I currently reside in Los Angeles, and I must say that as far as the in-store retail sector is concerned, you could not find more dis-interested employees. This is of course not including higher-end retail in which sales reps get commission, where naturally they kiss your ass like anyone else in sales. But say at Best Buy, or the grocery store, Target, or Blockbuster . . . all of the employees might as well be wearing shirts that say “I don’t care” and hats that say “fuck you.”
In stark contrast, when I used to live in Nebraska, I dated a girl who lived in Kearney, at town of about 20,000. You would not beleive the service you would get at Wal-Mart (big deal in Kearney) or Blockbuster. Greeted with enthusiastic but genuine "may I help you?"s and all-round nice friendly people.
In Los Angeles, I’ll almost get anxiety over going into retail stores because I already know the employees are going to be rude and not helpful, and as a result, Amazon.com gets the majority of my retail business.
There’s something to be said for small town service.
When I lived in DC, the service sucked pretty much across the board. You name the type of establishment, the service was incredibly bad. Even bartenders, who I knew from years of going in a place, would never give me a free drink. Now that I’ve moved to a small town, most service is far superior than in DC. And bartenders even give out free drinks.
Of course, the one exception is Subway. In DC, the Subways I went to seemed to be run by Indian families. These folks were on the ball. They made your sandwich quickly and correctly. The Subways here aren’t run by immigrants and I’m not sure if it’s connected, but the people behind the counter are incredibly slow and don’t do a very good job. Still, even with that exception, the service in a small town compared to DC is far superior.
I get good service from small town businesses too. When we lived in Seattle, my mom was always buying furniture and appliances and waiting weeks for delivery and hookup, and getting the run-around when she had to ask for repairs and maintenance.
But here, I can get a plumber or electrician in a couple of hours. Furniture and appliances sometimes get delivered the same day, always by the second day.
Example: We picked out a refrigerator for this house without measuring the height of the cabinets above where the fridge goes. The fridge was too tall. They took it back and brought me another one on the same day. Totally my fault for not measuring.
And delivery is free. Except for Sears, we’ve never had to pay for delivery.
On the other hand, a friend called all over to get price quotes for a furnace for the house he was building. No one called him back. He knew what he wanted but couldn’t get anyone to sell one to him. Weird.
Hmmm, while I can’t say that the one Subway I’ve been to in the DC area was any worse than the non-chain DC restaurants, I must say that overall DC has the best food service service of any community I’ve been to. Then again, my food experience there consists of my eating at the Capital Grille and several dozen places in the Alexandria area, but Alexandria remains the only place I’ve ever left an additional tip on top of the pre-figured 18% large-party gratuity due to the excellent service (as in, frequently but not over-frequently asking if we needed anything, responding when we called them over, and knowing their menu and posible substitutions like the back of their hand.)
While I’ve had DC restaurants I like much less than average (Mango Mike’s, with your faux-caribbean $30 dinners, I’m looking at you,) but I can’t complain about the service.
I’ve definitely noticed this phenomenon. Living in NYC for the last year, this is one of my biggest complaints. Even Portland, which is small but still a city, had much better service across the board than NYC. This goes for retailers, bars, restaurants, everything. I also find that the level of expertise of the average salesperson is much lower here. To be fair, it’s probably party explained by the fact that there are no real jobs in PDX so all of the salespeople have master’s degrees. But I grew up in Colorado, and the same goes for Fort Collins and Boulder.
I see this all the time where I live. We have to badger people to call us back. My best guess is that it’s a competition thing; the area can’t support more than a couple garage door installers/plumbing & heating installers/etc etc so they get verrrry lazy about calling back. Drives us nuts.
