Not a day passes that someone doesn’t rant on this board about a bitchy McDonald’s employee or a lazy retail clerk. While I feel sorry for people that have to deal with any sort of rudeness, I think we need some truth tellin’ time.
Service jobs (including low-level food service and retail) are almost all minimum wage nowadays. That’s pretty well known. What isn’t known is that turnover at these places is high- extremly high. Most people quit withing three month. Why? Because conditions and pay suck. People always say “if you don’t like the job- quit”. And quit they do. In a constant stream.
How bad does it suck? Computers track your every move. You get a big list of rules that nobody follows, but for whcih you are under constant threat of being fired (not so bad) or humiliated by your boss (sucks big time) for breaking. You have to “look busy” at all times, even if there is nothing that needs to be done. You never know what your schedule is going to be. They may only schedule you for a few hours. You don’t have any assurance that you are going to make enough to pay rent. You can be fired at any time, for no reason. You live in constant uncetainty. And you don’t even get ay benefits. There is no advancement. There is no reward for doing your job well. It just means your a bigger sucker that they guy next to you. It sucks. And people figure this out pretty quickly.
Employers take advantage of this endless supply of labor. They treat employees like fodder. They know you won’t be around long, and that when you quit or get fired there will be someone to instantly replace you, so they simply try to get as much out of you as they can before you move on. There is no investment in the employee by the employer.
Which means no training. Nobody ever trains customer service workers to smile and be polite. Nobody ever tells them how to be helpful. Heck, I’ve been on jobs where they don’t even train the cashiers how to use the register- which requires some knowledge and skill. They literally just throw them on and hope they don’t screw up too bad! From perhaps the third hour on your first day of work, you are not in training. This doesn’t stop them from paying the sub-minimum wage “training pay” or collecting federal job trainging benefits, but that is another story altogether.
What is another aspect of having temporary, untrained employees? Lack of trust. Mangers don’t trust the workers, and worker’s aren’t to be trusted because they have no real tie to the company and know they won’t be on the job long. As a result Most of these people have to see a manager to do anything other than the most simple transactions. They can’t simply open up a new drawer when the line gets too long. They can’t make common sense exchanges. They can’t do what is simple and obvious in many cases because they arn’t trusted to do anything.
Managers of course, have their own duties. Most delays happen because a clerk needs to flag down a manager in order to do whatever they need to do. And since they are untrained, they are constantly asking managers questions about how to do things that are obvious. Things slow down. People get angry.
Which leads to delays. Which leads to customers mad because they can’t get what they need done, even when it is obvious. Which leads to bitter workers who are constantly berated for things they can’t change.
So if you want good customer service, something has to change. People are going to need to figure out a system where employees are treated like human beings. A system where some attempt is made to train and retain employees. You really can’t blame Joe Service who walked in off the street and was plunked down in front of a register five minutes later and will be fired just as quickly for not caring about his job.
The only way to change customer service is to find out what places treat their employees well, and patronize those places. There are a few of them out there. Bitching about the poor state of customer service will do nothing until the system this system that feeds off human beings changes.