ANGRY PATRON TRAINING
GOLD Coast businesses are having to resort to training staff to cope with increasingly aggressive customers in the wake of pandemic hardship.
A city university professor has lifted the lid on the new measures being adopted by some firms due to more customer run-ins.
“I’ve been personally witness to incidents where customers have yelled at the 15-year-old schoolgirl behind the counter because they don’t have any rice,” Bond University’s Wayne Petherick said.
GOLD Coast businesses are undergoing customer aggression training amid an increase of incidents as a result of the pandemic, a criminologist says.
Organisations around the region are reporting a rise in aggressive customers during COVID-19 as businesses are subject to customer caps and increased wait times under health restrictions, Bond University associate professor Wayne Petherick said.
Prof Petherick said he was conducting in-house customer aggression training, teaching frontline staff how to identify the signs and defuse situations.
“I’ve been personally witness to incidents where customers have yelled at the 15-year-old schoolgirl behind the counter because they don’t have any rice, or they don’t have any toilet paper,” he said.
“We’re seeing these quite overt signs of aggression now towards counter staff, and anecdotally what we are hearing from different organisations is that customer aggression is on the increase.”
He said he also saw the frustration aimed at frontline workers during the recent mask mandate.
Prof Petherick said economic hardship during the pandemic could be attributed to the rise in frustration among people. He would not specify what businesses were undergoing the training but said they were mainly in the service industry.
Last month, Woolworths announced it would trial body cameras – like the ones police use – to help stop customer abuse. The cameras are being trialled at 11 stores across the country, including at Redbank Plains in Ipswich. The company said assaults doubled in 2020. The cameras would only be used as a last resort if a supervisor was concerned about safety, the company said last month.
Gold Coast Chief Superintendent Rhys Wildman said police had not recorded an increase in tensions between patrons and venues, but encouraged businesses to come forward.
He also commended businesses for engaging with de-escalation strategies.
“These tactics are used by operational police every day and are one of the core reasons that, of the six million-plus interactions with the community each year, so little number of serious incidents occur,” he said.