Mother of three, Anna*, is employed by a large supermarket chain and forgoes time with her family to keep up with the extra work demands of busy holiday periods, such as Christmas.
In return, she's been verbally abused and had things thrown at her while on the job.
Over her 19-year career, Anna has lost count of the number of times she has been sworn at and called names.
She has had many roles at the supermarket but she says the toughest jobs are handling returns and working on the cigarette counter.
"They [the customer] think they are entitled to have whatever they want, and if you haven't got something that's the right price or product, then they abuse you," she says.
"We put on our uniforms, and we work very hard but once you are in that uniform you're not the same person, you are their servant.
"You become a second-class citizen."
One particular recent incident stayed with Anna.
"I was working to fill an online order — we're under time pressure for those, we have an amount of time we have to fill it in.
"I excused myself and reached in front of a customer to grab an item and suddenly they just turned to me and started ripping shreds off me."
Anna doesn't remember how long the verbal barrage lasted but she says it continued around the store and forced her to stick up for herself.
She suspected the customer would be making a complaint, so she reported the incident straight to her manager.
Her manager noted the incident but the next day the supermarket received a three-page letter complaining about Anna.
What happened next shocked her.
Anna says she was asked to write an apology to the customer to appease them.
She says while she was angry at the response from her manager, it was the customer who had left her feeling "distressed" and "small".
"They made me feel like a lowly servant and that how dare I deign to be in their presence."
The customer's always right, right?
ACT/NSW union secretary Bernie Smith says large companies need to remember, in instances like Anna's, that the customer isn't always right.
"We're sick of the position where the customer is always right, they're not," Mr Smith says.
"When they start abusing people in the workplace then they are no longer actually customers, they become offenders."
Mr Smith says the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA) wants to see a zero-tolerance approach policy from companies on abuse of staff rather than appeasing the "bad behaviour" with a "gift card".
"We want better training to support front-line managers on how to de-escalate a situation and how to support the worker who is suffering the brunt of the abuse at that time, so the worker feels supported rather than the abuser being rewarded.
"I think we need a new generation of managers to be trained up properly in that the customer's not always right, the customer has rights but we're all entitled to a respectful workplace and all their other customers would agree with this as well."
Mr Smith says he has spoken to the ACT and NSW governments about what they can do to protect retail workers from abuse.
South Australia recently brought in harsher penalties for people who assault retail workers — people convicted of basic assault against a worker selling goods can face up to five years in prison, while someone convicted of assault causing harm can be imprisoned for up to seven years.
Mr Smith says he would like to see other states and territories, including the ACT and NSW come in line with SA.
An internal report compiled by the SDA of its members in NSW, found 76 per cent of respondents support stronger penalties for customers who abuse retail workers to help protect them from abuse.
Sixty-five per cent of respondents said rude or unreasonable customers were the main perpetrators of verbal and physical abuse over the Christmas period.
'Slip them a smile'
Five years ago, another survey of SDA members nationally found 85 per cent of members had been abused at work during the Christmas period.
A more recent study compiled this year by the University of Sydney found that 56 per cent of retail workers reported having experienced a notable increase in customer abuse at the beginning of the pandemic.
So, with an already stretched workforce and an increase in customer abuse of retail workers, Mr Smith says customers should remember "a little can go a long way" this holiday period.
"There are staff shortages across all industries this year and that is going to be felt in retail too."
His message to customers is: "If you are waiting in line and it's a bit longer than you'd like, don't you think the retail worker would love a few extra people to be working alongside them?"
"It's not their fault, slip them a smile, wish them a Merry Christmas and it'll go a long way to make everybody's Christmas a bit better."
Anna has a message for customers too: "We're all in the same boat, I think we're just trying to get through the holiday with as much grace as we can.
"If we could learn to be kind to each other, take on that whole idea of respect and show people that you respect them by treating them with respect and kindness"
*Name has been changed.
