It’s always great when people who aren’t trying to change things explain to us (vegans, environmentalists, feminists etc.) that we do not protest the right way ™ and that we don’t have the correct targets/methods.

Usually this is a byproduct of people not wanting to be bothered changing anything and pointing the finger towards other actors:

While I agree that only going after end-of-chain customers is unlikely to create at-scale change in the meat rape, torture and murder industry, it still has some effects.
Also these actions are a good way to build a community sentiment for the people included and incrementally go after other types of action.
For example, in the Extinction Rebellion movement, lots of activists started with legal protests, then illegal protests and road blocking and eventually a few of them built up to direct action against carbon-emitting industrial sites.
You also have to understand that the risk level is not the same when you go after customers and when you go after the industries.

Retail workers aren’t paid enough to deal with some self important asshole who thinks that screaming at people through a megaphone is their right.

They aren’t paid enough, period. I only hope that the activists only went after the customers and not the workers (which seems to be the case here, otherwise the article would probably have mentionned it).

Protest the horrible meat industry by making their lives hell, don’t go after the consumer go after the source ffs, but that would mean actually putting in effort to your cause, which these megaphone blasting people don’t want to do.

See higher. Also, as a general principle, fuck your opinion of what it means to put effort in a cause. Being in a place where most people dislike/hate your cause in a world where other activists have been assaulted and injured by assholes is already a fucking effort.

These people are why us non vegans have an issue with vegans, most of you are chill people enjoying your life, but these pricks make you lot look insane and then you defend them because you agree with their message, but while you defend their message, you also defend their actions!

Nah, be honest at some point.
We vegans are not chill people enjoying out lives, we are decent people trying to function in a dystopian world where the industrial mass murder of hundreds of billions of sentient beings every year is considered normal in the name of culture and/or pleasure.
The root of non-vegan opposition is the same as the root of big-car-lovers and masculinists opposition: acknowledging the truth would be too hard because it would mean acknowledging how much suffering you have caused. And it’s not entirely your fault, we’ve all been raised the same way, made to consider this was normal.
So any movement asking you to reconsider puts your brain in a very uncomfortable position, to which you react with rejection. And because no one wants to look like an asshole, you pick the group you deem most extreme and play the “I have no issue with vegans, but these vegans are a bit much and do a disservice to the cause” card - which is universally used to oppose societal progress whatever the topic.

Start holding these people accountable for making the rest of you look bad, I know most of you vegans are good people, you don’t deserve to be made to look like idiots.

Once again, thanks a lot for sharing your wisdom about a movement you are not part of. We all were really waiting for your input to decide how to treat our allies.

Edits: spelling