Delphic Maxim 56: Down-look no one

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day

56. Down-look no one

When I was doing my teaching degree, I worked in telecommunications retail. Actually, I’d spent three years prior to that working in telco retail, so I had a long time working in stores where you see a really wide variety of human emotions.

Retail workers exist in a space where you see the worst traits of capitalism. On the consumer side, you see the way people are manipulated by products and offers, the way people become impatient, and the gamut of customers who are friendly and fun to help, and the customer who are cranky and unpleasant. On the side of the company and employee, you see how powerless the system renders workers: you’re essentially a robot, your time is heavily regulated, your capacity to help people hugely circumscribed. When customers have problems — with technology, with network, with bills — employees in stores have very little ability to fix the issues on the sport. And in retail, not just telco retail but all retail, if you show up one minute late you cop a grilling, but you are frequently expected to stay back up to ten, fifteen, thirty minutes late, often without pay.

In short, retail can be a real garbage fire of an occupation.

But the thing that makes retail workers feel most unpleasant is when customers treat them like garbage. You can see it coming sometimes — a person swans into the store, as imperious as a king, as though the purple toga and golden wreath they imagine themselves wearing was blinding everyone into submission. The tone and intolerance these people show towards retail workers is unbelievable. The condescension and impatience and arrogance is mind-blowing.

I think because I’ve experienced that, it’s one of the reasons I go out of my way to be friendly to people who are helping me in stores, or who are taking my order at a cafe, or who are doing cleaning, or whatever job someone is doing that I don’t want to do myself. Your occupation — in a capitalist society like ours — says very, very little about your character. This is important to remember, because otherwise people have a tendency to fall into ‘down-looking’ people.

One of the basic values that I think we need to carry into the world is an understanding of the dignity and equal respect due to others in our community. While we may live in a wonderful, liberal, tolerant time that in many respects is less violent than ever, the rise of consumer society has impoverished some of our ideas about civics and citizenship. The Ancients had a fairly strong sense of community and civic responsibility, and while our modern understanding of human rights may be much stronger, our sense of civic responsibility has declined in some contexts. This is probably because we see ourselves as individuals with purchasing power, rather than ‘citizens’ who must relate to other people to get by.

So the lesson from today’s maxim is simply a reminder to be polite to the people around you — they are people just like you, and what they do in their daily lives doesn’t give you licence to look down on them. Until they start plundering the community, they’re just as entitled to respect as you.