Holiday Shopping While Neurodiverse (Working)

I’m pretty sure that many of you experience this ritual every year around this time and it’s something that many of you who are neurodiverse dread holiday shopping as a customer or working with people who are doing holiday shopping. For the first of this 2-part blog, I will be covering working during the holiday season as a neurodiverse individual.

Yes, holiday shopping season is here and being out in the crowds, dealing with angry people around you or being around children throwing temper tantrums because they are not getting what they want, is enough to give you a sensory overload in itself.

Take it from me, as someone who has worked in retail for 15 years, I have had my fair share of out-of-control customers during the holidays. Just being around angry people in general is enough to make my spine stand stiff. Yes, that is an actual fact about me, when someone yells at me or I hear someone yelling at somebody else, my spine does stand stiff.

Again, I have seen how the holidays can turn people from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde. There is a saying that the customer is always right and I agree with that somewhat. However, just because the customer is always right, doesn’t give them the right to turn retail workers into whipping boys or whipping girls.

If a customer gives me a hard time, I don’t say anything out loud because that would be a bad representation of me, instead I say in my head what I want to say out loud. Mostly, I say that Instant Karma is going to get them and in fact, there’s a really famous song by John Lennon about just that:

However, it’s really important that you cannot judge the customer based on their current behavior. When I was at Borders, I have had customers give me a really hard time and there have been other well-behaved customers who have come up to me and said that I was doing a good job and that the offender was a Scrooge or a Grinch.

Remember, that if you are neurodiverse and working in retail during the holiday season, it is just like any other day for you in an effort to build your paycheck for that respective week.

But it’s really up to you in how you handle that one Scrooge or that one Grinch amongst the crowds. You can either walk away and keep some dignity in your character or you can talk back to the customer and end up out of a job.

Catch you all later!!

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Jeff Snyder

I was born in 1989 in Providence, RI, and have lived my entire life in Seekonk, MA. I was diagnosed with Autism in 1990 and ever since then, I have achieved multiple successes in my life in areas of education, long-term employment, independent living, and speaking/panel engagements.