After a young corn seller had a bad experience with an irate customer, Joiners Corn is reminding people to treat its employees well.
According to Brad Joiner, an older woman stopped at the stand by ReMax recently and was upset at the corn she received two days prior.
“Our policy is always that if somebody gets bad cobs, no questions asked we just replace it,” he said. “My seller was trying to tell her that and she just got louder. She got very irate and wouldn’t even let my seller talk.”
A post on the Joiner’s Corn Facebook page suggested the seller was called names and body shamed. The tone of the Facebook post suggested this isn’t a frequent thing, but it happens more often than it should. Joiner said it was particularly bad during the heat dome event of 2021, when high temperatures affected the corn.
“You’re growing a vegetable and it is very weather dependent and it’s not always perfect,” Joiner noted. “And most of our customers are great and very understanding.”
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In this latest instance, the seller was 19 years old and has experience working retail and dealing with difficult customers.
“But my concern is if you’ve got a 13 or 14 year old selling, and at a few of our stands we do, it would shake them up pretty bad,” Joiner said. “There’s really no reason for anybody to be verbally abusive to anybody, let alone younger people who are trying to do a summer job.”
Joiner’s provides work for 20 or so teenagers each summer. It’s a first job for many of them.
“We had a new one start yesterday and his dad stopped at the stand and he was absolutely thrilled that we gave his son a chance at 13,” Joiner said. “It’s a good experience making change because nowadays a lot of places don’t even deal in cash, and it’s good experience dealing with the public. We try to give them good on-the-job training and have this be a positive experience for them.”
But there’s no way to fully prepare a kid for having an adult yell at them.
“We tell them to never argue with a customer and if they say something’s not good, replace it,” Joiner said. “Just stay calm and don’t take it personally. Sometimes people are unhappy with the product and sometimes there’s something else going on in their life and they’re overly stressed. But there’s never a reason to take it out on teenagers trying to do a job.”
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