In today's Friday Know-It-All, Content Creator Tony introduces us to Angry Retail Guy Scott Seiss.

Even if you don’t know the name Scott Seiss, you probably know who he is if you’ve spent any time scrolling through videos on social media. He’s rarely outside of his green-screen location, which puts him in an empty retail purgatory. In these videos, Seiss gets to say everything a cashier who hears “I guess it must be free” a dozen times per day wants to say.

“I’m telling all my friends not to shop here,” he says, reciting a common retail customer’s threat. You not only just lost their business, but their social circle’s. It’s the ultimate trump card, but Seiss is unfazed.

“Tell them,” he says as ominous piano music drops. “You think I want five other yous running around the stores? Have them call me, I’ll tell them.”

This week we ran a question about Seiss’ autobiographical character “Angry Retail Guy,” whose videos caught viral fame during the retail-worker perfect storm of 2020 and still are popular today. The character resonates because most people in retail are paid to deal with these annoyances without being allowed to be outwardly annoyed. If you’re an Angry Retail Guy or Gal or Non-Binary Pal, you get fired (trust me!), so you have to suppress your emotions to get through the day. That act of psychic sleight of hand can itself be every bit as taxing as staying on your feet or stocking shelves for eight hours.

There’s a phrase for that part of a job: Emotional labor. You could read a more detailed definition, or you can hear it described through “Angry Retail Guy” Speak: “I fake laugh at this job so much I forget how my real one sounds!” This aspect of work makes Seiss a virtual version of Mother Jones, going on an emotional strike for us.

In doing so, Seiss turned hating his job into (one of) his jobs, which is a career arc as interesting as it is inspiring. Seiss’ experiences did draw on a real background of awful jobs, highlighted by a three-year stint working the phones as an IKEA customer service representative. His service on the front lines of customer interaction includes a vast array of crappy jobs, saying in an interview with Jacobin Magazine that the worst one was a two-week stint in the not-too-exciting world of pizza delivery.

“You had to wear black pants, and it’d be like 100 degrees, and you’re delivering a pizza in this long, heavy clothing,” he told Jacobin’s Eileen Jones. The trauma of the job lasted far beyond the two weeks of working the gig. “My car smelled like marinara sauce for a whole summer.”

Turning workplace frustrations into comedy isn’t anything new. There’s “Office Space,” 16 versions of “The Office,” the retail-focused “Superstore,” and — for the folks who prefer their comedy humor-free — “Dilbert.” What Angry Retail Guy brings to the table is a lack of distance from those days. Traditionally, by the time someone blows up in entertainment, their days of waiting tables and ringing up customers are long gone.

The rants of “Angry Retail Guy” radiate a visceral frustration that only comes with doing these jobs. It’s easy to look at Seiss and go, “That’s me. He gets us.”

Of course, this feeling isn’t indicative of every retail worker’s feelings, as per IKEA’s official statement on the Angry Retail Guy series: “We are aware of Scott Seiss’s videos and simply want to clarify that Scott is not a current employee of IKEA and does not speak for IKEA or our co-workers.”

Not officially, anyway.

“People are overworked, underpaid, and the jobs are literally asking too much of people,” Seiss told Jacobin. “You just get treated like [expletive] at work and it feels bad and you don’t get paid much and that’s just how it is and how it’s always been.”

It’s probably not a coincidence that the videos blew up as the lockdown from the pandemic was at its height… but not if you worked in customer service. People who worked in grocery stores and restaurants were on the front lines of making society work, and saw a worldwide increase in abuse and violence. We needed a Lorax to speak for the humble retail cashier and delivery driver.

“All I know is I want workers to be paid more and work less,” Seiss declared to Jacobin.

Seiss is out of the retail game now, touring as a comedian and even getting a part in 2021’s “Cocaine Bear.” What do you need to know before seeing it? “Nothing,” Seiss informs you, backed by his signature piano bit. “If you’ve ever heard the words ‘cocaine’ or ‘bear’ before, you’re completely up to speed.” We have not yet verified whether his claim of it being “Conservatively, one billion times better than ‘Citizen Kane,’” but it should be noted that a look at the IMDB page of Orson Welles’ 1941 classic lists zero chemically altered bears in its cast (Editor Sophie, please fact-check this).