Customer Service: You get what you pay for

Everyone's had a bad customer service experience.  Everyone's encountered that unhappy cashier who doesn't really care if they're particularly helpful or if you had a good shopping experience.  We bitch about it all the time.  Companies force feed "good" customer service techniques on their employees, brag about them in commercials.  Giving bad customer service can even cause you to lose your job, but we never stop to consider WHY customer service is as bad as it is.  What causes someone in the service industry to be rude or uncaring.

People in customer service, whether they are cashiers, waitresses, call center representatives, etc, are human beings that we treat like slaves, work like dogs and pay very little money.  If you worked like a dog and barely eked out a living, you'd be unhappy too.  If you knew your company thought of you as an easily replaceable, unvalued peon, would you care about their image?  No.  And you'd be unable to hide your feelings of discontent even if you cared to do so.

There's something that happens to a person when they become a customer.  Suddenly, they are incapable of seeing the person waiting on them as being an equal.  No, that person is a servant and therefore beneath them.  It isn't just rich people who are affected like this.  Even those in the service industry will treat their fellow service people as inferiors once they step on the other side of the check out line.  It doesn't matter the psychology behind this.  It's wrong and we should know better.

How many times have you grabbed the wrong item and insisted you be given the sale price anyway?  How many times have you knowingly made a mess at the convenience store coffee counter and not cleaned it up?  How many times have you not tipped your waitress or only left a handful of change?   How many times have you or someone you've seen yelled at their server?  Or threatened to have their server fired if they didn't comply with an unreasonable demand?  People take out all their frustration on cashiers and waiters.  You may not get to be a dick to your boss but you can be a dick to the girl in the drive thru.  Why are customers so nasty?  Because they know they can be and that the cashier or waiter will be unable to do anything about it.  It's a power trip.

Not all customers set out to be assholes, but there are enough of them to leave a bad taste in a cashier's mouth.  When you have a bad experience over and over again, you start expecting it and you become suspicious of every customer you meet.  If your cashier is apprehensive towards you, it's a self defense mechanism and you can hardly blame them.

But the horrible attitudes exhibited by customers is just one of the mental stress factors that negatively affect our service representatives.  The work is hard and the reward is very little.

Service jobs are by definition bad paying ones. There simply isn't any reason for it.  You shouldn't need a fancy college degree to earn enough money to survive on if you're putting in the work.  Service jobs are hard work, but they're paid like it isn't work at all.

Money is an incentive.  Like it or not, people don't get jobs because they want to help others.  They get jobs because they need money to have a roof over their head and food to eat.  The world runs on money.  You work for the money.  So if someone works hard and isn't paid accordingly, they have a right to be upset.

Minimum wage is slavery.  No one can survive on minimum wage.  And no one who works hard and makes little money is going to care that much about their job.  No one who is taken for granted is going to care about doing a good job.  They'll do just enough to KEEP the job until they find something better.

But low pay comes with other draw backs.  It affects the QUALITY of the worker too.  Workers with skills are going to go where those skills will be appreciated - to higher paying jobs.  The only people who voluntarily take a service job are the ones who CAN'T get anything better.  Low skilled, ghetto, stoners, etc.  The kinds of people who will never care about good customer service.  Or you get older, better educated people who have tried to find something better and failed who will never be satisfied with low pay work and will never care about it.

In essence, when it comes to the service industry, you get what you pay for either financially or with respect.  Until we're willing to treat our servers with dignity and pay them accordingly, expect bad service.  Because we've earned it.