promote to customer

promote to customer (third-person singular simple present promotes to customer, present participle promoting to customer, simple past and past participle promoted to customer)

(informal, euphemistic, transitive) To end someone's employment.
- 2006, Loril M. Gossett, Julian Kilker, “My Job Sucks: Examining Counterinstitutional Web Sites as Locations for Organizational Member Voice, Dissent, and Resistance”, in Management Communication Quarterly, volume 20, number 1, →DOI, page 72:
  In the case of RadioShackSucks.com, many of the site participants reported being former employees (or in the vernacular of the Web site, employees who had been “promoted to customer”.
- 2022 November 17, “"Promoted To Customer," Joke Amazon Employees As Brutal Layoffs Begin”, in NDTV.com‎:

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