By Don Hall

Cancel Culture.
The Karen Phenomenon.
Donald Trump’s Non-Stop Tirades About FAKE News.
The Olympiad of Victim Status.
Twitter Trolls.
The Alt Right.
The Woke.

These seemingly disconnected elements all have a very specific thread in common. They derive from the rewards given to people who complain loudly and without pause. 

Sometime in corporate culture overseeing the idea of customer service, it was decided that the customer is always right and that very powerful framework has slowly infected all aspects of our culture. 

Is this steak overcooked? Of course it is. The customer is always right.

Did I feel threatened by that black kid in the hoodie with the Skittles? Of course you did. The customer is always right.

Is asking me where I’m from racist? How could it not be racist? The customer is always right.

Is journalism that criticizes me every single day FAKE? Duh. The customer is always right.

Is suggesting that a trans woman is not a biological woman transphobic? Especially if you wrote the Harry Potter books! The customer is always right.

Anyone who has ever worked in the service industry understands what a bucket of lukewarm smegma that mantra represents. It permeates our every dealing with people. It creates a sense of entitled behavior that rewards talking over someone to get what you want and emphasizes that, in a world filled with seven billion people all moments from being crushed by an earthquake or leveled by a pandemic, we each deserve a specific kind of treatment from one another.

None of us forest apes who learned to read deserves anything. Ever. 

As the former house manager of a nationwide radio show, former manager of Chicago’s Millennium Park, and current manager in a small off-Strip casino in Las Vegas, I’m used to the drill. I have my own approach that effectively cancels cancel culture in my rooms, defangs the Karens, and ignores the cries of victimhood used to get stuff.

First, do not meet hostility with hostility. This one took me years to figure out but as soon as you react to their hostility the game is afoot. This is not the same as saying “Let them call you names and scream at you.” When I have guests hit me with DEFCON Five, I turn and walk away. Give it a beat and return. If they continue, I walk away again. I am, in effect, training them how to approach me.

He’s six foot, five inches, approximately 350 pounds. And he is furious. 

I approach him to see what he needs and he launches into a rambling “this motherfucker” and “fuck this shit” and “what the fuck is wrong with you people?”

I hold up my hand and say “I’ll be right back.” I walk away. I stop and pick up an empty beer bottle and toss it in the trash. I come back.

“What the fuck was that? You fucking with me?”

The hand goes up. “Give me one second.” I walk away. This time I go to a regular who is playing a Lightning Zone machine and chat him up for a minute. I come back.

“So what can I do for you, sir?” He starts to gin up again. The hand comes up. He stops. He has figured out the game. He thinks for a moment then speaks more calmly about the fact that his twenty dollar bill was stuck in a video poker machine. I smile, make a joke about him breaking my machines with his ill-gotten money, and open the machine up and return his twenty.

Second, do not argue. Argument indicates there is basis for their shitty behavior. Remember they are trying to get something from you. You are in control of the situation. It’s all about choices.

“This fucking face mask shit is all liberal bullshit! I can’t breathe and the only reason their making up this whole coronavirus shit is to tank the economy so Trump loses.”

“Okay. I need you to put the mask on or you’ll have to leave the casino.”

“But you see that, right? It’s all just a bunch of bullshit! It’s also un-fucking-constitutional to force me to wear a mask. It’s goddamn against my freedom of choice!”

“That aside, I need that mask on or you gotta walk the walk.”

“Why?”

“Mask or split. No wiggle room. I’m sorry about that but them’s the rules.”

“Motherfuck. No disrespect to you but this is crap.”

“Maybe so but the mask goes on and stays there or you need to head out.”

Third, do not give them what they want if their behavior is demanding. Requests are awesome. Demands come from children. Children rewarded for making demands become the biggest cunts in society. A variation on the “never negotiate with a terrorist” becomes “never negotiate with an entitled, vicious dickweed.” Offer them a choice of your choosing that may come close but is never exactly what they want unless they request with humility and civility.

A Tale of Two Guests.

Guest number one is apoplectic about the fact that the television in his room isn’t working. He berates the desk clerk, demands to see the manager. When I come over he demands that he be compensated or he will Tweet about the hotel side of the place. I ask the clerk if the engineers have been by to check the TV. They have and it is working now. The guest demands he be comp’d for the night for his trouble. I smile and say “No.”

Guest number two checked in around 3 p.m. after a long drive. It’s 109 degrees outside and his air conditioning has broken down. The engineers couldn’t fix it. He requests some sort of perk for having to sleep in the stifling heat. “Even a free breakfast would be fine,” he says. I comp him his entire stay.

Fourth, if all else fails, confuse them. Confusion in the moment burns away the steam in a fraction of a second.

She is so worked up about her claim that the ATM Kiosk did not dispense her $40.00 that no amount of calmly assisting her is possible.

She’s been met with disbelief from one security officer. Encountered a rhetorical shrug from the cage teller. At the moment I am called over—imagine that, a black woman screaming a full volume that she better see a manager right fucking now—she is clenched like a fist and is bouncing on the balls of her feet as if to leap into some MMA-style melee with the now three security officers. We’re at that place when patience is lost on all sides and she is dragged out of the place, put in cuffs, and the police are called.

I can see this unfolding from across the room. I approach and she spins on me and unleashes a volley of rage-filled verbiage accompanied by no small amount of spit, her face mask forced from her face from sheer energy.

The moment is saved by Blue Swede on the ever-present casino soundtrack

“Whoa! Hold on!” I cry. My hands go up in the air in a show of joy. I look at the officers, I look at her and freeze in place.

“Ooga-chaka Ooga-Ooga
Ooga-chaka Ooga-Ooga
Ooga-chaka Ooga-Ooga
Ooga-chaka Ooga-Ooga...”

And I sing.

“I can't stop this feeling
Deep inside of me
Girl, you just don't realize
What you do to me...”

Confusion. The disconnect between what was going on before the song and in that moment resets things a bit. I smile. “Sorry. I freaking LOVE this song. Now what can I do for you?”

I grew up in what was enshrined the “Me Generation” of the 1980s. With so much of our daily lives encapsulated in performative behavior—the desire to be famous as a higher goal than to be wealthy, the non-stop seeking of approval via endorphin hits of “likes” and “retweets,” the awareness that we are constantly being filmed by everyone with a smartphone—we seem to be in the “Look at Me Generation.” I mean, for chrissakes, what narcissistic asshole first invented Taking a Picture of Yourself as a normal part of our behavior? We have subtly been trained to expect reward from increasingly demanding and childish behavior.

It isn’t enough to accept that, in order to succeed in an overwhelmingly service industry centered economy, we have to capitulate to being fed a shit sandwich and smile pleasantly as we choke it down for a sadly meager hourly wage. Rather than meet this with resignation turned to resentment and our own sense of rage, we have control of the moment. Every interaction is a teaching, a re-training, moment.

There is a difference between a demand and a request. Learn to reward the requests and stonewall the demands until they transform to requests and you begin the process of one-by-one training people that a strategy of cooperation rather than contention leads to more favorable outcomes.

The customer is not always right. In fact, the customer is often completely wrong. You can shift the behavior without abandoning the values of good service.

Train people to expect reward from civility and people will start to be civil.