Did someone suggest the Cracked writers post here? http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-you-suck-at-customer-service-without-realizing-it/
What’s with this crap about faking niceness? Of course no one wants fake niceness. We want real niceness. It’s not hard. Put your own selfish unhappiness about your job and think about the other people, and genuinely want a good experience for them. Yeah, maybe occasionally you’ll have something in your life so horrible that you have to fake it, but 99% of the time, it should be easy to temporarily dismiss your own concerns.
We’re not asking for the moon here. We’re asking for the same thing you do every single day of your life. Well, at least, non-assholes do it.
My rambling thoughts:
I don’t find cashiers to be any more or less rude than the general population. A heck of a lot of people are rude, sadly, regardless of which side of the register they stand. The amount of rudeness is somewhat less, it seems to me, in the retail worker world and in similar cases where someone is paid to be nicer than they might ordinarily be. And don’t we understand this? Aren’t we more upset because these workers are being rude when they are being paid to be friendly? We’re paying for niceness.
(Yet don’t be “false nice” or “droning nice”-- be “genuine nice” as if money has nothing to do with it. Weird.)
It is as if rudeness off-the-clock is somehow more acceptable.
As has been stated here many times, we don’t know what miserable unhappy story may be lurking behind the random people that we meet day to day. A retail worker will probably encounter several hundred customers on a normal 8 hour shift. Many will be nice, some will be rude.
Your cashier may be rude, and he/she may eventually get fired for this rudeness.
Maybe these rude folks are simply jerks. Maybe they’re carrying around pain you can’t even dream of. People are so hard to really read, especially during a 30 second interaction.
I figure its best to just go out and try and be as nice to people as possible, to reward people and businesses that provide non-rude interactions, and to try and be empathetic to those who are rude because we know not the truths of their lives and we will probably not have to encounter that rude person again any time soon— as opposed to those who actually have to live with or work with those rude people full time.
Do you fucking comprehend ANY of what appollonia posted? I mean really read it?
If you want unicorns shitting rainbows and giving you huggles when you go to the store, skip the fucking store - call your mother or you therapist.
ETA - be polite - they’ll be polite back to you.
Or, as biotope said:
Has this ever happened? I mean, actually, ever? That would be over the top even in Disney World.
Yes, McDonalds cashiers should be paid $65,000 a year. All minimum wagers should be paid $65,000. Fuck, I don’t even get paid $65,000. I should be paid $65,000.
YMMV, but my experience is that between 10-15% of people we encounter are at least somewhat rude, many unintentionally so for a whole host of reasons which we may or not deem valid, —but some others are just downright nasty people. Rudeness is also at times subjective. What I find as rude, you may not and vice-versa.
I also think that just about everyone has been rude or unintentionally thoughtless at times. We’re humans. We can all try and be better. I don’t know many of these “non-assholes” who are never ever rude. Actually, I don’t think I know any.
Your cashier could be one of those regularly rude folks. Your cashier in any case will have had to deal with a 10-15% rudeness percentage from their customers all day. Give 'em a break.
Hour 2 of a cashier’s shift is likely to be something like this:
A man wants to pay for his $1.39 bag of Doritos with a $100 bill. When you ask him if you have anything smaller, because it will clean out your till to give him that much change, he tells you that you MUST accept this because IT IS LEGAL TENDER. And he also wants all his small change in nickels. Whatever. The next person smells like they have been bathing in pickle juice while smoking three packs of cigarettes and eating Limburger cheese. The next person refuses to speak to you at all, whether “Hi” or “How are you” or “Cash, credit, or debit?” or “Paper or plastic?” because they expect you to mind-read what they want.
Then your manager comes by and he’s having a great day because he doesn’t have to deal with the masses. He reminds you to ask everyone when they check out if they’d like to donate a dollar to cancer prevention/Alzheimer’s prevention/autism awareness/the local food bank/Mothers Against Drunk Driving/Keep Our Water Clean/the local circus, or whatever it is that month. And it doesn’t end there! You’re supposed to ask each customer if they have a Store Loyalty Card and scan it. If not, ask them if they want one. Remember that the register tracks your scanning totals and keeps track of what percentage of your sales are made with a SLC and if your level drops below, oh, 50%, you get canned.
The next customer tells you they don’t want to donate to the Cause of the Month and they are SICK and TIRED of being harassed every time they come in here!!! The next customer doesn’t have a SLC but has it out in their car, can you just run their phone number? Oh, that number doesn’t work? Try this one, it’s my wife’s cell phone. No? Try her office phone number. No? Try our old phone number. The next person waits until you’ve put all their $150 of groceries in a plastic bag and then tells you that they have their own and they want you to re-bag everything. The cashier next to you goes on lunch break so your line increases. The next person brings up an item that has no UPC code on it and doesn’t even look familiar. Ask a passing clerk if they recognize it. They don’t. Page a manager. The customer becomes irate. It turns out they opened up a package of something, somewhere in the store, and wanted to buy just one granola bar (or whatever). Explain they cannot do this. The manager comes over and tells you to just give it to them for free.
The next customer has a loyalty card, but wants to lecture you on how they’re a stupid contrivance and the only reason they exist is so stores can know all your information, as if you, the cashier, have personally implemented it. The next person pulls a wad of sweaty cash out of her bra. The next person wants to know why yogurt costs $3.29 here and only $2.79 at Frank’s Finer Foods on Sunset Avenue, and why can’t you match the price? No, she doesn’t have a circular or a receipt or anything, she just wants a lower price. The next customer wants to pay by cheque but doesn’t have a driver’s license and doesn’t see any reason you should need a DL# to take the cheque anyway, even after you explain the store policy.
This is not even taking into account what may be happening to the cashier! He or she could have a migraine headache, or kids who are getting D’s and F’s in school, or an ailing parent they must care for, or terrible cramps, or a coworker who is busy ratting her out for some imagined slight, or is simply exhausted from working nine days in a row, or just broke up with her boyfriend, or is mentally calculating how much she will have to pay for her own groceries this month if she picks up another shift at her other job, or his dog has cancer and he loves that dog like a child, or she had a flat on the way to work and the manager chewed her out, or any of ten thousand other reasons why any ordinary person would not be the picture of sunshine.
It would be nice to have a cashier who is nice! But frankly I would be happy with a cashier who is efficient and prompt and doesn’t roll his eyes at me when he sees me buy five Lean Cuisines and a pint of Haagen-Dazs. I don’t really care about whether or not the cashier is going to be “genuinely nice” to me because IT’S A FIVE-MINUTE TRANSACTION AT THE GROCERY STORE.
Caveat: There are, of course, many many many transactions at your average store that are perfectly normal. And people say “hello” and “how are you” and “paper, please” and whatever, or they stare off into space while the cashier checks them out, and then both parties say “thank you” and the world goes on spinning. It’s the 80/20 rule–that 20% of your customers will cause 80% of your problems. Imagine all the customers I have mentioned liberally interspersed with ordinary boring transactions that nobody remembers because they’re perfectly satisfyingly dull on both ends.
I did once have a coworker in a shitty retail place who started literally throwing people’s change at them, then standing there sneering at them while they picked it up. Not people who were being jerks either, just random guys mostly.
I know it’s a crap job, but some people really shouldn’t try and do it.
As other posters have mentioned, I think it’s a combination of factors but I ascribe much of it to employees treated as completely dispensable, valueless cogs, being paid for shit and knowing all too well that they are powerless to improve their current working conditions. I did a 1 1/2 year stint as a customer service rep for a mid-size company.My manager was a clueless uncaring twat who hated his job ,my co-workers were the dictionary definition of dysfunctional and I rapidly realized that nothing I said or did would change the current situation. I conducted myself professionally with the clients-my service record was excellent but I also did the minimum necessary.
Yep,
But that is kinda funny Filbert.
JFC why are retail customers so emotionally needy? A “good experience”? What are your expectations here? Did you get your fucking Marlboro lights and your slushee? Then your experience was as good as it needs to be. Now move on with your life and let the poor cashier move on to the next customer.
Outright rudeness is not acceptable, but there’s something wrong with you (general customer you) if you get bent out of shape because the underpaid, overworked shmoe behind the counter didn’t light up like a fucking christmas tree at your presence. Get some actual friends.
I try to be friendly and nice when I have cashier jobs. It’s impossible to be be perfect all the time. I had two people today at my job get very, very angry with me when I told them “I’ll be right with you. I’m helping this person right now.” You know they went home bitching about how no one would help them, but you can’t ditch the person who asked first because the second person is going to be a dick. I’m sure I wasn’t as chipper immediately after the angry people as before, but I do at least try.
And if, when your item does not scan, you say “Har har har, I guess it’s free then, huh?” you’re totally not getting a chuckle. I heard it 18 times today. And yesterday. And the day before. And will tomorrow.
You bitter, asocial wipes have got to be kidding. The cashier is frequently the only living, breathing representative of a store that you speak to on a typical outing. Being courteous and friendly is in the job description and even if it weren’t, maybe you missed the memo, but we’re social animals, yes, including you unsocialized fuckers who live in tha interwebz. What is your excuse for failing to comprehend “customer service”? Did Miss Manners slap your grandmother? Never allowed to eat at the grown-up table? You are descended from the creeps who let Kitty Genovese bleed in the streets, right? Good God would it kill you uncivilized beasts to make the bomb-blasted, bullet-riddled, culturally divided world a skosh better by smiling and using some goddamned manners?
If you have more sympathy for the person who is outraged because they didn’t get treated like a long-lost friend during their two minute long retail transaction then for the person who is on their feet taking abuse for minimum wage for eight hours, then there is something wrong with your priorities. Maybe you shouldn’t look to people who get shit on more than many to make you feel better about a shitty world.
Great post, especially since you used Kitty Genovese as an example, which is awesome because it never happened. Also calling people fuckers for not being polite is awesome. You are a complete moron.
I don’t expect cashiers to kiss my ass but I expect them to be polite. I expect the same of myself. In my experience the vast majority of cashiers are polite. But then the vast majority of people I run into in other areas are fairly polite as well. It’s just that we tend to remember the assholes.
I wish this wasn’t so accurate.
Yup. Now that I think about it, though, I did work with a woman who did collections who was the politest, most friendly person with her customers that you’d ever want to meet - you don’t need to be a dick to work collections (but it does help for some kinds of collection jobs).
Hah! That made me snort out loud!
OH boo hoo hoo. Life’s tough all over, Myrna. One thing that will go to making life more tolerable for everyone is putting on one’s big gender-neutral-child pants and not acting like a churlish adolescent when one has to interact with other people. Pouting and nursing grievances and a martyr complex has never made a single person happier. Living one’s life with a sense of personal efficacy and refusing to essentialize oneself as a victim of the world has.
I just want cashiers to quit trying to pile the coins on top of the bills when they hand me my change. Gimme the coins first, dammit!!