Just get another job (on the service sector)

The BBQ Pit
61

And if you happen to be homeless, just get a house!

Not to say that I disagree with the fact that we have a pretty strong culture of victim mentality, because that much is clear, but this goes both ways. Waited in line for too long because the storeowners are cheap? Blame the cashier and be rude. And so the cycle merrily continues.

Also, perhaps you can help me here. Why is it so hard for some of you folks to distinguish between an offered explanation for poor customer service and the notion that I am somehow defending it or condoning it?

62

Thanks for the standard series of conservative mumbo-jumbo catchphrases. I’m sure they’ll add much to the discussion.

and you get the situation the OP seems to be defending (yes, I read the parts about not defending it but explaining it, but what is the poiint of wanting to explain it if not to defend it?).

Erm, to help create a better intellectual understanding of it among others who seem to lack it, so a better solution can be arrived at within the discussion. A lot of criminologists study criminals, not to make crime more acceptable, but to prevent it. Thought is not the enemy you seem to think it is.

**The bottom line is your job is to serve the customer, if you can’t do that properly, whether it is because you feel slighted on payday or because your girlfriend was sleeping with your brother, then that is your problem and not the customers and not the people who pay you. Your excuses are meaningless to me. Don’t liek your job, then quit. Can’t quit? then suck it up and be fucking responsible. **

The central point of the OP was that this sort of bluster is totally useless, absent any attempt to deal with the underlying realities.

63

Maybe because you use strained analogies like homeless people, seemingly implying that simply not being rude is somehow sooooooooo difficult that it can be compared to a homeless person getting a house. You keep loudly protesting that you aren’t defending bad service, yet you seem to keep doing it. YOU are the one who can’t seem to distinguish the two concepts. Perhaps we have different definitions of “defend” and “condone”. You know, simply denying it doesn’t prove you aren’t doing it.

And exactly who was blaming the cashier for the line being too long? I suspect you’re just making up strawman positions to argue against.

64

but just thnik how much of a help you’ve been to all these people… besides… yourself… of course… all these innocent, helpless people who call you up or see you on a daily basis… personally, one way or the other I will be out of a “typica;” customer serive roll in about a week… I-can’t-fucking-wait. My bosses watch everything I do… have no balls to tell me about it and have no idea what I’m alctually doing here… The only thing any of these people understand is my foot and their ass… that’s it… Amercia wtf would you do with out it?

65

I think I understand what Binarydrone is saying.

I don’t think it is ever right to be rude, but rudeness is a consequence of the current system.

Think of it this way - if having rude, untrained, disrespected employees was harmful to these big companies, then they would pay more to hire and train courteous people.

But they don’t.

Having rude employees is considered worth it for the money saved.

Not training the employees is considered worth it for the money saved.

Letting the employees be abused and disrespected is considered worth it for the money saved.

This is hardly a surprise. It’s not like the employers are saying “let’s save money by not training our employees” and then exclaiming “MY GOD! Our employees aren’t trained!” Or “let’s save money by paying minimum wage, because poor customer service won’t really hurt our business” and then “MY GOD! We have poor customer service!”

No, they are getting exactly what they expect, and exactly what they pay for. Their system is working exactly as intended.

So if you find that an employee at Walmart is less than enthusiastic about his job, you should remember that that is exactly the service Walmart is intending to provide. You are getting exactly the service that the system is designed to give you, and that Walmart has decided is the optimum service for you to receive.

And again, I don’t think rudeness is justified. But, for example, if McDonalds decided to save money by knowingly serving cheaper but worse tasting food, would you expect the food itself to decide to taste better? Probably not, yet in the case of customer service customers invariably expect a free upgrade. Nope. You get what you pay for.

66

blowero. Once again, here you are taking swipes at me, and contributing nothing to the conversation. Do you have anything to say about this issue at all, or do you just feel adversarial?

You think that I am defending bad service. Fine, whatever. You still have offered nothing in the way of rebutting my explanations (or defense of, as you seem to use the terms interchangeably) for it. Way to go, champ.

67

Because you’re telling people to “lay off” the customer service people. That’s like watching a two year old pull a cat’s tail and saying “well, I don’t condone it, but I know why she’s doing it” and not doing a damn thing to dicipline her. Sounds like justification to me.

I understand how you can explain something without condoning it, much like you can explain why there is such a large percentage of black mails in our jail system without condoning the black men that do belong there, it’s just in this context it doesn’t really work.

Thanks for commenting on my sites, by the way.

68

No need to get in a snit about that. I am actually still reading through them and do appreciate the effort that you put in to finding them. I must admit that so far I am a little uncomfortable with some of the explanations that are being offered (in that, at least in the first one, it seems to be at odds with some of my Liberal sentiments), but so far am not finding huge holes in the logic.

In looking over the second cite, I am not 100% how relevant the decline of civility in England is to customer service in the USA, as there seems to be a stronger element of class conflict than one would expect here.

I am not sure that I buy your whole “pulling the cat’s tail” analogy, though. To me it is more like having a long tailed cat is a room full of rocking chairs, putting a child in the room that is so tired that he must sit down and then acting surprised when the cat’s tail is hurt.

69

Your welcome, of course, one man’s “standard series of conservative mumbo-jumbo catchphrases” is another man’s reasonable explanation, I suppose.

Thanks for the standard series of holier-than-thou intellecutal mumbo-jumbo catchphrases. I’m sure they’ll add much to the discussion.

Of course, it is nonsense, this is the Pit, if he wanted to intellectually discuss the rationale behind poor customer service it would have been in Great Debates.

And it is also ironic, I give a different viewpoint, that I would have supposed would add to the intellectual debate you hold so highly. Yet, your first reply is that my my take on the situation is ‘mumbo-jumbo’ and nothing more than ‘conservative catch-phrases’. Yes, that is a highly intellectual rebuttal to my comment. It hardly seems to be me who is trying to put the kibosh on thought here.

Well, I gave my opinion, the underlying reality is not that people aren’t paid enough, it is that people are allowed excuses, such as “I’m not paid enough to do my job competently”. It isn’t bluster, it is a viewpoint that you don’t like, apparently

70

Nightime hit the nail on the head.

Companies know exactly what they are doing. That is why I started my “Companies That Deserve To Go Bankrupt” thread. because those companies are so insidious it makes me ill.

71

Not so fast there. Actually, I do want to have an intellectual discussion about the reasons that customer service is on the decline. The reason that I chose to put the OP in the Pit was because I was directly (and at least on some levels, negatively) commenting on the posts or opinions of others members. Thus, as this might loosely be interpreted as a flame, I chose the Pit (trying to maintain a higher tone and all that).

So, in that spirit, I invite you to expand on the way that your opinion differs from mine. You seem to be saying that, while you agree that low wages are a contributing factor in bad service, there really is no excuse for bad service and that the CSR was hired to serve the customer and should just suck it up or leave if they don’t like it.

I further interpret the thrust of your post to be saying that all of this is just excused put forth by the folks that are succumbing to the culture of victim hood.

My position is that because we are not paying our laborers in the service sector a living wage, and because we are supporting companies that treat them as disposable commodities, that bad service is the inevitable result. To be sure, one might argue that on an individual level the workers should behave better, but I am at least partially convinced that this is asking too much of them. I do not think that it is reasonable to expect folks to exist in what amounts to an abusive environment and respond with civility. Especially if there really seems to be no negative consequence to rude behavior, nor rewards for civil behavior.

Moreover, I am more than a little intrigued by the way that these discussions always seem to come back to a cry for the service sector laborer to suck it up and do better. Rude customers and uncaring and incompetent management seem to be factors that we are all to happy to gloss over and dismiss. Perhaps that is at the heart of what I mean when I call for folks to lay off the CRS. A call for better directed anger.

72

I in no way condone rude customers or incompetent management. But being paid whatever wage is not in and of itself an excuse, is all I am saying.

You mention a living wage and I would simply answer is: what entitles anyone to be paid a living wage? This is the crux of my argument. This sense of entitlement and then when that entitlement is not granted the decision to play victim and do a half-assed job.

Don’t get me wrong, I completely buy what you are saying in that low wages are an explanation, and all I am saying is that the solution (if there is one) is not to shower people with better wages, but for people to not be allowed to use that excuse.

Even in the face of rude customers there is a right and wrong way to act. IN the face of ignorant customers there is a way to act. If management is a problem then there is a way to deal with it. None of ose ways equate to poor customer service. If I get poor customer service I will complain about it, I don’t care what their rationale is, and I won’t think twice about it.

73

You guys are partially right. You do get what you pay for. But lets not pretend all of a sudden your work ethic would improve if all of a sudden your salary doubled. $5 an hour employees are not rude or indiferent because they are making $5 an hour. They are rude an indiferent because the only people who will work for $5 an hour are the dregs of the labor pool - students in part-time/after school jobs, high school and college dropouts or neverbeens, non-english speaking foreigners. People who either know they won’t be at this job more than a few months or through circumstance are now forced into these types of jobs and are probably bitter - basically people who don’t give a shit. They also have the luxury of finding a similar job even if they get fired because the bar is so low.

There is no excuse for bad service but I am a realist. I understand that when I go to Sears, I am not going to receive the same level of service as a Nordstroms.

What I don’t understand the rationale that thinks it’s ok to do your nails, watch Moesha on the closed-circuit video and talk on the phone with your boyfriend while attending to customers. Please explain to me the IT Help Desk attitude of it being ok to treat the users like morons because they don’t know as much about the PC as you do and you think you should be working at Microsoft.

And I noticed no one answered my question - If the job was beneath you, why did you accept it in the first place?

74

I have to also agree with nightime. His assessment is dead on IMO.

All I can say is been there, done that. My company pays quite well and it’s reflected in the quality of the customer service (ok, so it’s not perfect, no industry is). I used to work for a much lower paying company (ironically with stricter dress codes etc) who did not treat their agents well and it certainly showed.

75

I guess that my response to that is that if you are entitled to good service because you are exchanging currency for it than I and entitled to a living wage because I am exchanging my labor for it. You cannot have it both ways and claim to be living in a just society. I would also argue that is a laborer is doing a half-assed job that another way to look at it is that they are simply taking the only direct action available to them to make up for the difference between the value of their labor and what they are being compensated for it. That, in essence, they are empowering themselves and actively fighting against being a victim.

So, fine, complain to management when you receive bad service. This is, of course, your right. What I would add, however, is that I would be gratified to see all of the folks that are complaining to local management about bad service also take other customers to task for being rude, and writing to corporate headquarters when they see abusive management etc.

76

Dude, your OP was already adversarial. I just don’t get you - you want to get in your little digs on other people, then cry foul when they respond. I wasn’t even involved in the threads that you linked to, but your self-righteous attitute towards others really sticks in my craw. I mean, for Christ’s sake, a woman buys tampons and the clerk deliberately humiliates her; then you’ve got the gonads to link to her thread and suggest that she has no right to complain about it. Sorry, but that’s just bullshit.

But it doesn’t stop there, no sir. When several people call you on it, you suddenly switch tack and claim: “Gosh, I was just trying to foster an intellectual debate on the economic causes of bad service”. GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK. Octopus nailed it - if you wanted to do that, you would have posted in GD. You just want to spew venom at people.

But here’s where it gets good: Not only do you continue to castigate those who dare complain (They’re not even complaining to the clerk in question, just telling their friends about it), but then you have the audacity to get all bent out of shape at other people in this thread for not sticking to the reasonable discourse model that you failed to set up in the first place, all the while vehemently denying that you have done so.

When are you going to get this? I’m not debating your theory as to the economic causes of rude service. You have provided nothing to debate. The data you provided is for ALL OCCUPATIONS; it’s useless to determine what the trend has been in the service sector alone, which is what your topic is about. I’m not saying you’re wrong; in fact I suspect that you are right about that one issue. The thing is, there’s no debate here; you have provided nothing of substance to debate, and put it in the wrong forum to boot. This thread is ill-conceived, and nothing more that an excuse for you to put people down. If you continue to tell people they have no right to complain, they will continue to argue as to why they DO have a right to complain. It’s not that difficult a concept.

I suggest you start over in Great Debates, get some data that actually supports your premise, and knock off the invective. Then you might have something.

77

msmith537, you sorta answered your own question. People take these jobs because the bar is so low.

I don’t think the issue is whether it’s ok to be rude (it never should be) but how to understand the issue of why being rude is accepted by both CSRs and customers. No, paying them more isn’t going to magically make them nicer but if they paid enough, maybe career minded folks might want to get said jobs? I’m a career CSR and I have to care how well I do my job because I know my bonus is going to be reflected in my performance. I know my next raise is going to be tied directly into how well I do my job. And career level jobs in my market are not easy to find.

When I used to work at Mr Lube (aka jiffy lube in the states) I was making min-wage (or close to) and had no prospect of raises or bonuses. I did my job at a mediocre level because there was no point of doing better. That being said I was still never rude, but don’t expect me to run out and greet you if there’s 4 feet of snow on the ground in my t-shirt.

Also, you can blame the company if you see their workers watching TV and ignoring their customers, or chatting on the phone (but not during their breaks etc) because it’s the company’s job of monitoring their worker’s performance. Blaming the underpaid co-workers isn’t fair. One bad apple and all that…

78

blowero, What I was linking to was a specific post in that thread that stated :

Is that not what comes up when you click on the link, because I was pretty careful with my coding (it should not bring up the start of the thread). Can you not see how the attitude in that post is problematic?

I think that I have been pretty clear as to why this is in the Pit, and the difference that I see between justifying a behavior as opposed to understanding it. All of my posts have sought to clarify my position when asked to. I am not sure where you get that I am castigating people or how I failed to set up a reasonable discourse model as that was far from my intent.

I get that I am not going to win with you but, from the heart, it was not my intent to be self-righteous or hypocritical, as you seem to think.

79

When you put it like that, it sounds quite reasonable. For the record, I was referring to the other linked thread, but I too disagree with Duderdude2’s assessment. I don’t think anyone should have to expect to get treated like shit. But the point we are making here is that it STILL doesn’t justify not doing your job. You work at McDonald’s and the shift manager yelled at you? Sorry, but you don’t get to take it out on the innocent customer who didn’t do anything to you. He’s just trying to buy a hamburger. And no, we don’t have to “lay off” ; If you took out your frustrations on the wrong person, you deserve to be criticized for it.

80

Apologies in advance for duplication of points previously express or alluded to.

I hate crappy service! I’ve had menial jobs, positions that didn’t challenge me mentally, nasty supervisors, and nearly every other thing that comes out of the Big Bag of Excuses for Not Treating Others as You’d Like to be Treated. Yet, with little exception I treated the customer well, even when they were being a shit.

It’s not the customer’s fault that I chose to work at this place. I may be earnestly seeking to get out the door, but until I do, I will be pleasant. Whatever opportunities did not bestow themselves upon me, it’s not the customer’s fault.

While beyond dispute that some customers are self-absorbed piles of ambulatory excrement, I smile and try to influence them via my attitude. It has never struck me as a good plan to lower my demeanor to that of those who would enter the establishment with a crappy attitude. If anything, I’d like to send you on your way happier, and failing that, send you on your way.

People can complain about anything they’d like, and that is their choice. People can also make the choice to rise above, and offer something they’re not getting, be it a smile, a thank you, a moment of genuine concern and helpfulness. It’s not all about what goes in your wallet, it’s somewhat to do what is inside of you before you arrive. IMHO that is the concept which was lost somewhere over the last 20 years.

Cutting grass, pumping gas, selling newspapers, drying cars at the carwash, answering phones and carrying messages. Fixing radios, selling electronics, photo lab assistant, emergency room technician-not one of those positions paid over $10 per hour, yet I still did my darndest to make the customer experience a pleasant one, because that was my job.

Perhaps this is an antiquated mindset, but I still believe that someone who shows attention and diligence together with a positive attitude towards their task will be noticed and rewarded.
Try it for 6 months, and then come back to tell me I’m wrong, would you?