Register! - Vol. 1 Ch. 4 - What’s The Complaint About?

[MangaDex]

 

[BKNY_STEVE]

Dude. That was kinda shitty.

 

[ErikTheRed]

Customers should all have to try working in a customer facing job before making a complaint. Such a shitty thing to say about a guy clearly working hard. Some people sweat a lot naturally when given a physically demanding job.

 

[frankdoodle1]

Oh he did not just do that. So rude.

 

[Dragonfirewings]

Customers should all have to try working in a customer facing job before making a complaint. Such a shitty thing to say about a guy clearly working hard. Some people sweat a lot naturally when given a physically demanding job.

it should be basic decency to put on deodorant and shower. You dont need to have worked customer service to know and say that

 

[ipmanvsthemask]

Quite shitty of our protagonist, but it's a pretty interesting twist.

 

[Jokul]

I don't think mc made the complaint.. It looks like he was just looking at a public notice board. That being said mc has such a creepy design I can't handle it. The way he stares is blegh gross.

 

[outinthegardener]

Yeah, that's a manager fail. Telling the guy who works in the back of house and does harder labor to be mindful of how stinky he's getting for the 1% of the time he might get called up to the register? That's ineffective advice that makes him worse at the job he does 99% of the time. And putting the complaint up front is hugely demotivating to the employee, and it rewards the customer for complaining, leading to more nitpicky complaints.

The customer is getting worked up over an imaginary problem, too. Smelling some B.O. at the register doesn't harm anyone. At worst it's a little unpleasant, and life is full of little unpleasantries. I'll argue that their problem is largely symbolic, not realistic. They're upset about the idea of B.O. near their food more than the actual smell. Their food isn't tainted, and they will stop smelling B.O. seconds after they leave the register.

Body Odor has not always been treated as offensive. It depends on a lot of cultural and historical factors. No one in their right mind would complain about a mailman in 1870 smelling like B.O. and Horse, or a hot asphalt worker smelling like hot tar and armpit. The idea that it's offensive to come to work with noticeable smell is a more recent invention of the post-industrial age. It's the switch from a predominantly agricultural society to a predominantly desk-worker society. Email jockeys, dentists, or customer service workers who stand around all day don't have the expectation of getting sweaty.

We also get chemical companies inventing products that cover up odors (Listerine! Deodorant! Febreeze!) and they market those odors as an urgent problem to make us buy them. But if we step back and look at different historical eras next to each other, we see that the smells problem is not so urgent. For one, there are worse smells than B.O. or bad breath we deal with every day. Car Exhaust! Manure fertilizer! Your cat's litter box! Deep fryer oil! The thing is, the way we categorize and rank those smells is more about social constructs of acceptability than it is about how bad they actually smell.

Which brings us back to our fictional upset customer. They're concerned that the food might get 'tainted' by the smell of body odor. This is wild, and it shows they've never worked in a commercial kitchen. Food processing is bathed in bad smells, from farm to table. Those veggies were grown in the dirt, washed in toxic chemicals, carried by workers in the hot sun, before eventually getting washed and wrapped in sanitary-coded plastics for sale. The livestock whose meat and eggs and milk you buy are raised in farms, covered in sweat and their own shit and urine before they get processed into the clean-looking products at the grocer. The food you eat at a restaurant is made in a hot kitchen by a bunch of underpaid, chain-smoking, sweat-covered, and bloody chefs. They all stink like sweat and grease before your omurice gets to the table.

What the customer is really upset about is the symbolic contamination of their food, which exposes the literal contaminations that are an inherent part of the food industry. All that food on display is wrapped in plastic to maintain the symbols of purity and sanitation. Bringing the back of the house up front exposes the mythology for what it is- a story about cleanliness. A story told with signs and rituals that launders all the filth and environmental destruction and social murder that our modern society is built on.

 

[theroachoftime]

it should be basic decency to put on deodorant and shower. You dont need to have worked customer service to know and say that

Dude, deodorant only goes so far. I'm a sweaty guy that works manual labor jobs. I shower daily and slather on deodorant and I still end up stinking. That's just how it is for some of us. Like this dude I don't work customer facing jobs (not so much because of my smell as because I don't want to.)
Working the back of a grocery store is manual labor and will make you sweat. I had a job as an overnight stocker so I can attest to that. If my boss back then had asked me to fill in at a register and then bitched about my smell I would've told them to go fuck themselves.

 

[theroachoftime]

Yeah, that's a manager fail. Telling the guy who works in the back of house and does harder labor to be mindful of how stinky he's getting for the 1% of the time he might get called up to the register? That's ineffective advice that makes him worse at the job he does 99% of the time. And putting the complaint up front is hugely demotivating to the employee, and it rewards the customer for complaining, leading to more nitpicky complaints.

The customer is getting worked up over an imaginary problem, too. Smelling some B.O. at the register doesn't harm anyone. At worst it's a little unpleasant, and life is full of little unpleasantries. I'll argue that their problem is largely symbolic, not realistic. They're upset about the idea of B.O. near their food more than the actual smell. Their food isn't tainted, and they will stop smelling B.O. seconds after they leave the register.

Body Odor has not always been treated as offensive. It depends on a lot of cultural and historical factors. No one in their right mind would complain about a mailman in 1870 smelling like B.O. and Horse, or a hot asphalt worker smelling like hot tar and armpit. The idea that it's offensive to come to work with noticeable smell is a more recent invention of the post-industrial age. It's the switch from a predominantly agricultural society to a predominantly desk-worker society. Email jockeys, dentists, or customer service workers who stand around all day don't have the expectation of getting sweaty.

We also get chemical companies inventing products that cover up odors (Listerine! Deodorant! Febreeze!) and they market those odors as an urgent problem to make us buy them. But if we step back and look at different historical eras next to each other, we see that the smells problem is not so urgent. For one, there are worse smells than B.O. or bad breath we deal with every day. Car Exhaust! Manure fertilizer! Your cat's litter box! Deep fryer oil! The thing is, the way we categorize and rank those smells is more about social constructs of acceptability than it is about how bad they actually smell.

Which brings us back to our fictional upset customer. They're concerned that the food might get 'tainted' by the smell of body odor. This is wild, and it shows they've never worked in a commercial kitchen. Food processing is bathed in bad smells, from farm to table. Those veggies were grown in the dirt, washed in toxic chemicals, carried by workers in the hot sun, before eventually getting washed and wrapped in sanitary-coded plastics for sale. The livestock whose meat and eggs and milk you buy are raised in farms, covered in sweat and their own shit and urine before they get processed into the clean-looking products at the grocer. The food you eat at a restaurant is made in a hot kitchen by a bunch of underpaid, chain-smoking, sweat-covered, and bloody chefs. They all stink like sweat and grease before your omurice gets to the table.

What the customer is really upset about is the symbolic contamination of their food, which exposes the literal contaminations that are an inherent part of the food industry. All that food on display is wrapped in plastic to maintain the symbols of purity and sanitation. Bringing the back of the house up front exposes the mythology for what it is- a story about cleanliness. A story told with signs and rituals that launders all the filth and environmental destruction and social murder that our modern society is built on.

When I worked overnights at a grocery store there were two dudes that handled the meat department. One of them chain smoked the entire time (you could track his progress by the trail of cigarette butts, and he worked real slow.) The other would keep telling the same story about his "brother" fucking a chicken.
There was also the dust head who thought I was Jesus, the intellectually disabled boxer that had conversations with himself all night (real sweetheart, wonky eye,) the divorced guy still paying the rent for his ex and her boyfriend, the creepy white dude who kept talking about his totally real black girlfriend... Weird shift at a weird place.
But it's the weirdoes doing the shit work that are holding this world together.

 

[BKNY_STEVE]

it should be basic decency to put on deodorant and shower. You dont need to have worked customer service to know and say that

Yeah, that's true, but then it's on the management for putting a dock worker on the retail side.

 

[v.roderick]

It's 100% on the manager for not organising enough floor staff. That poor dude. I know several people like him, usually truckies. They shower each morning and put on deodorant, wipe themselves down after doing a job and reapply deodorant before getting back in the truck and people will send complaints into management about their smell.

Good thing their truckies though management said shit like "What? You expect him to smell like ya mum? He did the job didn't he?" And funnily enough, they always had work so it's not like they take their business elsewhere.

 

[MilkDrinker]

Maybe it's a Japanese thing, they both sweat less and shun deodorants for their aggressive smells.

 

[xTachibana]

Just out of curiosity, aside from him being jealous of him interacting with shinozaki, and him reading the thing on the board at the end, is there even any real reason why people are assuming he wrote it?