Professional Documents
Culture Documents
#6709
Creative Nonfiction
An older woman saunters up to the box office window I gaze out of during my boring
morning shift at the theater. I’m standing, ready to greet her and supply her with the movie ticket
she’ll inevitably be requesting. I put on a positive face and gear myself up to use my polite
I’m met with unapproving eyes that glare up at me as a purse is slammed onto the outside
counter of the box office. “I’m fine.” Immediately a heavy tidal wave of complaints about the
location of the building and its parking lot crashes over me. I apologize for her inconvenience
and let her know the easiest way to reach the parking lot from the main road or from inside the
shopping center, for next time. Her face tells me she’s unimpressed by my advice. We proceed
with her transaction: she asks for senior discount, hears the price, reaffirms it’s with senior
discount, and then feels totally ripped off by the unsatisfactory price. I apologize for something I
“Okay, that’s going to be in theater ten on the right-hand side when you go in.”
Her purse and things are gathered up and she trudges inside the doors. I go back to staring
out the window, watching parents pick up their kids from the Montessori school at the other end
window and says, with an exasperated tone of voice, “Can you please tell me what theater I’m
supposed to be going to. No one told me inside. Why hasn’t anyone told me where to go?”
“I’m sorry about that. You’ll be in theater ten, on the right-hand side when you go in.”
Why do some in the older generations assume no obligation to listen or respect people
who are young? Too often, at my minimum wage job at a movie theater, people over the age of
55, especially women, showed me no respect. These unhappy women come into the building,
assuming they have some omniscient power to know the policy and dealings of every
establishment they enter. If the building and its employees do not meet their standards, then they
should not be expected to have a decent attitude. Everything costs too much. They are constantly
uncomfortable with one thing or another. They don’t like the idea of seeing advertisements for
any movie other than the one they came to see. They don’t think they should be required to wait
in line with everyone else. And all these problems are the fault of whatever poor employee is
subject to serve them. There is a disconnect between the young workers who must cater to the
older customers. What can remedy this disconnect? Age is not an excuse to mistreat anyone. It’s
unfortunate that young workers, who are just trying to earn money at a job they find hard to
enjoy, must be subject to frequent disrespect from older people who have assumed entitlement to
On the other hand, working at a job like this makes most young people incredibly polite
wherever they go. Young people say “please” and “thank you” genuinely, not as a weapon. We
come into someone else’s place of work understanding that most employees are subject to rules
and regulations they cannot change. We don’t want to inconvenience a worker by asking for too
much. We assume we don’t know the policy, and no one is obliged to cater to us. Young people
who work for minimum wage come into other minimum wage paying establishments and
demand the bare minimum. We offer to clean up after ourselves. We try to give exact change. I
would never present someone with a fifty or one-hundred-dollar bill for a purchase that is under
ten dollars, because breaking that without enough cash means calling the manager and making
the whole transaction much longer than it needs to be, and much more stressful for the employee
who feels they’re inconveniencing me, the customer, which is not the case at all. We’re subject
to the same environment that the employees we see and ask services of are subject to. For that
I struggle to understand why some older people do not show general niceness to workers.
I can’t imagine them enjoying it if someone treated them in the same way that they treat the
youth. Maybe the “golden rule” of treat others the way you want to be treated has been drilled
into this generation of young adults to a more severe degree than it was to the older generations.
This then poses the problem of why the older generation, who are prescribing that this rule be
told many times over in elementary schools, do not adhere to it. It all seems like a conspiracy in
which older people, who held positions in school administration, decided they’d hammer in the
“golden rule” to the youth so that only they may benefit from it. We’ve been taught a set of
manners which many people who are older than us do not adhere to themselves. No one could
imagine being rude to someone else’s grandma, that would be atrocious. Similarly, no one
imagines their grandma being rude to another student from their high school. And yet, this is the
reality we live in. In the world of minimum wage jobs, fast food, and retail, the grandmas are the
enemy, the bully, and the too-cool-for-school teenager is usually polite, proceeding with a
of sweet old ladies who appreciate the good job I do, but the number of rude, privileged women
who come in and complain, forcing blame on me, the victim of corporate policy, far outnumber
the traditional, sweet grandmothers. I use the word privilege here meaning a perceived privilege,
a privilege of age. Whatever apparent economic class these mean-spirited women seem to fit into
is not a factor in their attitude. Angry old people come in and pay with both cash and card and
An even more disturbing divide of generations I’ve witnessed has been on my college
campus. On a college campus, the culture that is created is basically an assemblance of many
polite people who all work some form of the same minimum wage job that is subject to a number
of corporate policies. On my campus, we have a fair number of older women working the jobs
that are normally thought of as jobs college students fill. We have older ladies serving us in the
cafes and cafeteria; they have become the employee, subject to company policy. In this
environment, I still witness the ability for the older person to be rude. Every time I come up to
the counter at one of our cafes, I’m greeted with an air of inconvenience. The woman’s attitude
makes me feel like I’m burdening her with my simple order of a coffee that’s on the menu and
requires no other special requests. The last time I went, I was holding my cash in hand. Saying
very few words, the woman took my order and gave off the impression that I was bothering her
by coming up and requesting the service which she supplies because it’s her job. She wrote down
my order and then stuck out her hand in the general direction of my money.
The motion of expecting me to somehow know already what I should be paying and the
idea that I should pay her at that moment bothered me. Why is it more of an effort to tell me
what the total is (a practice that most people employ when working in any service job)? This
woman just looked at me, as if I was a bug she wanted to swat away. In this case, why must I
still feel that I’m an inconvenience or doing something wrong? Is it my youth? Older people see
that I’m young and therefore undeserving of any respect or credit. Yet, this episode is not
singular; other students I’ve talked to have had similar experiences on campus.
which seriously alters a young adult’s job experience. If the job itself is not too hard, then the
only thing a worker’s enjoyment is dependent on is the people they’re surrounded by. Hopefully,
a young employee can have a good experience with another young employee, but if an older
person comes into the workplace, negatively affecting the environment, this completely
dismantles any hope for a worker finding joy in their already less-than-great job. Being a
customer, as a young person, means minimizing or, at the very least, not adding to the negativity
in the day of a minimum-wage worker. However, to many old people, this relationship is
nonexistent. They come into a workplace demanding that everything be a completely positive
experience for them, no matter what the cost is to the worker. This assumption usually results in
more negativity for the young worker. The difference in the two scenarios is a relationship of
equality or a relationship of inequality. Young people regard themselves as equal to anyone they
meet, young or old, worker or customer. Older people will often regard themselves as above the
I don’t know how to remedy this problem. How do you teach an enormous group of
people that what they do to the youth is not alright or warranted? I don’t think you can. I can’t
propose to begin providing classes about etiquette in fast food restaurants and what it looks like
to treat a worker at Target with respect. I think the only possible resolution to the problem is
time. We can allow the disrespect shown to young people in service and retail to die out. As we
young people age, we can replace the old and provide a better experience for the next generation.
We can’t submit to a mentality that says, “When I was that young worker’s age, I was treated
poorly by people my age, so now I should enact revenge.” The cycle can be broken with us if we
age gracefully, with a tendency towards kindness. Let’s instead think, “I will treat that young
worker well because when I was that age, niceness from an older person was all I wanted.”