If there is no work to do, I'd rather go home and watch a movie of my choosing, or anything else I feel like doing. Idle time at work is excruciating.
Sure, pay is pay, but time is more valuable than any job can afford to be honest, and few things let that reality sink in as much as idle time at a job you hate, but you have to stay and deal with it because you're struggling to make ends meet.
Dealing with rude customers is quickly learned.
The stuff around internal politics though - little pecking order shit, where the managers and other coworkers can and often do make working unbearable causes many exits and often violence.
No, it's not, many workers I know face repeated and regular stressful abuse, which is almost always worse if they are visibly part of a marginalized group of people, who also get racial and misogynistic slurs thrown in their face. There are dramatic differences in treatment, and many managers don't step in to protect their employees. That's not to say the other stuff you mention doesn't also occur.
It's not even necessarily retail, I know a really sweet Latina woman, she manages and runs multiple bicycle rental places in SF. People will be incredibly rude to her, but when she says, "Hold on, let me get someone else to help you" and gets a white male employee of hers, they are suddenly all smiles and apologetic and understanding.
I honestly would encourage folks here to remember to be good customers, to treat workers as you would want people to treat you, because workers in the US are almost always underpaid and dealing with work related stress.
Try to know what you want by looking online, understand that workers don't owe you happy smiles and social interaction beyond the goods and services you pay for, listen to and ask for suggestions and consider them as expert advice if you are having trouble making a decision, and if possible be polite and say thank you.
I've never seen a manager hand off a difficult customer to a lower employee. As a customer I would ask to speak to the manager if I wasn't getting service never does the manager ask the co-op student to handle this difficult customer they can't.
Something about your story doesn't add up. You say she is the nicest person but is she good at customer service because those are two different skills.
Maybe you should try an experiment?
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-happened-when-a-man-sign...
https://nickyknacks.medium.com/working-while-female-59a5de3a...
There are advantages to being female or black or old or young or male depending on who you are talking to.
It is eye opening.
I'll go out on a limb here and say you have never worked in a retail job before, dealing with the general public. A small percentage of the public are simply fucking awful people who will do absolute anything they can to try and get what they want.
Surprise surprise, dealing with this form of abuse (and more importantly, never knowing when it's coming) on a daily basis destroys your mental health - just as dealing with abusive behaviours from a spouse or parent does.
Businesses should not tolerate this, but they do, because it increases their revenue by a couple of percentage points.
Your opinion is the minority, a sizeable one but obviously the minority. The opinion of the person you're replying to is the majority.
Nobody wants to hang around and do nothing at work, even if you're getting paid. If the job is done people want to go home and sit on their ass on their own terms.
And while they might be tolerable when done occasionally, in the age of Agile all the things, where even restaurant staff are now hosting daily standups, those meetings are not occasional.
As someone who's apparently in the minority, what's the evidence of this? Is this just your self-assessment?