Inspired by matt_mcl and his Please for the love of God do not order the pecan mudslide at DQ thread, I’m inspired to ask: what can customers do/not do at your workplace to make you a happy camper?
I’ll start off. My current job (copy editor) doesn’t involve any actual customer service (although it would be nice if authors wouldn’t go off on big rants every time we changed a comma to conform with our style guide), so I’ll mention a few things from the time I served at the Golden Arches.
If you are a McDonald’s customer, please, for the love of God:
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If it’s lunch rush and there is a huge line filled with 20 or 30 people, do not let your kid order for you. It is really hard to give “service with a smile” when there are 20 angry people in line and your child is standing there with what you think is an endearing look on its face, mumbling, “umm… a cheese… uhh… no, chicken nuggets… uhmmmm…”
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If you have separate orders (you’re ordering for three people, and all three want to pay separately, for example), don’t go through the drive-through. Two orders is hard enough; any more than that is nearly impossible for the drive-through register person to handle. Essentially when this happens, the drive-through person has to write down the amount and then make change in his/her head when the person comes through, because the cash register will only hold the info for one person’s order at a time, so you have to ring the first order through, pretend the person paid, ring the second order through, pretend that person paid, and then ring the third person through. When they actually arrive at the window, you say, “OK, Person 1, that will be $5.18”, and you have to make change from your head because at this point the register is actually displaying Person 3’s order. (I hope that made sense.)
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If it’s lunch rush and, again, there are 20 people standing behind you in line, do not order a sandwich “to be made fresh” just because you know that the sandwiches sitting there on the line are stale. Hello, it’s the LUNCH RUSH, and the sandwiches are moving off the line practically as fast as we can make them. All that your request accomplishes is to make you stand there waiting for five minutes being a nuisance and holding everyone up while you get a sandwich that is microseconds fresher than the one you would have got had you not specified a special order.
I could probably go on, but this will only descend into a Pit-level rant. My time at McDonald’s scarred me, it did.
So anyway: how can people make YOUR job a little easier?