You look better when you smile

“You look better when you smile.”

Narrow your eyes slightly if this is something you have had said to your face. Hold back your anger if you’ve gotten any kind of variant of that. I don’t mean your parents telling you to smile when you take your school photos or being forced to pretend you don’t feel awkward as you stand next to family you see once a year.

This is something that most girls and women will hear at least a dozen times in their life. Some hear it that many times before they finish high school.

This is also something that anyone who has worked in retail, especially face to face customer service will hear more frequently.

I myself have heard it a number of times and in varying forms. Sometimes it’s not always someone telling me I look better when I smile, sometimes it’s someone asking what’s wrong with my face when I was minding my own business filling some stock to the shelves. Alone. Not talking to anyone.

You may remember the above rant in a previous post. I will restate for the record that before this woman came up to me I was literally alone in the aisle, minding. My. Own. Business.

Pretty sure that if anyone had walked into the aisle and seen me smiling at a random carton of air freshener or laundry detergent then they’d probably wonder what chemicals I had been sniffing.

It came up the other day at work that a team member could be written up for not smiling enough when helping/serving customers. I immediately called bullshit on this because that’s actually ridiculous. Getting written up for consistently not being friendly when providing customer service or refusing to provide customer service? Sure thing. It’s literally part of our job, unfortunately and no matter how obvious the answer to their question is.

However, I’ve looked at the codes, because I personally needed to feel vindicated about the fact that this comment about smiling had been made and by a man no less.

Side note, this isn’t a feminist thing, I think. Though I’ve never heard any of my male coworkers being told that they look better when they smile or that they need to smile more at the customers.

Back to my point. I’ve looked at the codes and guess what? There is absolutely nothing in there about smiling or lack thereof. We are required to provide friendly service to customers. The end.

Before there is a misunderstanding, my issue here is not that I’m being asked or rather told to provide friendly customer service to people. My issue here is that I’m being told that I or anyone else could be penalized for not smiling at all my customers. You’re able to provide friendly customer service without smiling.

Do you want to know what smiling at all my customers has gotten me? Either way you’re finding out.
 – Old guy hitting on me despite me telling him that I am underage.
 – Old guy making inappropriate comments because my “smile” did not convey how disgusted I was.
 – Middle aged guy thinking it’s appropriate for him to make lewd comments to me when he sees me around town.
– Lady asking what’s wrong with my face when she sees me not smiling for the first time in ten years.
– Shoplifters swearing at me for looking at them.
– Shoplifters abusing me because… I don’t know. I look too friendly?
– Small children looking at me like I’m a crack head.
– Babies smiling back at me (not mad about this one).
– My cheeks hurting
– Regular customers having a misconception that I am a generally nice and pleasant person.

The first three points are a lot more common than what you might expect, or maybe exactly what you expect depending on your experiences.

For generations women have been told that they need to smile more, soften their voices and their words, appear more friendly, blah blah fucking blah, all so that we don’t threaten or offend people. All this has gotten us over the years is sexual harassment and being forced to be uncomfortable and not complain.

There have been times when I was younger that even my own mum has told me to be more lady like. I always had an issue with this term. How hard is it to say “sit at the table properly and not with your feet on the chair”? Thankfully after I expressed and explained my displeasure with this particular term she stopped and phrased it in a less infuriating way.

It was also weird because she was the one who taught us to stand up for ourselves and not take crap from men. Internalised misogyny is everywhere people.

The issue has also come up when any of my female coworkers have been called a pet name by some old guy they don’t know. When we vent to each other, we all know the feeling, we all agree on how uncomfortable we are when it happens but we feel like we can’t say anything because not only is it our job to be polite but it’s drummed into us from such a young age that we should accept “compliments” and being called pet names by men we don’t know incase we offend them. God forbid the male ego be bruised.

When our venting is overheard by a man, or sometimes even when I say something to Matt when I get home, it’s always the same thing. “He’s just trying to be nice”, “He probably thought he was giving you a compliment”.

Guess what. I didn’t ask for a compliment. I don’t need them to “try and be nice”. They’re not doing us favours by calling us sweetheart, beautiful, love, whatever. We are not so desperate for compliments that we need anyone who is willing to just throw random words at us.

Don’t get me wrong, we as women will accept compliments from other women, generally without hesitation and especially when the compliments feel genuine but rarely do we act like we’re doing each other a favour if asked to stop.

The moral of this story is this; If someone tells you that you look better when you smile, tell them they’ll look better when they stop talking. I have some more…colourful…responses but as my mum likes to remind me, teenagers may end up reading my blog posts and so I should keep them to a certain level of appropriateness. Also the last time I said what I wanted to say my mum told me off for my language.

Yes that’s right people. I, a twenty-four year old woman with a house, two cats and soon a dog and not far off from being a married woman, still gets told of by my mum for using really colourful language. I’d also like to maintain that I didn’t swear in what I said…It was just…really descriptive and perhaps insanely violent.

Don’t feel like you have to be polite to people just because. If they’re making you uncomfortable tell them to leave. If your boss questions your behaviour/attitude explain to them that the person was making you uncomfortable and you have a right to feel safe in your work environment. Hell any environment.

My patience for things like this is at such an all time low that most of the time I don’t bother to try and be polite when people are weird or creepy. I don’t have time to cater to other people I don’t care about.

As a small end note because I just remembered and am too lazy to go back and rewrite the section of the post where this next thing would go (10/10 why I suck at writing essays); the guy who told me that team members can be written up for not smiling enough at customers…I’ve seen him smile maybe twice in the past two weeks and neither of those was when dealing with customers. As a matter of fact…I don’t think I’ve ever seen a male manager or any male team member smile at customers anywhere close to what they expect any female team member too.

Love that for us.

But you know. We look better when we smile.