Is it safe to say the vast majority to most rich Americans treat service workers, waiters, and cleaners with respect and politeness?

24 comments

1. I don’t believe so

2. It’s been the opposite in my experience. When I lived in Orange County, which a wealthy part of California, I found rich people to be incredibly rude and entitled. Like straight up berating workers and throwing tantrums

3. Fuck no lmao every rude person I’ve encountered in customer service were rich and entitled

4. In my (admittedly limited) experience with rich people, that’s been the case. The people who tend to be assholes are the “not quite rich but I identify as rich” upper crust of the middle class who have a sense of entitlement without the ultimate stress relief of having the kind of money that obviates all actual problems outside of family.

   So they stress about status and how they’re being treated and they think not getting what they want at exactly this second is a sign of disrespect and that’s threatening.

   Actual rich people are like…whatever, take your time. I own time.

   At least in my experience.

5. In my experience, absolutely. However, when wealthy people are pieces of shit, it is really noticeable.

6. No.

7. Hard to say. When I worked in retail I was treated like shit by almost everyone.

8. I’d say most for sure. There’s always enough outliers to give someone a bad day though.

9. Rude costumers has no tax bracket requirement

10. I believe so. It’s just less noticeable because these rich people who treat service workers with respect tend to be low key and not pass as rich. Where those to flaunt their wealth tend to be rude and be easily noticed.

11. The majority are polite, I maybe wouldn’t say vast majority. And I wouldn’t even say a majority have actual respect beyond being polite.

12. Yes.

    Part of the culture is believing that even though someone may currently have a higher/lower station in life, no person is “better” than any other. Treat everyone with the respect you’d want to receive.

13. Eh it’s more personality based than wealth based imo. Like if someone thinks they’re better than everyone else, they tend to be shitty. If they recognize people just have a job to do, they’ll be cordially at minimum.

14. I have a business where I have a lot of wealthy customers. I’d say 99.9% of them are super nice.

15. I’d say not exactly, it’s mostly the people who think they’re rich when they’re not quite there, like the ones with $700,000 homes instead of the $3 million mansion

16. Rich people are generally smart enough to understand basic respect. It’s the wannabe millionaires driving financed BMW 3 Series “certified pre-owned” cars that need lessons on civility.

17. Yes, I think so. One anecdote is a few years ago when I worked in Miami, we had a mid level manager who was rude to the cleaning staff once and it became a big story around the office. People were talking about it months later.

18. Yes, I think that would be a safe assumption. It would be just as safe for other groups as well.

19. I think the vast majority of people treat other people with kindness and respect. Karen types are definitely out there but I don’t think it has to do with how much they make or how old they are they are just miserable assholes.

20. Generally, yeah. Doing so is kind of a status thing in and of itself in a lot of cases.

    There are always exceptions and assholes, but polite is the general rule.

    There is a weird middle ground with certain people that grew up without money and made into more than average themselves, though. Not necessarily properly rich but at least to upper middle. A degree of “well I used to be like you and made it to higher income so I must be objectively better than you” attitude. Not all go that route at all but I’ve seen more service monsters come out of that category than any other.

21. In my experience that has always been the case.

22. I’d say it’s about 70/30 across all classes

23. Money talks, wealth whispers

24. When I worked in low-end customer-facing jobs, I’m not sure who was worse: the trailer park/ratchet types who would threaten to jump the counter and whoop my ass, or the highfalutin types who would patronizingly berate me for my lack of ‘professionalism.’

    At least with the first kind, I knew the cops would take my side if I fought back!