Oh my God, I can’t believe you remember that! Yes, it was!
I must have missed something, Lissa. Do you have a link to your experiences with Boss from Hell? And how did she get away with it?
I doubt if I’d be able to find the original thread in whihc I posted the story, but to make a long story short, a woman went batshit in my line when I was a cashier and threw a bag of donuts at me because I accidently rang up the customer behind her first.
She ran up and down the row of register screaming like she’d been set on fire-- she was obviously very disturbed. Not in the sense of, “Man, that bitch is crazy,” but seriously mentally ill. She ran back to my register and demanded I give back her donuts. When I told her they’d been smashed by the impact, she accused me of eating them.
My boss took me back to the employee lounge, and screamed at me. Luckily (well, maybe not-- perhaps it would have been better if I had been fired) the security guys had filmed the whole thing and vouched for me that I hadn’t done anything wrong.
My boss was adamant that it was still my fault-- the customer had left angry, end of story.
She also wrote me up once because a customer claimed that I had cussed at her kids, even though I had two other employee witnesses to the fact that I had not.
They wouldn’t let us have breaks until one of the girls threatened to sue. They scheduled me to work during school hours. They would actually pull up the legs of our pants to check to see that our socks were of an approved color. They yelled at employees in front of other staff and customers, and did various other little things which, if I relayed them here, would sound silly, but were quite humilating to the people who had to endure them on a daily basis.
It’s bad enough when customers are rude, but when the management is going out of their way to make their employees feel like shit, the job becomes almost unendurable.
So, needless to say, when I see a cashier who looks glum, or grumpy, or hell even downright snappish, I remember how I felt and don’t hold it against them.
I do try to be pleasant to cashiers because I know they have a shit job. I smile at them, speak nicely to them, and generally try to make our interaction a little more pleasant for both of us. But sometimes it just don’t work. Interaction requires an actual response from the cashier, you see.
We just moved and I’m unable to find a lot of small things that are easier to just buy replacements for than keep hunting for. So the other day I went to three different grocery stores looking for one $1.50 item.
First store: Didn’t have it, got a couple other things, pleasant cashier.
Second store: Didn’t have it, got a couple other things. Cashier behind register totally ignored me. Another cashier walked over and rang up my purchase but literally never made eye contact with me, held a conversation with first cashier the entire time. Threw my things in a bag on a bag rack facing away from me across the counter and turned her back on me. I asked, “Is that my bag?” No response. I finally had to VERY awkwardly lean over the counter and try to retrieve my bag from the rack, while she continued to ignore me. So I VERY loudly thanked her for handing me my bag, and left the store, never to return.
Third store: It was 5:30 p.m. and everyone getting off work was stopping by for a few things. The store had 15 checkout counters across the front of the store. All but one checkout counter was staffed. Lines were max two deep. The cashiers were cheerful and courteous because they weren’t stressed out of their minds. Found item, bought several more, and guess who’ll be getting my grocery business from this day forward?
It’s really not so hard.
I don’t know if it’s because I live in Canada, where we are supposedly excruciatingly polite, or because I’m polite myself, but I very rarely have bad customer service. I say please and thank you and smile at service workers, and rarely get anything but a smile in return.
I would say give it the ol’ college try - try being polite (but still maintaining your boundaries - cashiers not acknowledging me is not acceptable), and see what kind of response you get.
Here’s the post.. I love the manager claiming “We’ve lost a customer!” Like it was a tragedy in this case. I also feel very sorry for that woman’s son, who had to deal with her all the time.
You know, it’s funny. I don’t think I’ve ever had poor customer service in a face to face transaction (phone’s a different story). The reason why it’s funny is I hate the whole concept of “customer service”. As in “I deserve service!” Am I the only person on the planet who goes to the grocery store for, well, groceries? I don’t expect service. I expect food. My sole and only requirement of the cashier is that she scan my items and accept my payment. She’s a cashier. Her job is to take my money in return for my food. We can do this transaction in total silence. What’s the big deal?
On the other hand, I’m a friendly person. I love people. I love meeting them and talking to them. I like saying hello or good morning. I’ll make chit chat. If the cashier smiles and responds to me, I want it to be because she’s actually smiling at me, not because her boss told her to say “Have a nice day” to everyone. Not because I’m “paying her” to be nice to me. Creeps me out, that does.
I think it’s entirely a problem of management. As others have said, expecting people to be perky and friendly when their boss treats them like shit is too much to ask. I don’t think that enthusiasm and friendliness can be faked.
We’ve gotten to the point where management is on a different planet. “The Customer is Always Right,” might be the worst retail philosophy ever. Because all the assholes out there have gotten it in their heads that simply because they’re The Customer, they have the right to behave like a complete jackass, and they get rewarded for it! Management caves. The other half of that philosophy is the unspoken, “The Employee is Always Wrong.”
I also find, for what it’s worth, going through one’s life without a sense of entitlement, or and rigid ideas of “how it should be” really makes everything smoother, and life so much more pleasant. For example, in the OP’s case I would have said (with no sarcasm, snark, or malice), " 'Scuse me girls, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’m in huge rush to get home before my kids start chewing the sofa. Could you ring me up real quick?" 99 times out of a 100, that solves the problem. No, no one learned a lesson. No, you didn’t get “proper service”. You didn’t get to be right. But you got your groceries, and faster than snark would have. I look for the quickest means to my desired end result (in this case, dinner). I’ve seen this concept in hundreds of debates (the ebonics one pops right to mind). Most people would rather be right and/or retain the moral high ground than actually solving the particular problem at hand.
I can’t agree more. I’m a manager in customer service (call center, not retail) and I flat out tell my employees the following:
“You know the saying “The Customer is Always Right”? Well, we all know that the customer isn’t always right. The customer can be wrong, and often is wrong. The customer can also be mean, obscene, insulting, and cruel. The point is, though, that you can’t be any of those things. What you want to do is stay calm and friendly so that you can get the call overwith. Don’t bother arguing with them. Just calmly explain the situation, do as much as you can do, and move on.”
Fortunately, we’re also allowed a lot of slack in what agents are empowered to do for customers. We also allow them to hang up if the customer becomes really awful (personally insulting, profanity, obscene, etc.) because nobody should have to put up with that.
Customers have a sense of entitlement. They feel that because they’re customers that we should do anything that they ask. This is stupid. We will do what you ask up to a point that it’s reasonable and we’re not taking a major financial loss, because we want you as a customer. I have had a customer ask me to get in my own, personal car and drive him a package (and he was 1,000 miles away) or he would go to my boss and try to get me fired. I’ve had customers demand that I fire an employee that they didn’t like (they didn’t do anything wrong – they were following a reasonable refund policy). Even if I did, I can’t tell you what disciplinary action I give to an employee!
Yes, there is terrible customer service out there (as evidenced in the OP). However, I deal with customers every day and I know that 99% of the time, when a customer is complaining about bad service, it’s really a matter of inflated expectations. No, we are not giving you a refund for your $300 overdraft charges because you screwed up and ordered when you had no money. No, we are not giving you $200 because you didn’t like our $20 product and we “wasted your time”. No, we are not sending a free product via overnight delivery because your card was declined the first time you ordered.
If there weren’t so many scammers and people set on a false sense of entitlement, we could probably get better service from most companies, in my opinion.
I worked at the gas station that was attatched to a grocery store for a couple of months earlier this year. I found that a pleasant customer could improve my mood for the rest of a shift, and a nasty one could just ruin it. The last thing I want is to be one of the nasty ones.
I knew there was a reason I shop at Target now instead of Kmart. Yeesh!
If there weren’t so many people with a false sense of entitlement PERIOD the world would be a better place. This is one of my peeves that I’m really working on - not letting the “special” people get to me.
You sound like a great boss, fluiddruid. Would you say that managers that pretend to believe in “The Customer is Always Right” are probably doing it to power-trip on their employees?
“Managers who”, dammit. I know better than that.
I made a stand on the subject of customer service in GD a while back, but took a slightly different approach. To answer your question, YES customer service is dead.
Why I think so, you ask?
It is cheaper to provide crappy service and instead focus on a good product. “Customer Service” is a shifty, rapidly moving target. Even if a buisness bends over backwards and present themselves to a customer someone will find fualt. With such rapid turnover rate in the typical low pay service industry it is a terrible investment to focus your employee’s energy on how to deliver “good” customer service. Hire friendly and train them to do their job proficiently. That is the most cost efficient.
To the naysayers: Get real. It is impossible to figure out what the fuck every crazy fool that walks through the door demands. We get it, you are in a hurry, you didn’t wipe your ass well enough this morning and want someone to lick your crusty anus clean, your wife left you because you are an evil fucker. You are going to take out the anger your sad little life creates on the low paid cute little girl behind the counter.
Are you getting poor customer service? Try being a nice customer, and you will be amazed how human beings react.
[QUOTE=Binarydrone]
<snip>
The first thing that you need to do is to become a regular wherever you shop.
<snip>
The second thing is more of an intangible. It seems to be comprised of natural charisma and good manners as well as extra patience
<snip>
[QUOTE]
You are my hero. I’m quoting this just so perhaps people will read it a second time and have it forever imbedded in a new wrinkle of their brain.
Thank you. I think it’s because they really don’t know how to manage. They think managing means controlling everything their employees do. Good managing is about teaching people not to need you to hold their hand. Telling an employee “the customer is always right” is stupid, anyway. You need to teach them about shades of gray and making appropriate judgement calls. If the customer is always right, and they say that the price of this DVD player was $29 instead of $229, do you just give it to them?
There’s a lot of reasons why I won’t work in retail. One is that they treat their low-level management very poorly; they work them on long hours constantly, don’t give them enough time off, and they get bitter and irritable. This trickles down to the employee. It all comes down to the fact that if you try to pinch every dime when it comes to employee side, you end up paying in the long run in the customer experience. I won’t say my call center is perfect by any means, but people have a consistently better experience than average, I would say. This kind of service is expensive, far more so than you might believe. If you just pay minimum wage and barely train people, then stick them on the phone, the effect is like that of the OP’s experience – oblivious, unempathetic employees who really don’t care about service at all.