"Dave Barry once wrote that a person that is nice to you but rude to the waiter is not a nice person, and I wholeheartedly agree.
Customer service and polite, reasonable customers; you can't have one without the other."
taken from this blog post: Vanishing.
In his post, this guy makes the point that all the hoopla about declining customer service in retail stores is really a two-way street and he gives examples of why that is so.
It made me think of what happened to me just TEN MINUTES before I was supposed to leave yesterday. A customer wanted me to help her find a "really nice" scrapbook album for her son's sports memorabilia. Her daughter was going to put the album together and she wanted it to be an album that would be an "heirloom".
I showed her first one album and then another. She found something she didn't like about every album I showed her. (By the way, this woman was very condescending.) Finally, I politely said to her, "All of our scrapbooks are right here on this aisle. Look through them and see if you can find one that fills your need."
It was already past time for me to leave but I had a few more returns to put out. I put those out and as I came along the back side of my department "headed home", the lady was coming toward me. She smiled. I smiled. I noticed the album she had chosen was our budget (cheapest) album. But, when I passed the album aisle, I COULDN'T BELIEVE MY EYES. She had pulled out albums, opened one up from it's box and left it and its box scattered in the floor. When I went to pick it up, I noticed that she'd left a trail behind her all down the aisle. I believe I had to pick up and put back every album she'd even considered before she left with our CHEAPEST album--her "heirloom".
I fully understood where this guy was coming from when he said there has not only been a decline in good customer service but also a decline in good customers. I can't imagine that years ago a mother would glare at me when I cautioned her child that they could get hurt RUNNING through our glasswares and ceramic area.
Our society is definitely changing in a number of ways. I picked up another quote I'll tag on here that describes another direction we are headed.
Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.
That site also had this sign the writer had seen in a library she visited:
Ask....
and don't think about WHO is going to be paying for all this stuff.
Check out more of Steve Sack's Editorial Cartoons.
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