Mckenna Lloyd

#6709

Creative Nonfiction

Cultural Criticism Essay

April 11, 2019

The Generational Gap

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

customer service voice.

“Hi there, how are you doing today?”

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

have no control over whatsoever.

“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

of the parking lot.

 Surprisingly, the woman comes out of the theater, aggressively coming back up to the

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.”

“Finally! Thank you.”

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

certain luxuries which employees are not capable of controlling.

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

reason, we practice treating workers in a way we wish people treated us.

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

transaction without complaining.

 The cases of mean grandmas and nice teenagers is not always true. I’ve had my fair share

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

still complain about the price.

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.

“I’m sorry, how much is it?”

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.

A perceived entitlement or privilege, especially apparent in older women, is something

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

people they come across in a day.

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.”