nothing but another item on the shelves.

I’ve been working in retail for almost two years now, and honestly, before you join the industry, you don’t really realise how bad it actually is. As a 16-year-old desperately searching for a job so she could learn how to fund her own life, I was happy to take on anything. Of course, I knew from the typical retail stories that I’d have at least a few iffy customers, but little did I know that it would hurt my pride and confidence so much.

On an average shift, I experience many different types of belittling behaviours. As I’m just trying to do my job, I will face things like weird stares, impatience, pressure and, of course, flirting. It’s common for a customer to deny my help, only to wander up to a male colleague of mine and seek assistance there instead. Being a young woman, it’s not like I haven’t dealt with these kinds of things before. But when it comes multiple times a day throughout an eight-hour shift, it becomes harder to deal with.

If you haven’t worked in retail before, I’d just like to clarify that you can’t just leave the shop floor to hide away from every uncomfortable situation. Although I can pass the customer on to another member of staff, why should I? Do I pass them on to another female member of staff and let them be terrorised instead of me? Or do I give in to the narcissist and just pass them on to a male member of staff? It’s an endless cycle.

Difficult customers aren’t always men; the store that I work in has a target market of middle-aged men, so generally, this is who the tough encounters come from. However, the women that I attend to aren’t exactly the most accommodating either. Let’s just say that if I don’t get them what they want when they want it, I am immediately the worst person alive. They make this clear through how they treat me – with a little bit of backchat and a whole lot of asking for the manager. I am treated like a child that has no concept of how to carry out the job that they have been trained for.

It’s pretty obvious that the way that I’m treated is because I am a young woman trying to tell adults stuff that they don’t know about the products that they’re shopping for. I know this from cross-referencing these situations with how adults treat me in other situations, and how they treat my colleagues who are also young women, and from the fact that customers will decide they’re not happy with my service and choose an older member of staff, asking them the exact same questions.

I’d like to think that I’ve built up some sort of resistance to these situations, but realistically I don’t think someone could be completely unaffected by this kind of treatment. When I first started dealing with customers like this, it really used to hurt me. I was young, I was still learning how to be confident enough to actually walk up to people and be able to serve them. It brought self-doubt. I would question, ‘If I can’t succeed in a little part-time job, how on Earth am I going to be able to head into a career?’

Only recently, when I began aiming for my dream career (doing something that I enjoyed immensely), did I realise that the way that people treat me on my way up should not stop me from doing what I want to do. I started thinking differently about what I go through within these shifts, and what I can do about it.

I mean, when you think about it, I am doing what I can, and these random people that know nothing about me aren’t happy with it. Now that I’ve come to terms with that, I’ve started to deal with it a little bit better. It sounds overly cliche, but you just have to not let it get to you.

Let’s face it, as much as you want to, you cannot relay the attitude that they give to you unless you want to lose your job. The best thing that I’ve found to do is to just not care. If they’re not happy with your service, don’t serve them; let them make their own mess and tidy it up when they’re gone – at least it gives you something to do. Or a personal favourite of mine: if they are being hostile with you, take it in your stride to annoy the living daylights out of them (in moderation, of course). An overly friendly approach never hurt anybody.

Clearly, it’s not a good situation, and it hurts that once again, it’s down to the young women to cope with it rather than down to the older generations to stop being rude and condescending. But if we can hold out until a change arises, then we win. You are stronger than those that try to get you down.