As a manager of a Subway located inside a Walmart I am continuously exposed to an extremely low quality portion of humanity. People who walk out on orders because we are out of courtesy cups, people who try to use food stamps to pay for their orders, etc. Then there is the alarmingly large number of people I serve who think it is alright or even cool to be stupid. Take for example:
Actual conversation with a customer:
Customer: "So, uh, what all meats come on the Turkey Ham sub?"
Me (wondering if this is a serious question): "It has turkey and ham."
Customer(nodding, pleased at this discovery): "Oh, okay."
This is actually a mild example of some of the ridiculous questions we field each day. Worse, when I try to identify our menu items to people, I can see that they immediately dismiss the information with an air of superiority. There's no desire to remember tomorrow what ham looks like or that it comes from a pig. (Yes I have had to educate a person on the facts that ham is pig and beef is cow.) Apparently, looking like a halfwit is the way to be. To me, this 'culture of ignorance' is downright apalling.
And before you tell me I'm being to hard on people, let me say that not ALL our customers are like that and I'm aware that everyone has a brainfart now and then. Your kid distracts you and you order a meatlong football sub instead of a footlong meatball. That's something to have a laugh over. But if you, as an adult, have to bang on the sneeze guard glass like a child and point to 80% of the vegetables you want on your sub because you don't know the name of them or are too lazy to even try to think of what that name might be, then really, at that level of ignorance/ineptitude, what good are you to humanity? If you can't sift up from your meager knowledge base the word tomato instead of "them red things" then how the hell did you manage to actually get to Walmart and our Subway? Operating a motor vehicle is obviously beyond your brain's motor function capacity, and if you took the bus then did you have to have someone count out the exact change for you?
Ignorance of this level is not and never will be ok. It's not cool. It's not something to giggle over.
In the words of Forest Gump, "Stupid is as stupid does." So as a general FYI to the human race -Choosing ignorance is sentencing yourself to a life of utter insignificance. Until that sinks in (if ever), try not to fall in the toilet and drown yourself mmkay?
