More than 1.4 million people are employed in Australian retail and fast food businesses. Sadly, it’s not always a happy or safe place to work.

A union survey of more than 4600 frontline workers found 87 per cent had experienced customer verbal abuse in 2023 – consistent since 2016.

But incidents have become more frequent: In 2023, 76 per cent of those who’d been abused experienced it daily, weekly or monthly, compared with 54 per cent just two years earlier.

Retailers have spent millions on beefed-up staff security measures, including body-worn cameras.

The lead-up to Christmas is a notoriously bad time for customer violence and abuse against workers. On Thursday, a large collective of retail groups launched a national “Be Kind in Retail” campaign, urging shoppers to be compassionate and patient over Christmas.

But there is one ultra-cheap solution, trialled since 2020, which our three-part study has confirmed seems to significantly reduce customers’ intention to verbally abuse workers.

In late 2017, the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association union launched its “No One Deserves a Serve” campaign to reduce abuse of frontline staff.

Later, as part of this initiative, the union bought 500,000 adhesive plastic “under badges”, which were handed out for free from early 2020 to retail staff to stick to existing name badges.

An under badge is a small personal identifier attached below a name tag that can convey a short humanising message in a few words. Examples include “I’m a mother” or “I’m a son”.

The badges were trialled........

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