The holiday season can mean as many things to as many people you ask. It could mean giving to loved ones, finally getting a gift you’ve always wanted, or the hassles of shopping for people you can hardly stand. There’s the Secret Santa at the office, the triumph of finding a parking space at the mall, and the charities ringing bells and knocking on doors to give to those in need. However, in the commercialized blitzkrieg that has come to be a yearly tradition every December, perhaps it’s well-advised to take a moment to ponder the implications of this season on the people who perhaps suffer more than anyone else in these trying times.
I mean, of course, the poor retail workers.
In our capitalistic society, there’s a mantra that’s often repeated time and again in the customer service field: “The Customer is Always Right.” It’s a trite little saying designed to remind the lowly worker bees that the man screaming about the condition of his shopping experience has every right in the world to be upset. The customer is your paycheck. Without the customer, there would be no store to complain in. There would be no food on the table. Just do everything you can to appease Mister Forehead-Vein and when you get home, just add a little extra kick to the eggnog and try to forget your day ever happened.
In the modern days of shopping and consumerism, it seems that the public at large has forgotten that the poor sod ringing up your shoes or flipping your burgers is still a human being. Certainly you have every right to be upset in the face of gross incompetence; should you receive the wrong change after four or five times of explaining basic arithmetic, naturally you have proper grounding to show great displeasure. But more and more often, there are customers with a certain sense of entitlement that seem to believe they have absolute power over these gnats who dare try to make eye contact during their business transactions. How dare you check my identification when the signature on my credit card is smudged, knave? Don’t you know how much I spend here? I should have you fired!
Being polite and businesslike to a customer is absolutely not something that should be disputed. When a person walks through those doors, there’s no reason to not treat them with some respect. The issue seems to happen as something may happen to make the customer upset, and suddenly they become more important than those that quietly go about their day. The squeaky wheel getting greased fixes the obvious problem, to be sure, but there’s many other wheels that will become squeakier to get their hot, greasy action as a direct result. “You have to complain loudly,” mothers will tell their children, “because if you cause a big scene, they’ll give you what you want.”
Then, of course, that same mother will wonder why their children destroy the furniture when told to turn off the Xbox.
Whatever happened to “catch more flies with honey?” Why does “customer service” need to equate to “unquestioned subservience?” The blame cannot fall on the belligerent customers alone; at least equal part must be placed on the management of the establishments. The simpering floor manager that apologizes for their employees behavior is just as much at fault as the shopper who absolutely knows that there’s more copies of that book “in the back,” and the computer system clearly is wrong.
This holiday season, after you wait in a long line and you plop your piles of presents upon the register counter, try not to be too hard on the poor schmuck that may accidentally have rung up the same item twice. Sure, you may have waited behind all those people for forty-five minutes to get to the cashier… but that cashier had to deal with every one of those people personally. Maybe she has a good reason to be a little bleary-eyed.
The golden rule of “The Customer is Always Right” should not be superseded by the original golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Until your holiday shopping and New Year’s celebrations are complete, I’ll be lurking in the limelight.
