‘It’s Their Job’ Is No Excuse for Being a Bad Customer

What started with a viral tweet about insanely complicated Starbucks orders has devolved into an all-out Twitter battle between those who work in service and those who proudly make service workers’ lives a living hell.

Most baristas are unlikely to raise an eyebrow at the mild personalization of an order like “add whipped cream” or “extra espresso shot,” but the blasé lack of regard with which some customers decide to instantly double or triple a person’s work is, frankly, deserving of a healthy dose of shaming. Elaborate “secret menu” drinks and limited-time concoctions like the notoriously barista-hated Unicorn Frappuccino can be much more disruptive than customers realize: they interrupt and slow down the normal workflow, add time to all customers’ waits, and are hard to know how to make — let alone to a picky, image-conscious customer’s high standards — without specific instructions.

Even worse is the defensive retort that this kind of customer tends to default to when shrugging off accusations that they’re making baristas’ lives that much harder: variations of “it’s their job,” “u chose to work at sbux,” “no one told them to work there,” and other responses that betray an astonishing lack of both empathy for employees and an understanding of how the job market works.

This “it’s their job” attitude is a frequent blanket excuse for the often absurd demands that people make of service workers, as if those workers solely exist to serve customers’ wildest whims. For instance, gallon smashing — the prank challenge that involves smashing gallons of milk in grocery store aisles by pretending to slip and fall — was briefly popular in 2013 and continues to be recreated with glee on teen-populated platforms like the app TikTok, with culprits leaving huge messes of spilled milk for store employees to clean up as just another part of their jobs. Or, in a more common scenario, just look at the discarded popcorn, drinks, and trash that moviegoers litter the theater with after a film has ended, reasoning that someone will come to sweep it up.

“It’s their job” is a reflection of the classist contempt and lack of respect that many customers hold for the people who make their drinks, serve their food, and keep their grocery stores stocked and clean. Just because an arduous task — whether cleaning up sticky pools of milk or holding up an entire line to make a personalized caffeinated milkshake for someone who should’ve just gone to an ice cream parlor — may be loosely covered under the vague bullet points of a job description doesn’t mean that it’s a normal and manageable amount of labor to thrust upon an employee who, yeah, is just trying to do their work. Nightmare customers are not just those who belittle or undertip, but also the ones who preoccupy themselves more with whether or not they can demand extra labor, rather than whether or not they should.