Not individually but as a function of society. These people keep standards high, even the ones who are unreasonable. I don’t like them and I would hate to deal with them but in contrast they make reasonable people appear reasonable. If there were no Karen’s you might get attitude for asking for a clean spoon. So have some appreciation for these horrible people.
This is indeed an unpopular opinion!
But I’ve worked in fast food so I cannot in good conscience agree with it. I have some appreciation for assertive people with legitimate complaints, but “Karen’s” as we know them are not that. They tend towards illegitimate and illogical complaints because they seem to feel entitled to get what they want, sometimes regardless of what they specifically asked for.
Nevertheless it’s a hospitality workers endless burden to deal with these types. I understand the specific merits of what your post outlines, I just don’t like it 🙂
I kind of agree with OP to a degree. I did 10 years of retail (mostly in small local shops where I could help influence how stuff was run) and now run my own business, which is essentially retail. So I’ve experienced 100s of Karens over the years.
Their endless and stupid complaints in a lot of cases have helped me simplify process for the thickos, make information as dumbed down as possible and helped me clarify things that I assumed anyone with half a brain would just know. It’s also given me the opportunity to learn how to deal with completely unreasonable people, which is a really useful skill to have in life.
The Karens help anyone with average and above intelligence see the world through the eyes of people who are completely ignorant, they allow you to see “issues” that no normal person would ever consider and help try and mitigate the Karen complaints before they even begin.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not excusing their behaviour and I get incredibly frustrated every time I have to deal with one, but you can learn lessons from these people in a lot of cases that’ll make your life easier if you have managers/owners who are willing to listen.
There is an enormous gulf between a Karen and someone with standards. Karens don’t just have high standards. They have an overweening sense of entitlement, a disparaging attitude toward anybody not-them, an incredibly racist attitude toward non-white people, and are just generally the kind of sociopath you get when parents never introduced their children to the word “no” while growing up.
How does calling the cops on a child selling lemonade at a lemonade stand “keep standards high”?
How does calling the cops on someone (correctly!) telling her that her dog isn’t supposed to be in a park “keep standards high”? (In this case it seems directed at doing the opposite!)
How does accusing random (“coincidentally” black) people in a hotel lobby of stealing a phone “keep standards high”?
How does calling the cops on a 12-year-old for “sexual assault” when a backpack brushes her “keep standards high”?
Karens don’t do things to keep standards high. They do things to keep themselves high on their own egos.
I work at a restaurant, and I encountered great examples of this today. I was wiping tables, and a woman saw me walk past one table and stopped me to tell me that there’s was debris in the chair to which she was afraid someone would sit in it. That’s sensible!
I had another guest tell other guests that my restaurant was trying to steal from the guests because because a side of chips (crisps for you europeans) cost money. $1.50. A WHOLE $1.50 for an endless supply while you ate in the store!
Which would you call a Karen?
I’m not sure our definitions of a Karen are aligned. I would say they are overly entitled to a point that is unreasonable, there are many other aspects of people you can combine yes. I don’t think all Karen’s are racists though some are. My point wasn’t about them directly keeping standards high. I am pointing out that they keep the heat off those who do act reasonably by being over the top. If the highest standard was a person asking for a (completely) clean spoon, people may wonder what their problem is, that spoon is clean enough.
Karens are bullies. Bless you, if you think bullies " keep standards high".
tbh the use of the term karen is bullying, i found it strange the whole anti bullying thing was going on when the term was popularized.
tbh the use of the term karen is bullying
how?
I personally try not to use the term because there’s actual people named Karen and it’s super fucked up to have your name used like that.
super fucked up
Your bar for things being fucked up is unimaginably low.
I agree. People who were given the name Karen at birth and then lived their entire lives with that as the centre of their identity should just change their names and stop whining
Cuz if I replace your name with “shit” then I’m calling you shit. So instead of shit I will use xuxebiko. Brb going to take a huge stinky xuxebiko. Get it now? It’s grade school bullying.
The karen/ ken meme and term became popular as a way for people of colour, particularly black Americans, to satirise the class-based and racially charged hostility they often face.
They protested against racist and privileged bullying that threatened them with police action, their kids with jail, and low-wage service people with losing their jobs, by poking fun at the bullies and publicly calling out the bullying behaviour. POC victims of bullying didn’t threaten their bullies or become violent towards them or wave a gun in their faces, but just publicly calling their bullies karen/ken is too much for the karens/ kens and their enablers to handle.
People who say calling out bullies is bullying are not against bullying, they’re pro-bullying and are against consequences to bullying.
ps : remember to wipe front to back .
Wrong, it’s a meme with the high bobcut and highlights in some ladies hair.
Karen is a slang term used as an antagonistic female character in memes. “Karen” is generally characterized as an irritating, entitled woman, sometimes as an ex-wife who took custody of “the kids.” In 2020, the term was broadly applied to a swath of white women who had been filmed harassing people of color, including dialing the emergency services on them for no criminal reason.
source : https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/karen
Ffs, at least know the meme you’re talking about.
Does it change the fact it’s bullying?
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually ceased or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance
Wikipedia
the karen meme and term became popular as a way for people of colour, particularly black Americans, to satirise the class-based and racially charged hostility they often face.
Let’s see how this will be spun to show poc victims of racial and class hostility as racist and hostile to racist bullies.
People who say calling out bullies is bullying are not against bullying, they’re pro-bullying and are against consequences to bullying ,
In this case, by their racist and privileged bullying karens threaten people with police, kids with jail, and low-wage service people with losing their jobs, but just publicly calling them karen is too much for the karens and their enablers to handle? This is some z-grade horse manure.
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“Countless innocent customer service workers suffer for it, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”
If the pandemic taught us anything, which it didn’t, it’s that our essential workers are our most valuable members of society and should be treated accordingly
Do they? Have they ever? Have you ever even worked any service position?
If you had I doubt you would find them good for anything but shitty tips, racial slurs, outrageous demands, and the whole heard belief that the entire world revolves around themselves.
This is more of a dumb opinion than an unpopular one, but it’s also very unpopular.
“without fire, we wouldn’t know what hot is”
“without cancer, we wouldn’t realize how great being cancer free was”
“without Nazis, we wouldn’t realize how shitty Nazis are”
“without wage slavery, we wouldn’t realize how great pulling up our bootstraps is”
Swing and a miss my guy, swing and a miss.
My post is about Karens serving a function not about appreciating people who aren’t Karens. I’m more saying they are a bit like mosquitoes. It’s not about being able to appreciate the absence of mosquitoes but the function they are serving in the bigger picture.
What function do mosquitoes serve?
Things eat them and then other insects get to live because they ate mosquitoes instead
Yeah, but there are non mosquito things that fill that role as well, so it’s not unique to mosquitoes.
Also, the existence of mosquitos may be preventing another non-mosquito insect from filling its space in the ecosystem.
So not only are the “benefits” of mosquitoes redundant, they add far more negative than positive.
Mosquitoes suck, but aren’t entirely without value - that being said their only value isn’t unique to mosquitoes which negates nearly all of their value. But they’re still more valuable than Karen’s so it continues to be a losing argument
You might be taking the mosquito thing a little too literally. You can’t lift a naturally balanced ecosystem that’s evolved over millions of years and overlay it over the dynamics a coffee shop. I was simply trying to illustrate that the degrees of acceptable standards may have been lower without an extra buffer the keep legitimately fussy people from filling the role of a Karen. Some of these legitimately fussy people would naturally feel they are being reasonable and weren’t being treated with respect and would then appear to be overly entitled. We have already lived with Karens so the lessons have already been learned. Removing them now and saying “see standards haven’t dropped” isn’t an accurate comparison to living in a timeline where Karens never existed in the first place.
Sometimes someone needs to be “the Karen.” My neighbor’s dog barked all the time until 3am. I am too anti confrontational to do anything or say anything. But it really sucked. Someone kept confronting them, complaining, and talking to other neighbors about it, called the animal control etc. Shit eventually stopped. I couldn’t be bothered. But thankful for that person.
If everyone is “cool” and minds their own business all the time, some people take advantage and assume their shitty behavior is ok.
That same person who called about the dog, also got the super ugly RV that was taking up all the space on our tiny street with no parking towed. And it never came back.
Thanks “Karen.”
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I don’t know how I live with myself.
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No you.
I don’t want people to be kept in check because they fear being slapped, and I don’t believe most people become their better selves through experiencing or fearing pain. So no, I don’t see Karens as presenting a solution to the problem of managing poor behavior.
That being said, what I do think is a problem for the Karen term is that insults are invariably misused in ways that hurt innocent parties. The women who are inconveniently or inarticulately but legitimately angry have reason to fear being mislabeled by those who want to shove them into a mental box and out of sight.
Karens aren’t “picky rude people”. They’re unreasonable and cannot be pleased.
for a moment there i thought you were referring to the Karen population of northern Thailand. great post, this is indeed an unpopular opinion.
And without dumbasses we wouldn’t appreciate people with IQs higher then single digits I guess.
Counterpoint: Karens intrinsically harm all industries they touch. By creating reactive policies and jaded service workers, they lower the service quality for everyone. Nobody that’s emotionally drained from their soul crushing tantrums can now put in the work to provide the level of service they normally would want to. Instead they foster a hostile environment that makes fulfillment impossible. They’re actually the reason you might get an attitude for asking for a clean spoon. They provide no benefit.
Nope. Nazis may make me seem reasonable by comparison. While I like seeming reasonable, I don’t want to thank fucking nazis for it. Same logic.
This is a good point. I do wonder if they actually do keep the far left from going off the deep end though. I would like to think a world without nazis would be better in ever way but I can’t help but get the feeling there’d be some monkey paw shit going on.
Can’t we leave this shit on reddit?
First, it isn’t Karen’s, it’s karens.
Second, it’s a lazy and misogynist way to shoehorn women into a box if they dare speak out. You can just say over entitled and say the same thing without making it some kind of weak-ass stereotype that then gets turned into the same thing as bitch used to be used for
It was a shitty joke to begin with, and it has gone too damn long.
I don’t appreciate them but they do make us look better.
