I’ve had enough bad experiences with cashiers and sales clerks to know that, as a country, we are going to heck in a handcart when it comes to face-to-face customer service.
Recently I was shopping at a Rite-Aid and encountered a malcontent clerk who likes to gripe about his job in rapid-fire speech that fueled my inner thoughts about whether or not I actually did hear him correctly? I don’t think he said anything fireable, but why should I listen to him complaining about his job? At least he has a job. He ought to shut up and ring up my purchase.
The other day I was snookered into taking a mall survey. At the local mall sits a senior citizen hunched over a clipboard; she tries to solicit participants from a table at the head of the food court, and my friend and I have seen her for quite some time and felt for her situation. We sat down and took her survey. It turned out my friend was allergic to the food item she was touting, so I wound up participating alone. You know how these things go: we had to walk down a back entrance corridor lined with unlit cinder block walls, to a dimly lit office manned by a pleasant enough clerk who welcomed us to her little survey haven as if we had come to Shangri-La.
Her assistant, however, was not of the same ilk. He was a disinterested young fellow probably on the demographic fence between 18 and a basket-weaving Associate’s degree, whose tone of voice and behavior did not spur our interest in the product at all. He even commented that he needed to double-check the entries the lady had written on her clipboard because he had trouble reading it. I was tempted to remind him that, someday, he would probably have arthritis so bad he wouldn’t be able to text anymore, but I kept that to myself.
It seemed I would have to take a product home and test it (that is eat it and survive), so he went to the back room to fetch it. The product had two or three varieties, but the one he told me I would try didn’t match the one he brought out; he seemlessly took it away and came back with another one without batting an eye or betraying his mistake, but I was dumbfounded. The fellow couldn’t read the difference in the labels on three products?
I’m sitting here now to tell you that I survived eating the product, which I managed to get home from the mall in nothing more than a plastic bag and a salvaged freezer tote in my friend’s car. It made it through a half hour of shopping in the mall and another half hour or so at Target, then the trip home. I just wish the follow-up survey would include a part on how the survey staff treated us.
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