Rude awakening: Retail workers are copping more abuse, but why? (2025)

Scott Harris spent 26 years in the Queensland police force before he established his consultancy training retail staff how to de-escalate and manage conflict. And business is booming, thanks to climbing rates of aggression and violence towards retail workers, a phenomenon many believe is a flow-on effect of the COVID pandemic.

“It’s definitely increased over the 10 years since setting up my business,” Harris told me. “A big part of that would have been through the COVID period where people really struggled with being isolated and locked down. There has been a loss of respect and empathy and kindness towards people in the retail sector.”

Harris trains staff at big companies such as Woolworths, Coles, Bunnings and KFC. He is not speaking on a hunch.

Last week Woolworths reported a 26 per cent increase in violent incidents at its stores in the past year. The supermarket giant had locked down stores across the country 45 times in the first half of this year due to security alerts. It has “substantially upgraded” its security in response, and more measures are planned.

Official crime statistics show a 4.3 per cent rise in retail thefts in NSW in the year to March, and a 40 per cent increase in Victoria over the same period.

Loading

Victoria has a particular problem with retail-crime-connected criminal gangs stealing goods they sell on the black market. But more generally, people without criminal profiles are more likely to be belligerent, abusive or violent to people who work in shops and behind counters of all kinds. The Australian Retailers Association says 87 per cent of retail workers report experiencing verbal abuse, and 51 per cent report experiencing physical abuse.

This is particularly horrible when you consider that the retail workforce skews female and young – more than half its workers are women, and more than a third are aged 15 to 24, according to the ARA.

It is a pressing enough problem that the ARA and the National Retail Association co-hosted a Retail Crime Symposium in Melbourne in July. Harris spoke at the conference, as did Associate Professor Xanthe Mallett, a criminologist with the Central Queensland University.

Mallett posits that there has been “general shift in the psychology of the country after COVID, and young people especially are struggling to readjust”. She believes one of the manifestations of this is an increase in rude, disrespectful or even aggressive behaviour in public settings.

Loading

Anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that other public-facing service workers such as nurses, emergency staff and teachers cop the same sort of behaviour. Even the recorded on-hold message for my local council is a polite reminder of its zero-tolerance policy for disrespect of staff.

“People are more self-protective now,” says Mallett. “There has just been a general breakdown of some of those social bonds, as [during the pandemic] people literally became fearful of their neighbours. People take a long time to get over that.”

She links the “sovereign citizen” movement – a dangerous melange of anti-government paranoia, hyper-individualism, anti-authoritarianism and assorted extremist right-wing ideologies – to the same post-COVID social fraying.

“I do think COVID lockdowns had a big impact on the general psyche of the population,” Mallett says. “They made some people quite paranoid.”

While most of us readjusted, some groups didn’t, and young people and children in particular are still dealing with the impacts.

Loading

Of course, all of this is theorising and speculation, and difficult to separate from the (related) effects of living with smartphones and the (now accepted) deleterious effects of social media on youth mental health. But it seems obvious we are still grappling with the social impact of the pandemic and the psychological impact of the lockdowns imposed.

A just-released film by US director Ari Aster, Eddington, is one of the first major movies to grapple with the peculiar insanity the global health crisis wrought on individuals and communities. Set in May 2020, it depicts how a small New Mexico town grapples with the early days of the pandemic.

The film’s central conflict is between a conservative sheriff (played by Joaquin Phoenix) and a liberal mayor (played by Pedro Pascal), who clash over the enforcement of a mask mandate. But the film is really about the onset of insanity/radicalisation of everyone in the town, each in their individual ways.

Aster told The New York Times he wanted to “show what it feels like to live in a world where nobody agrees about what is happening … COVID felt like an inflection point, where the link to the old society we lived in was finally cut”.

This detachment from long-held norms is acute in the US context, where the head of the Centres for Disease Control was sacked by President Donald Trump last week for, it seems, insisting on scientific rigour within her organisation.

But the internet-focused isolation hastened by the pandemic extends beyond the United States.

Aster says his film is ultimately about the collision of “a bunch of people who are very isolated, who are unable to see the bigger world outside themselves”. When this happens, he says, “we end up amplifying each other’s paranoia and fear because there’s nothing in the ether to hold us together any more”.

Author Patricia Lockwood has a forthcoming novel about the pandemic, Will There Ever Be Another You, in which the narrator goes nuts after contracting COVID. As the NYT review notes, “many readers may have forgotten, or perhaps memory-holed, what it was like to live through the pandemic”.

Loading

In my inglorious teenage career as a checkout worker at Woolworths, I was patronised plenty, but never abused or denigrated.

Retail work is often a first job for teenagers and young people, and a teenager’s first job is an invaluable experience that inoculates against the deficiencies often lamented in today’s youth – high rates of anxiety, and a supposed lack of resilience to deal with ordinary life challenges. It would be a bitter irony and a terrible shame if rising rates of aggression turned young people off seeking this kind of work. A teenage job requires you to be personally organised, responsible for yourself and accountable to people or institutions that care a lot less about you than your sympathetic parents do. It requires you to encounter other people at proximity, and get along with them.

These are all pro-social values that are our only hope in counteracting any damage done to social cohesion, whatever its cause.

Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer, columnist and author.

Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.