Boise, Idaho
I witnessed something disturbing yesterday when a customer accused the cashier of stealing from him while at a local Dollar Tree store.
And earlier in the day I watched a video of a young ESPN reporter who berated a towing company’s employee after her car was towed.
After watching these two people’s behavior, I was wondering what has happened to civility?
Then I thought, “Maybe Miss Manners could advise these people on the proper etiquette.”
They probably wouldn’t listen.
But how about if Miss Manners and Dirty Harry had a baby together–an etiquette maven and the toughest cop ever?
So the Miss Manners part of the baby would advise them to “Be Polite!” and the Dirty Harry part would caution “Go Ahead, Make My Day!” If they continued their unpolite behavior, Dirty Harry would shoot them.
Maybe this child could help bring civility back into our world! Wouldn’t that be grand?
Here’s what happened at the Dollar Tree store:
A youngish man (maybe 35) accused a younger (maybe 20) cashier of short changing him.
The manager was involved along with another cashier who had witnessed the entire cash exchange.
The manager ran a system check on the register and had the cashier balance his cash to the register. The actual cash balanced exactly to what the system said he should have, but the customer insisted that he had been cheated.
He kept saying that he had given the cashier a twenty dollar bill. The cashier calmly said that it had been a ten dollar bill.
But here’s the thing… There were no twenty dollar bills in the register!
After several minutes of arguing, the customer changed his attitude and started getting nasty and making very rude comments to the employees. The manager offered to call the cops to have them arbitrate the situation.
After that, the customer issued a racially motivated slur to the manager and stormed out of the store.
The manager took note of the customer’s car license number and most likely reported it to police in has the customer tries this trick with other stores.
And, in case you haven’t seen it, here’s the video of the young ESPN employee who earned herself a week’s suspension:
I wish I could be speechless by both examples of horrible, unnecessarily rude behavior. Unfortunately, I cannot because this type of rudeness is no longer rare. I wish that there was a Miss Manners/Dirty Harry person to handle people like that.
I was so surprised at how the anger of the Dollar Tree customer escalated over the course of his confrontation. If I had been the cashier, I would have run away crying… ;-(
So very sad in so many ways. Good on ESPN!
I’m sure there is more than one side to the story because it appears that only the reporter’s dialog was featured for the most part. Then I thought, “Well, maybe she had too much to drink.” But then I thought that she shouldn’t have been driving if that were the case. I know that I, for one, learned from her mistake…