Liberal Street Fighter

… I’m gonna dig myself a hole
Gonna lay down in it ’til
I satisfy my soul
Gonna let the world pass by me

That’s about how I used to feel after the noon rush on this day every year. Just … let … me … hide.

On THIS Black Friday, only the second year I’m not rushing around through crowds after over twenty years as a retail clerk, manager and/or buyer, I’d like to put in a word for those long-suffering folks confronting voracious Americans on this most holy of days in the United States of Mammon.

Show them some damned thanks, would you please?

There will, of course, be endless stories in newspapers and local newscasts and the “consumer” segments on cable news about how bad customer service is in this country. Endless laments about how it’s worse than it ever was, and advising you that the ONLY way that you’ll get your money’s worth is to learn how to complain agressively and often.

I used to HATE those stories, as they are almost always terribly one-sided, and almost always direct you to direct your ire at a relatively powerless person.

Let me tell you why your service sucks, as someone who used to provide it.
MARKETING & ADVERTISING

In my experience, marketing people have little or no experience actually helping people. Their job, of course, is to entice you into the store. They will often do so with ambiguously worded signs, sales tags and advertisements. The signage in the store for these sales usually goes up the night before the sale begins. Yes, that’s right, many of the clerks and managers staring bleary-eyed at you today were either there VERY late Wednesday night or even on Thanksgiving itself trying to get these signs put up properly, trying to get the right sales tags on the right products. They will be doing this on top of the usual store operations.

This isn’t really totally the fault of the marketing and advertising folks: enticing people is different than SERVING them. One is offering up a fantasy, a mirage, a shadow projected on the wall of a desired reality. Customer service is, ideally, fulfilling the actual real desire. Stripping vs. hooking, to be crude.

There are all kinds of other considerations that go into the marketing. Certain products may be priorities for the manufactures. There may be large ad buys that carry with them certain display requirements. The buyer for the given retailer may have a product she loves that is pushed more, or one she hates that is buried somewhere in the store despite an ad you may have read. The total buy for the given chain may have been limited, and your particular outlet may have gotten a smaller portion of the company’s overall piece of the pie. The layered interests and demands get to be very complicated, and what you want being sold out is often the result of forces way beyond the control of the clerk behind the counter telling you “sorry, we’re sold out, and I’m not sure when we’ll get more in.”

SENIOR MANAGEMENT, STOCKHOLDERS & BUREAUCRACY

These forces are your enemy, and often the enemy of the store-level management. All of them try to get the most lifeblood sucked out of the store level as they can while providing as little support as possible. This dynamic is known as “productivity” … I used to call it “squeezing blood from stones”. Over the years I was in retail, more and more pressure was brought to bear down on the actual service-providing parts of the businesses I worked for to do more with less. The shareholders, after all, demanded it. Actual service was an at-best tertiary consideration after this requirement and the requirement to look happy pulling off increasingly impossible miracles.  Training money is expected to come out of regular payroll, and seasonal temps are hired later and later in the year, and often thrown into the thick of things with minimal training. Meanwhile, careful records of schedules must me maintained, gaps caused by sick/lazy workers adjusted to, and the vagaries of business levels are more uncertain than the weather, no matter how sophisticated a given company’s scheduling software is.

RETAIL EMPLOYEES AND MANAGERS

Lets be honest, a lot of them suck. This isn’t a field that our culture considers a “career”, no matter what Wal-Mart’s stupid Orwellian ads proclaim. People fall into it. People settle for it. People with a passion for whatever a given store is selling start out figuring that they might as well get paid for enjoying their hobby while they look for something better, only to find themselves still doing it years later (guess which one I was). Telling someone you work in retail is an invitation for scorn. If you started out caring or trying to do a good job, this will wear on the strongest person. Having to pick up the slack for the guy who’s just there to punch the clock and cash his check only makes it worse. I found, though, that these slackers were a minority. Most of the people I worked with over the years TRIED TO DO A GOOD JOB.

and finally …

CUSTOMERS

Oh, where to start with this bunch? Reared for years on the bullshit line “the customer is always right” (except when they’re wrong, as an old manager of mine used to say), people think that they can do no wrong. They deal out abuse, expect satisfaction while doing everything they can to impede the transaction and, perhaps worst of all, pay NO attention to other customers beside themselves. Over the years, I’ve seen fights, shoving matches, screaming matches … I’ve been spit on and pushed down, and NOT just by shoplifters. I’ve watched my employees called niggers and bitches, and been forced by senior management to back down to nasty wealthy customers who threatened lawyers or who called a friend-of-a-friend of the CEO. I’ve seen customers whistle at a clerk like they would a dog and snap their fingers at a cashier the way a Victorian “lady” would call over her maid. Customers often know what they want, but have no idea what it’s called or what it looks like, and woe to you if you can’t read their minds. I had a guy once walk up to me and say, “there’s a song, by a guy, it’s about a girl, he’s in love. Do you know who does it?” If the employee asks you questions about what you’re trying to find, indulge them and answer their questions without a large sigh or derision. Maybe he’s undertrained, or new or maybe you just weren’t making yourself clear.

Oh, and people REALLY need to learn to wait their turn.

Finally …

Whew, looking back at this mess above, it’s a wonder that any business gets transacted at all. It’s also plain that it’s a good thing I made my way out of that world! In any event, in you’re shopping this holiday season, if someone gives you good service, look them in the eye and say thank you. If a manager is nearby, praise the employee to the manager. Treat them like professionals, even if some of them in the store weren’t. You will get better service in return, and let me tell you, sometimes a kind word was like a bottle cold beer in a desert to me when we were in the weeds and the computers at VISA were starting to go down. Also, the way this country is going, it might be YOU behind that counter when your multi-national pulls up stakes and tosses you on your butt, and what goes around comes around.