Tag: deregulation

A comprehensive guide to avoiding Karen behaviors and how deregulation contributed to them.

This post contains a brief mention of suicidal ideation that I’ve witnessed.

With lots of experience in retail and food service, I know how not to be a Karen. I’ve worked at a cafe, a bookstore, at a Michaels, and then the yarn store. I’ve had a full adult stomp their feet at me. Been called a bitch, and stupid. Dealt with harassment, and so much passive aggression that it’s now my policy not to respond to it at all.

I have a not-so-secret secret: My real name (not Smitty) is very close to “Karen”. I don’t find its new meaning offensive, but sometimes I feel a little awkward introducing myself. I even give baristas a different name so I don’t scare them. I kind of wish the term wasn’t a name so that it could at least apply easily to men (who are often very, very bad Karens).

Once my dad asked me if it bothered me, my name being so close to Karen, and my brother joked “Yeah, you should get on fixing that.”

So I am!

Have you had dozens of bad shopping experiences where it just seems like you can never get the help you’re seeking? Does your blood pressure rise every time you walk through a shop entrance? Do cashiers’ eyes widen when you approach? Well, you might be a Karen.

Here are some common Karen behaviors.

• Refusing to follow a worker’s directions about where to find something, how to pay, or how to access the thing you need because you believe it’s a waste of your time.
• Asking for special allowances (an appointment when there’s no availability, expired coupon use, an unearned discount), and retaliating when the minimum wage worker cannot give it.
• Saying “I shop here all the time, do you know how much money I’ve spent here?” when you are not acquiesced to. Nobody cares, or knows who you are.
• Trauma dumping on a captive audience. This is pretty frequent for service workers. I’ve learned a shocking amount about a customer’s medical problems, divorce, family member’s death, addiction, and suicidal ideation in the time it takes to ring up their order.

And these are just a few examples, before the escalation to name-calling, screaming, and throwing stuff. In extreme instances, it escalates to assault.

If you recognize yourself in any of these examples (and the list is not exhaustive), here are some suggestions on how to better handle the situation.

• Trust that the person knows what they’re doing. You may be a very smart person, but the worker is the expert on how things work. They know what is possible for them to help you. Be clear about what you need, and calmly ask follow-up questions if something is confusing.
• Remember that you are not the only person in the store/restaurant/cafe, and that the worker has other people to help. They cannot offer specialized service to every person who walks in the door. Take a deep breath and accept that you are but a drop in the ocean that is the universe, and take comfort in the zen of anonymity and insignificance.
• Relinquish the idea that you have status as a regular or a big spender. Sometimes the barista or the cashier will recognize you, but most of the time they won’t! They also could not give less of a fuck how much you spend, especially at a chain establishment, because your big spending has never increased their wages. They are required to be there because it is their job, not because they are a personal servant.
• If you feel the need to share life updates or personal issues with the worker, consider if it would be better shared with a good friend, or even a therapist. The worker is likely not trained to help you with a personal crisis or chronic medical problem.

But this post is not just to punish or kvetch. Part of me is sympathetic to the Karens. Some of them are purely out to make people miserable, that is certain. But I think a lot of them simply still expect a customer service experience that they grew up with. Once upon a time in America, you shopped at stores owned by your neighbors and run by their families. The cashier did know you and what was going on in your life. Business owners had some authority over prices, what they stocked, and shop policy. They started those businesses with knowledge a specific field, and staffed them with people who were similarly knowledgeable. A business was likely small enough to be dedicated to one category of good/service that the owner was an expert in, as opposed to large chain department stores like Walmart or Target, where it can’t be expected that an employee can be an expert on workout equipment and cell phones and baby supplies and whatever else that business is selling.

During my first food service management job, I dealt with a lot of turnover and no-shows, often working 11+ hour days to cover shifts, and constantly training people I was certain would not stay in the position for more than a couple of weeks. My conclusion: “What can I expect? These people are only making minimum wage. They just don’t make enough to care what happens here.”

So what happened? Chains stores and restaurants grew, their protection from failure and ability to provide cheap goods compounded forever by their growth, growth achieved by paying their employees less and less, making many people more and more dependent on the cheap prices they provide.

And aren’t we seeing this happen with our beloved LYSs? Natural fiber yarn is at a price point many can’t afford, but is necessary to keep an independent business open and pay their employees a livable wage, but then fewer can afford to shop there. Add in some of the other problems that LYSs have been diagnosed with (haughtiness and racism, namely) and we find ourselves with a declining customer base despite it seeming like knitting and crochet are getting more and more popular (a statistic that is admittedly hard to quantify). Younger crafters tend to find yarn online instead of in store, speaking to the convenience of online shopping for a generation largely accused of being less social. But the internet offers more possibility for affordability, and big retailers like Hobbi and Knitpicks offer cheaper yarns in smaller units. No hate to people who shop there, I do too (though not at Knitpicks since I heard they were being accused of a carpet beetle infestation).

I am far, far from being any kind of economic expert, so I had to do some research about the decline of small businesses. The rise of large businesses has been happening since the 19th century, when the first department stores were established, and when transcontinental shipping infrastructure allowed for easier transport of supplies and products. According to Piketty in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the growth of wealth during the turn of the 20th century went largely unregulated, reaching a peak in 1913, until that growth was flattened by two world wars and concentrated government policy meant to help the citizens of those countries recover from the physical destruction and financial devastation of war. Piketty’s research shows a significant 10% decrease in the amount of wealth owned by the top decile during the years between 1945-1975. But that percentage started climbing again in the late 70s and early 80s with the deregulation movement, which has two notable mascots: Thatcher and Reagan.

To be fair, it wasn’t just America and the UK pulling the rug out from rising wealth equality. In France, where Piketty is from, a economic liberal parliament defeated socialists who favored greater regulation during the Trente Glorieuses period when France bounced back after WWII.

A result of this deregulation and lack of oversight is the emergence of an isolated class of wealth managers skyrocketing to an echelon that can’t be reached by other people who work for a living. Those managers, as Piketty writes, “have the power to set their own remuneration, in some cases without limit and in many cases without any clear relation to their individual productivity.” This trend in income equality is mirrored by wealth inequality – assets are increasingly owned by a smaller and smaller number of people who happened to already be wealthy from inheritance. In the current economic climate, these conditions are caused when the rate of return on investment is greater than economic growth. The rich get richer while wages and job opportunities stagnate. You know how people say the Kardashians are famous for being famous? The same goes here – some people are wealthy because they’re wealthy.

Once a person or entity reaches that point, it seems that the money just makes itself. They can dodge taxation by attributing profits to subsidiaries in zones with lower tax rates, for instance. They can out-compete new, smaller businesses simply by having the capital to absorb business costs for longer. As long as rate outpaces growth, they have a smaller pool of competition because the first step to wealth ownership becomes more and more insurmountable. And they are guarded by wealth managers who need deregulation in order to make their own money, much like remoras who live in the slipstream of sharks.

And here’s where my sympathy for the Karen ends, because in my experience, many a Karen has voted in favor of these conditions, and the only thing that has trickled down to them is a jaded labor force. But what makes a Karen a Karen, is that they punish the worker in front of them, the person who’s just trying to survive, instead of the owners of companies that put their neighbor’s shops and restaurants out of business. Unless, of course, their neighbors stay open by underpaying their employees.

I’ll end my rant with a Karen anecdote for my own community of knitters and crocheters. A few years ago I attended a large fiber event at a convention center with the company I worked for. We often ate in the hotel restaurant/bar, which was filled with convention attendees. As we left one evening, we thanked our excellent server and explained what the event was.

“I hope our people are treating you right”, I said.

“Uh well…”

“Are they at least tipping you like they should?” I asked, horrified.

“Not exactly.”

Having been to multiple industry events like this, I know that the people who can attend them and shop at them can afford to tip at least 20%. Do fucking better, Fiber Karens.