I think of it this way:

In any given shift, I’m going to come across maybe 300 customers if I’m working POS and account only for people coming to the register. (Not drive, mobile, etc).

Of those 300, maybe 2-3 are complete dickheads.

Maybe 5-6 are favorite regulars or really nice people who make me smile.

The rest are pretty unmemorable.

We tend to only focus on the dickheads which account for less than 1%. But because of the way our brain is wired, those are the ones we remember and it makes it seem as though they are representative of all customers. But they’re not. They are less than 1% and they deserve the same amount of our psychic and emotional energy.

I’m right there with you. I’m a 5 year partner and 3 year shift. I have received so much verbal abuse with Starbucks...a customer told me yesterday that she was allergic to foam. Long story short, she was very nasty to me and would not listen to what I had to say. She called and emailed corporate, and then I received a call from another SM in the area because my SM as well as others are out of town. I explained the situation and she says I am not in trouble or at fault, but I gave up my shift this morning because I was so afraid of encountering this customer again. She even came back to the store after peak yesterday and hung out for HOURS. My anxiety was through the roof and I literally just had a nightmare about the same customer. How hard is it to treat others with common decency?

Sure, there are some absolutely terrible Starbucks customers! but nothing, and I mean nothing, compares to the verbal abuse I received at my previous job. At Starbucks has been like a breath of fresh air to me! How do you take a bitchie Karen over the previous customers and I encountered at my other job. I used to work at Kohl's and the amount of times a day that I was called stupid by customers was astounding. And I was legitimately one of the best workers in the store! I was one of the few people that was trained in almost every single department and worked in multiple during one shift. As much as I don't like the customers that are here, I know that it could be so much worse. Yeah, maybe it's different between the different stores in the different states. It's in my experience, it's okay.