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RE: Saturday Musings: I Suck at Customer Service!
I spent about five years in various positions in food service and I think you're absolutely right: in so many cases I've been told to practice "customer service" and excuse customers who exhibit a complete lack of integrity and accountability by owners and managers who lacked the experience to know the difference.
One previous employer demonstrated signs of this with their first few restaurants and it wasn't much of a problem until they opened an upscale rooftop bar I've been told now caters to a coke-snorting clientele that's far less classy than they'd hoped for. Sometimes you've gotta draw that line!
One of the interesting-- but unpleasant-- things I noticed in the retail/service industry is that often it was the "lowest" end of the clientel that was the least pleasant... it was almost as if there was a "layer" of people who felt basically powerless in their lives... and the only sense of power they ever got to have in their lives was to be verbally abusive towards some counter clerk who'd been indoctrinated into "the customer is ALWAYS right!" thinking.
I used to think so because my first few jobs didn't exactly serve "high-end" clientele but my last gig was on the campus of a major tech company in the U.S. and most of those geeks made at least two to three times the average of my previous customers and still managed to behave every bit as trashy.
Yeah, money doesn't give anyone good manners... it just gives them... money.