Some of the Boomer hatred is unwarranted. However, I have observed that 100% of the time I’ve seen someone abusing a cashier or retail person, they’ve been a Boomer.

Story I’ve never told anyone but my current girlfriend. The year was 1997 or so. I was in the Army at the time. My friend who I was with was very much into working out and was at the top level of a martial arts program (a real one, not the pretend kind). Both of us were standing in line at a low-end grocery store in Florida at about 9PM. Ahead of us, there was another man in line, about 35 years old (so, at the time, a Boomer) who was just absolutely berating this poor cashier for some mistake she’d made.

The cashier was at this point near tears and just couldn’t have been nicer to this idiot the entire time. He was, as we got in line, escalating his vitriol and pitch of near-screaming about her incompetence and what a bitch she was. Then, this dude reached out and grabbed the cashier hard by her vest and pulled her toward him and started yelling full-force into her face. She then started crying in earnest and looked, as she should have, terrified. I glanced around the store quickly, saw no security guards. No one was coming to help. I looked over at my friend and said, “You had enough?”

“Yup,” he said. This all happened in about two seconds, mind you. Events, as they say, were proceeding quickly.

I swept the guy’s feet and my friend, seeing what I was going to do, grabbed the guy’s arm as he was falling and guided his head down onto the conveyor belt of the checkout counter, pinning him pretty well with his face against the belt. I held his other arm and hip-checked him hard against the side of the checkout counter and with my body pinned him against the counter so he couldn’t flail his legs around much. He was bigger than I was, but he was a whole lot weaker than I was at the time. Working out four hours a day pays some dividends.

My friend said, “Now, this can all end very poorly. But if you just walk out of here like nothing happened, we can forget all about it. Otherwise you’re going to leave on a stretcher. Trust us on this.”

The guy, not expecting to be challenged by anyone, was already making conciliatory noises. I ran a quick hand over the outside of his pants pockets to make sure he had no weapons and then we let him up. He literally ran at full speed out of the store the moment we let him go, leaving all his groceries and everything else. He hauled ass so fast it was comical. My friend and I just looked at each other like “what the fuck?”

The cashier said to us about it all, “I’ve never seen anything like that before. Like, ever.”

Luckily, he didn’t come back with a gun and kill us both.

The cashier thanked us and gave us our groceries and the dude’s groceries he’d just left there for free. I hope she didn’t get into any trouble for that.

Regrets: none.