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Comment by angmarsbane | Hacker News Reader

I have absolutely no data, but I wonder if a decline in public decency is also playing a role. It isn’t hard to find videos or articles of service workers getting harassed or physically attacked by customers.

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A lot of companies (e.g. uber, Amazon, etc) have made it much harder to get any kind of satisfaction from the management who is actually at fault for problems people have, and leave the front line folks to face the anger they incur. Easy example, I have had lots of problems with uber that are almost always app related, but I am asked to rate the driver every time. I try to always give a good rating or none at all, but I imagine the drivers (who are mostly just executing specified instructions) are bearing the brunt of any frustration with the company. This is true for most customer service roles now, companies have completely offloaded their accountability onto the front line who is usually the least responsible.

So your idea makes sense.

My couple of years experience in retail taught me that people are generally horrible when they’re not around their peers. I feel there should be a mandatory 1 year of service in retail for every American. It would humanize them.

> I feel there should be a mandatory 1 year of service in retail for every American. It would humanize them.

I don't think it will. I know plenty of people who've worked retail and still treat others like trash.

Same experience here. I am friends with a pharmacist who worked retail with me, and she was starting to get impatient at the guy at Staples because the print job was taking too long, even though he was clearly stressed with a full line of customers.

I fear that, much like the student debt reduction talks, would just result in people saying things like “I had to suffer through {xyz} so you should too!” leading to little net change in customer attitudes.

Lobbyists will change it to 3 years.

The front line workers absolutely have it rough and they get taken advantage of constantly but they've been getting the shit end of the stick throughout history. I think these mega companies have just been able to leverage technology in order to scale the distribution of a ridiculous amount of shitty sticks in quantities that haven't been seen before.

That being said, I still agree that empathy in general seems to be trending downward and my assumption is that online life makes it a lot easier to dehumanize other people which makes it easier to treat people like shit.

Shot and killed. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=covid+mask+security+guard+sho...

what the actual...disgraceful. Over a mask dispute?

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