I was recently in a tire center of a popular wholesale warehouse store. There were a bunch of customers waiting and the one employee was working was dealing with the phone, walk-ins and people waiting for their cars to be ready. The other employees were in the car area working on cars. One of the customers became upset because the employee answered the phone (the work phone, not his cell phone) and the customer started yelling and called the employee a name relating to the employee being overweight. I’m sure this was embarassing for the employee because this was in front of about ten other customers, and the customer yelled it so everyone heard it.

The employee, of course, could not retaliate. He said to the customer that it’s only because he likes his job that he was not going to comment. The customer was handled by another employee so he could leave.

I was wondering if one of the other customers was going to tell the guy to shut the f**k up because his impatient attitude did nothing for the situation.

In a situation like that, would you intervene or would you stay quiet?