Incivility: Dunkin' Donuts edition

a republication

This is an essay from a year ago that is now out from behind the paywall. Sadly, things have not gotten better.

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This is the next entry in the continuing series of complaints about the spreading incivility in every day life.

For newer readers: Yes, I recognize that you may see what I’m going to describe as a “small thing.” Why don’t I just brush it off?

Because it’s one of countless “small things” that are occurring more frequently today by orders of magnitude compared to just a few years ago. Where I live (liberal/prog/blue Vermont), this is now normative. If you’re newer to this Substack, understand please that I write on this topic extensively. Because it is that common. What I describe are not “outlier” situations.

It’s not “one fast food worker having a bad day.” It’s most service workers “having bad days” most days.

Millennial readers: This shocks many of you, and the only way to get you over that shock is to keep exposing you to it. Service workers do not have ‘shit jobs’ that entitle them to take their ‘bad days’ out on customers. Third-world children who mine for rare earth minerals have shit jobs. The girl at Dunkin’ Donuts is not oppressed; stop it.

This excuse-making that is so common among younger people is not something I’m going to tolerate. It never existed as a cultural norm before the Millennial generation came along, and it’s not going to be one they’re going to talk me into.

Here’s what happened at 8 am this morning when I thought I was going to order a breakfast sandwich, not a side of contempt.

I ordered a breakfast sandwich this morning in the Dunkin’ Donuts. Oh, excuse me—”at Dunkin’ “. I apologize for not having internalized the overnight-new-name that’s shorter, and the last step before the name becomes simply “DD.”

When I got to the car, I took out the sandwich. It was cold. I don’t mean that it was room temperature. I mean that I stuck my finger right into the middle of the sandwich and detected refrigerator-temperature “eggs.”

It was so cold that the slice of cheese was rigid. It hadn’t even been heated at all. It wasn’t that the cheese had melted, then the sandwich cooled. It was that they did not heat the sandwich at all. They actually took the ingredients right out of the refrigerator, assembled them, and sold it to me without any form of heating.

Mistakes happen. I was a waiter/bartender for 12 years, and I made so many mistakes they used to show up in my work stress nightmares. I get it! The point I’m making is not that they made a mistake (though I will note that this kind of “mistake”—not heating hot food—is a bit outside what used to be normal).

The problem was the staff response. I brought the sandwich back in and very politely, with a smile, preceded by an “excuse me, I don’t mean to cause you extra work, but,” and asked for it to be reheated. There is no way I could have been more genial, non-threatening, and reasonable. I was pumping out signals of cheerful understanding with my smile and my voice.

The Angry Girl who took my sandwich glared at her coworker, then at me. Complaining, you see, means Customer Did a Bad. Customer Not Entitled to Expect Hot Food. Customer is Motherfucker. Who Does Customer Think Customer Is?

I waited five minutes. Angry Girl, being an angry girl, was tossing bagged orders onto the to-go shelf yelling out “BACON CREAM CHEESE EVERYTHING BAGEL” at the top of her lungs. Aggressively. She was absolutely communicating to customers that she hated being there and they had better just get their shit and leave.

She reserved her Biggest Anger for me. She walked over with what was obviously my sandwich in her hand. I could tell because the wrapping paper was all messed up. OK. I expected them to just reheat the same sandwich, and that’s fine. But it’s the little stuff—-the lack of any effort to rewrap the sandwich. It was falling out of the wrapper when she handed it to me.

But I would have known it was my sandwich anyway from what she bellowed. “Bacon croissant sandwich for—WHOEVER.” She tonally emphasized the “whoever.” There was no way to take that but as a deliberate signal of contempt.

She jammed it into my hand. I smiled and made a point of looking right at her with my smile and saying, “Thank you for doing that for me.” I think you’d have to agree that I went out of my way to be thankful for something that, though minor, they should have done to begin with. This is how you have to walk on eggshells with store employees here in liberal land. You have to be timid, deferential, and apologetic, especially when it’s their mistake, not yours.

She looked at me deadpan. Flat expression with a slight glare. “Yep” she said, and turned her back on me.

Guess what? When I got to the car and opened the sandwich, she hadn’t reheated it. Yes, really.

Did you start out reading this article thinking I was a fussy jerk (if so, can you tell me why you thought that?)? By the time you got to the end, was it more understandable to you that I felt treated rudely?

Readers, this is every day, most of the time. Grocery store. Gas station. All fast food restaurants. Best Buy. WalMart. No matter what business it is, if it is located in one of the two “metropolitan blue” cities in Vermont, this is now normal. Drive 10 miles into the country? People act decent.

This is what wears on me. It would wear on you, too, even if you think it wouldn’t.