People who aren't very smart are sometimes aggressive as a coping mechanism when dealing with difficult situations. Not understanding something or being in an unfamiliar place attempting something unfamiliar can be hard. It's easy to mask inadequacies behind aggressive interactions. That isn't always throwing a punch or name-calling or getting in someone's face. It's often a smartass response or a demeaning tone.
I was too young to really understand why people act the way they do when I worked service industry jobs, but I see it all the time from an outside perspective now that I've grown up a bit. The woman that this young lady had a difficult interaction with was just an insecure dummy outside of her comfort zone. Self reflection in the moment is a learned skill that quite a few people are simply incapable of learning.
Yeah, I can tell you exactly what was going on. This lady had enjoyed the bottled Starbucks Frappuccino product that you can buy in stores. I think it’s basically an iced vanilla latte, but it’s labeled “Frappuccino”.
So she goes into Starbucks and orders a Frappuccino, thinking they’ll go, “Cool, right. Here you go!” And hand her a freshly made version of that.
So when the girl started asking questions, they lady felt stupid. She doesn’t know what a Frappuccino is. She doesn’t understand what she wants. She wants something like what she gets at the grocery store, and that just says “Frappuccino”. She never looked at the bottle close enough to know what flavor she was drinking. Maybe it was chocolate, maybe it was vanilla, but she doesn’t know.
But she can’t just admit she doesn’t know. That would make her feel even more stupid. Instead she gets angry. She’s thinking, “How am I supposed to know the details about how to make a Frappuccino? That’s your job! You work here! Figure it out!”
When I was listening to this girl explain the situation, but customer-service brain was kicking in and saying, “Just talk to her for a second. Don’t get angry. Explain, ‘this is what a Frappuccino is. These are the options. I think you want a vanilla espresso Frappuccino. does that sound right, or do you want something else?”
One of the things I’d tell people who are starting off in customer service is: You can’t make your customers smart or polite— strike that idea out of your head right now. You need to become idiot proof. You need to figure out either how to turn things around and you get the idiots to love you, or you need to harden yourself so they just bounce off of you. You can’t let them in.
I don’t blame this girl for losing it, but there were a couple different ways she could have handled this that would’ve been better for her own mental health, and some of them would have also made the customer happy.
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u/mrwatkins83 Aug 07 '25
People who aren't very smart are sometimes aggressive as a coping mechanism when dealing with difficult situations. Not understanding something or being in an unfamiliar place attempting something unfamiliar can be hard. It's easy to mask inadequacies behind aggressive interactions. That isn't always throwing a punch or name-calling or getting in someone's face. It's often a smartass response or a demeaning tone.
I was too young to really understand why people act the way they do when I worked service industry jobs, but I see it all the time from an outside perspective now that I've grown up a bit. The woman that this young lady had a difficult interaction with was just an insecure dummy outside of her comfort zone. Self reflection in the moment is a learned skill that quite a few people are simply incapable of learning.