Holiday shopping ?hell?: workers brace for unruly customers and labor strikes

Isabella Burrows, 19, started working at PetSmart in Michigan just ahead of the holiday shopping season in 2020. "It was one of the worst things I've had to work through. We didn't have enough people to deal with those crowds. We had three registers and there were lines around and out the doors for how much traffic we had," said Burrows.

This year, Burrows is scheduled to work from 3 to 11.30pm on Black Friday at a store one hour away from where she lives. She was transferred from a closer store in May after complaining to human resources that her manager downplayed and dismissed the tragic death of her 12-year-old brother two days after it happened.

Though she has different managers at her new store, she still fears asking anything from management, while still grappling with the trauma from the incident at her previous store, ongoing worries about Covid-19, and bracing for the influx of store traffic and aggressive customers during the holiday shopping season.

"For everything that inconveniences customers, it affects us just as much. We don't have control over prices in our stores or how much we receive of a product," said Burrows, who is also a member of the advocacy group United for Respect. "I think that's something people forget sometimes: that we're people too."

Retail sales in November and December are expected to increase between 8.5% and 10.5% - an all-time record - compared with 2020, according to the National Retail Federation. And this despite ongoing supply chain issues, the decision of some retailers including Walmart and Target, to close on Thanksgiving, and employers' continued struggle to find and retain enough workers.

"The week of Thanksgiving and Black Friday into Christmas is the worst time of the year to work at Walmart, especially for cashiers and self-checkout hosts because of the sheer volume of customers who flood into the stores and become volatile and angry over issues not within our control, such as merchandise they want is out of stock," said Peter Naughton, a Walmart cashier and self-checkout host in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. "We all deserve better and more respect, appreciation, better compensation, and understanding that we are not robots but human beings."

An Amazon worker, who requested to remain anonymous, described Amazon's peak season, where workers are scheduled to work extra shifts to meet the surge in demand from holiday shopping as "hell".