Some customers are beyond help. Take the case of the woman I had the pleasure of meeting a couple of months ago at the truck stop where I work. This dim bulb LEFT her 15 year old son behind and drove 150 MILES before she noticed he wasn’t in the back seat! Meanwhile, we had called the sheriff’s dept., who called the kid’s father (two states away) and made arrangements for the poor kid to spend the night at a motel and catch a Greyhound in the morning. I mean, honestly, how many 15 year olds do you know who would ride in a car for 150 miles and not make a sound? What got me was the fact that, when the woman finally came back, she managed to convince the kid it was HIS fault. He was in there apologizing to her! A little off the subject, I know, but the whole experience made me feel I’d plumbed the depths of idiocy. And my co-worker and I were as polite and helpful as we could possibly be the whole time (what we said about the woman after she left, however, is another story).
For what it’s worth, the St. Paul Pioneer Press ran a series of articles yesterday that pretty much confirm several points made in this thread:
*The labor market in the US (and Minnesota) is pretty tight
*Whenever you have a business that’s staffed largely by people who aren’t working out of economic necessity (i.e. teenagers) and who know if they don’t like one job, they can go down the street and get another job that pays more, customer service sucks, almost by definition.
*Managers who employ these people desperately want to keep them in one place for a while, and consequently allow some of them to get away with being abusive to customers.
I understand that teenagers need to gain a work ethic and job skills, and earn honest money. I’m not arguing with that at all. In fact, let me apologize to every teenage employee whose conversation with a boyfriend/girlfriend was terminated by me because I had a pressing need to know where in the store an item could be found. While I’m in an apologetic mood, let me also apologize for all the times I dared walk into your store on Prom (or homecoming) Night and you were there cuz your asshole boss turned you down for a night off. Aw, hell, let me apologize for your interrupting your drama-filled life, simply for expecting you to behave in a professional manner while we engage in our retail transactions.
Please pardon the sarcasm. I just had a run-in with an eighteen-year-old bank teller who blamed me for her mistake.
Robin