The poll question does not refer to military or law-enforcement uniforms, or religious attire; strictly to uniforms civilian and temporal.
I'm midway through doing someone a favor, working at his truck stop over the 4th of July weekend, and last night (Friday night), I went there to work wearing a dark brown pinstriped three piece suit, including vest and tie.
It was a startlement to customers, who said I looked like a London banker, and were wondering why.
I told them I was protesting work uniforms.
I don't wear any uniform, just regular clothes, because even as a little lad, I thought work uniforms, to put it bluntly, sucked.
That was about the time real-estate agencies began enforcing dress-codes in their offices, coercing all employees to wear the same color of blazer, usually red. Some people look good in red, some people look lousy in red; some people look okay in blazers, some people look ridiculous in blazers.
Everybody and anybody looks really stupid in discount-store, convenience-store, dollar-store, truck-stop, &c., &c., &c. uniforms.
It's got to be humilating and degrading for such unfortunate people, as such uniforms appear to have been purposely designed to make them look like clowns.
Anyone who has ever seen a heavy woman working in a convenience store, having to wear a pink polyester-something, knows what I mean.
One suspects employee morale at any place would improve, if employees were allowed to wear their own regular semi-formal clothing, instead of having to walk around looking like a clown. Probably productivity would skyrocket, too.
The closest I ever came to having to wear a uniform was at Dollar General. When I first moved from Omaha up here to the Sandhills of Nebraska, I was a stranger, and besides had to support myself. I worked for Dollar General for several months, unloading trucks, until I learned the lay of the land, got to know some people, and then wandered off in different career directions.
Dollar General had this policy that employees had to (and perhaps still have to) wear tan pants and either a very dark blue or black polyester-double knit sort of shirt.
Tan pants, I had no problem; however, I had considerable difficulty with the idea of wearing one of those stupid shirts. I remedied the situation by getting regular standard usual cotton shirts in the same very dark blue color as that dictated by Dollar General.
This was never "good" enough to suit management, but as good employees were hard to find, I got away with it. Not once did I ever don one of those stupid official Dollar General polyester-double knit crudities.
The last time I worked at the truck stop as a favor--Memorial Day, so a regular employee there could have time with her family--there was a kid who came in, who works at Target in the "big city" (recently demoted from the 9th-largest city in Nebraska to the 10th-largest city).
He wondered why I was not wearing a uniform.
I told him why, using a few words here-and-there that made him blush.
Then he asked, "Well, without a uniform, how would customers know you're an employee?"
To which I replied, "Look, when you walked inside this door and merely looked at me, you immediately knew who was working here. No 'uniform,' no badge, no nothing, to distinguish me from anybody else, but still, you knew who was working here."
