Customer Service is for Assholes
Serving customers today, I had a sudden epiphany that we haven’t come too far down from the trees, evolutionarily speaking (or God dropped us on our heads at birth, whichever side of the fence you sit on). Let me explain…
I had a customer today (for those of you who don’t know, I work in the doors and windows department of a major big box chain renovation store) who requested that I come up to the cash registers to explain something to him. I sighed, knowing that someone who is too lazy to drag his ass back to the department to ask me a question is never a good sign and went up to see what the prick wanted.
On his shopping cart he had two interior doors: one 28″ wide and the other 30″ wide.
“I don’t understand how two door of different sizes… are the same price! This is gotta be some kind of mistake.”
One thing you should know about me before I continue is that I tend to profile customers in the same way that police profile the general citizenry. In my mind’s eye, the profile book opened to:
SMARMY DUMBASS WHO POINTS OUT ERRORS AND INCONSISTENCIES:
This customer will point out anything that seems out of place, wrong, or illogical to anyone that will listen because he’s so insecure he has to pretend to be Sherlock Holmes. Usually ends up appearing foolish, as 99 times out of a hundred there is a simple and reasonable explanation for the so-called mistake. This does not stop him from doing the same thing the next time he’s in the store.
I calmly and rationally explained to him (that’s a stretch for me) that interior doors generally aren’t sold by either dimension or weight. They are sold by popularity or volume of sales and materials used. 28″, 30″ and 32″ doors are common household interior doors, they don’t differ much in price, if at all. 18″, 24″ and 36″ doors are a little less common, so therefore they are priced accordingly. He was quiet, nodded his head and seemed to understand, so I took off and went back to my department, ready to forget all about him, when two minutes later, there he is again! He’s got his notebook out and he’s jotting down prices of doors and shaking his head and cursing to himself. This guy is really pissed off. Again, my profile book is flipping:
HALF-WIT:
This customer is slow to pick up new bits of information. Relatively speaking, the formation of the Grand Canyon is a premature ejaculation compared to this guy. Ask anything of him, including challenging queries such as his name and phone number and it is guaranteed he will not understand.
Or…
WEIRD CREEP WHO HAS BEEN PUSHED TOO FAR:
This customer has such a miserable, shitty existence that he is going to use this trivial event to explode in a fiery ball of rage. He is right, and by God if some clerk at a hardware store is going to tell him otherwise. This customer will mutter incoherently to himself. It is advisable to carry a piece of lumber or a hammer when dealing with this customer. For further reference see the Michael Douglas movie “Falling Down”.
I was in no mood to take bullshit today, so I went up to him and ask him what’s up.
“It doesn’t make any sense. How can they be the same price? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“’Sir’, I just explained to you the pricing of these doors. Now what is your issue? Should the 28″ door be priced less? That means it would retail somewhere between the 24″ door at $48.69 and the 30″ door at $49.68. You’ve been poking around here and arguing with me for the sake of 50 cents?”
Not wanting to appear cheap, the customer replied no, to which I retorted:
“So you want to pay more for the 30″ door?”
He replied of course not, and further, that wasn’t the point. The point was that two different products with different amounts of the same material should be priced differently for the sake of fairness.
I effectively ended the conversation when I replied:
“If you’re not satisfied, take the doors back and shop somewhere else, but remember… in the fifteen minutes you’ve been arguing with me and the cashier, I made $4.12. You are left with nothing. Is it really worth your time to be arguing about this?”
The logic was irrefutable. My only real comfort was the fact that he had to drive to another renovation store only to discover that their prices were the same as ours and for all of his efforts all he did was waste a few extra bucks in gas.
Dumbass customers are the staple of any retail worker’s ranting. But I think that the larger problem here isn’t so much dumbasses, as they have been and always will be the statistical majority of humanity, but this theory, this notion, this fucking ideology of customer service. I don’t get it. I never have and I never will.
Anybody who utters phrases like “Is this what you call customer service?” or “I like shopping at this place because they have good customer service!” is a complete asshole. I can’t vouch for the motivation of why people shop at certain stores, but here’s my motivation: They have a product I want to buy.
Where did we get this idea that just because I’m a customer, that all of the sudden the sales clerk has to cater to my every stupid whim, no matter what?
“I don’t like the colour of the floor. Well, I’ll just chew the clerk’s ear off about it. What’s that? You don’t carry the brand I want? Instead of shopping at a store that does, I’ll just raise hell until I’m blue in the face! Where will it get me? Nowhere! But unlike my family and friends, the clerks can’t tell me to shut up.”
Jesus, people are grim. If I walk into McDonalds, I don’t come for smiles and small talk, and I don’t expect the cashier to call me by name. In other words, I don’t need to be validated. I don’t need to be loved by the people I’m buying from. Talk about insecurity. When I walk into McDonalds, I expect lukewarm food that the cooks didn’t spit on. That’s all. If the cashier isn’t smiling at me and thanking me, all I can say is I don’t blame her.
If a store can’t handle what I’m after, I don’t bother yakking at an uninterested manager, I don’t fill out comment cards, and I don’t make a scene. You know what I do? I go somewhere else. And if enough people don’t like the service and they go somewhere else, you know what happens? The store closes down for lack of business. For all you consumers out there, you know what this is called? The free enterprise system.
But no. Now I spend two or three extra minutes in line now because the cashier has to call everyone who pays by debit or credit card by their names, and they have to remind them of a certain promotion that they have and they have to ask if they found everything they were looking for. Well, if Jack didn’t find everything he was looking for, too bad for him! Our forefathers jumped into boats and found a continent with no maps. This idiot cant find a loaf of bread in a supermarket! Why are they wasting my time? If Jack really needs it, he should have found it. If Jack really needs it, and couldn’t find it, the cashier can tell him where it is and he can go back in line when he gets it. But since Jack the customer is the most beautiful and unique creature God ever pulled out of his ass, the other eight people have to wait while somebody fetches whatever he needs. What a crock of shit.
What really burns me up is that if the vast majority of consumers find big box stores awful places to shop at, they’ve got nobody but themselves to blame. Years ago, they took their money away from the corner stores and mom and pop shops for the convenience and lower prices of the mega stores. Never mind that the mom and pop shops actually gave two shits about you, probably knew your name without reading it off of your credit card and gave your community vitality and strength. Hot shit, I can save three dollars off a pack of underwear! All I have to do is spend fifteen minutes finding the right aisle, another fifteen minutes navigating around zombies who plod around the aisles, getting in the way and having serious discussions about buying one product over the other based on how funny the commercial is, and another fifteen minutes waiting in line because some dumbass has to argue with the cashier like she’s the CEO of the company because he couldn’t find staff to help him choose a vibrator. Never mind that it’s Saturday afternoon and fifteen million people have decided to shop at the same time. Never mind getting your ass out of bed earlier in the morning to beat the crowds. I am a beautiful and unique creature, just like your commercials promised and I want it now!
And that three dollars you saved? Pissed away on gas to get there. Don’t expect Wall Street to call you anytime soon, jackass.