[nmrm2]

> (I don't know if this is normal for Aldi

Aldi is a German company. Every grocery store I've been to in Germany has seats for the cashiers. Also, the cashiers wear name tags that read Mr. or Ms. Blah.

I suspect parent is correct about this being mostly an American cultural thing.

[TheCowboy]

Yes, I should have specified that.

I should also add that it's not 100% that everyone has this perspective, and it could vary by region in the US. Sometimes it's employers who think that customers might perceive this. It might even just be the case of a vocal minority of people who think everyone else doesn't work as hard as them.

[nmrm2]

> It might even just be the case of a vocal minority of people who think everyone else doesn't work as hard as them.

I worked in a grocery store (in the US) back in the day. People complained about the smallest stuff -- that I wasn't as conversational as they wanted, or that I wouldn't process their coupons in the order that they expected, or even in one case that I wouldn't help them steal from the store.

Maybe 1 in 10 complaints I received was even remotely close to something a sane human would be even mildly inconvienanced by (and even for those I can't imagine ever caring enough to spend my free time complaining to a grocery store manager). It wasn't just me or just that store; management had an entire formal process passed down from the corporate office for figuring out which complaints should contribute to evaluations and which were spurious. I never had less than 10 complaints per quarter and only two of those were mentioned in my evaluations over a several year period. Other cashiers had similar numbers. Interestingly, friends who worked at non-grocery-stores encountered these sorts of things far less often.

I'll never understand the psychological reasons for why people behave like this. It's probably the same reason people troll. But I do wonder whether it's a US-specific phenomenon wrt grocery stores specifically.