I want to write a little about entitlement, and my understanding of it. There's the actual dictionary definition, as in to be entitled to something – to have an entitlement to it, or a right to it. For example, I am entitled to have a relationship with whomever I choose. I am entitled to drink all the soda I own in one night. I'm entitled to my own feelings.
Then there's the other application for it, which is to call someone entitled in a negative context. As if to say, you feel entitled to things I don't want you to actually have/take/be given.
Another word that ties into this is “privilege” which again has a bunch of different senses. To have a privilege is a positive thing – it means that some person or institution has given you an option that isn't necessarily given to others. You might have privileges given to you in school or work for good behavior or exceptional performance. You might have privileges taken away if you misbehaved or required discipline.
So I'm the Assistant Store Manager at where I work. That means that I carry out the instructions of the Store Manager, and I act as the Store Manager if she is not around to give orders. On days when I work with her, she gives me direction and I pass that along to the rest of the workers. On days when I do not work with her, it's up to me to find projects to work on, make sure schedules look good, attend conference calls, and keep the ship sailing smoothly for when she gets back.
Keyholders are there as placeholders, just in case one of us is sick or needs vacation time. They're expected to be capable of everything we are.
So my manager is pretty no nonsense. She's seriously intelligent, and everything she does is calculated. When I met her, I even got the sense that her downtime with us chatting was calculated. Like, she knew that making bonds with her team was important and had set aside time for that sort of thing in her head.
Anyway. I really like her and our store is way more successful than it used to be.
So back to entitlement. We interviewed a new Keyholder a few days before our new SM got here. She's a beautiful black woman with a lot of experience in sales and marketing, and worked for big brand names as well as doing her own thing independently. I pushed for her because during her interview, she basically covered everything I wanted to hear about how to sell properly.
I thought she was going to work out really well, so I recommended her to the new Store Manager, and she did her own interview and liked her perfectly fine. So we hired her.
Things started out really well, but they've gone downhill recently. You have to sign a sheet when you want to use the product in the store (like say I worked at a cosmetics store, and I'd like to use this foundation today, I'd write it down and sign for it and everything) and a manager has to sign off. You can't wear other brands at our store because that would be retarded.
So right off the bat she just doesn't seem to care that the products need to be signed out. I'll just spot her wearing one randomly and I'm like hmm? But do I want to sound all nitpicky? Idk.
Another thing was that she didn't actually use any of these sales skills that she talked about in her interview ... with the actual clients. In sales, you never want to dismiss a client. You don't want to say things like “Okay, well, if you need me, I'll be ...” or “Okay, well, look around ...” That's dismissing them, or saying basically, I am not getting anywhere with you, so I'm going to let you do your own thing and give up. That's the opposite of what our brand stands for. We want to be a part of every client's every moment in the store – not too pushy, but not too evasive either.
We started noticing that if she missed out on a sale or let a customer wander off, when we'd approach her (which is our job) and ask what went wrong with the interaction, (you know, to train her) she'd say something like, “They weren't going to buy anything.” Okay well I mean no, not with that attitude. You can't just judge a customer based on how likely you think they are to buy something. If you do that, you're just a cashier.
Things started to heat up when we hired some more bartenders. I don't know if she felt threatened or what it was, but she started having really not okay interactions with me after that. If she was missing a product and I went to go double check for it, she would say (IN FRONT OF THE FUCKING CUSTOMER) “I just told you, we already checked.” With an attitude.
BITCH MY JOB IS TO MAKE SURE YOU'RE DOING YOUR JOB CORRECTLY. LITERALLY MY JOB DESCRIPTION IS TO DOUBLE CHECK YOUR WORK.
Anyway it went from bad to worse, just with an attitude. It used to be, if I corrected her on something, or asked for something to be done differently, or reminded her that we DON'T MESS WITH THE DISPLAYS OMFG, she'd say something like “I know the rules, I'm just doing this because we don't have much time left,” or “I know the rules, but I'm just going to do this.”
Now it's become, “The rules around here are so tedious.”
And it all sort of came to a head one day when I pulled her aside and said hey, you know, like, not to mess with the displays right? Our boss works really hard on those and she's the only one who really knows how to do it.
She went off about how the standards here are just getting higher and how she is super flexible about her schedule – ?? Like how she has a very open available schedule, and how she feels like she's not getting her due or some shit idk.
You can see where this is going. So like – she might not have meant it this way, but what I heard was, “I meet all these standards, so I really shouldn't have to meet these other ones that I don't like as much.”
What a bitch??
People say that white people are entitled/privileged a lot. But the only people I meet who have ever had this attitude are the other thing.
So I've bitched about my example and been racist – great. But seriously – having entitlements is a positive thing. But for me, taking someone's expectations of you – that they pay you for – and deciding to set your own much lower, is the epitome of entitlement (in its negative sense at least). Thinking that you're entitled to your pay regardless of how hard you work or how well you achieve your goals. That's just ew.