Can you imagine working in a place where you’re threatened by customers with violence? It happened at a pharmacy I worked at on a near constant basis.
It was startling to see a man in his 70s threaten to get his gun out of his car because his doctor made a mistake and didn’t call in his prescription to the pharmacy.
And it was a Friday evening too so it meant that the patient had to wait until Monday to get his medication after running out earlier that day. As much as I can understand his frustration and how terrible it must be to go through withdrawals over the weekend, he was taking his anger out on the wrong people completely. I tried to complain to the HR department but they didn’t really do anything about it. My friend who works at a cannabis dispensary said that the HR department there behaves in a very similar fashion if there’s a dangerous customer in the store. There was one the other day who threatened to go get his gun several times if an employee wouldn’t discount his cannabis product at a lower price point. Instead of banning the customer, the manager on duty caved in and gave him the discount. Then the HR department of the cannabis dispensary swept the problem under the rug completely. They wanted everybody there to forget about it and not talk about it again. Somebody once told me that an HR department is there to protect the business, not the employees. When I started to think about this more it all made sense to me and I could finally understand why HR departments rarely do things in the benefit of an employee who feels threatened or unsafe in a workplace.