Editor,
Working in the service industry has the unfortunate side effect of impressing you — with exactly how much the customer believes they buy from the company and how much the company believes its $6 per hour buys from you.
The kinds of behavior that are routinely displayed to service professionals is mind-numbing. In an average day, a person working in service, a menial job worth no more than the previously mentioned wage, should expect to be harassed, called names, threatened and insulted by customers.
Personally, I am forced to believe that the customers perceive some kind of personal insult based on any inability to provide them with almost any request they can aim at the service person.
I blame this on the campaign of advertisements and wildly popular concept that companies live to serve the consumer. Of the company, this is absolutely true, but of the employee, that’s another story.
What possible effect could a full day of various serving duties, coupled with the constant fielding of requests –– which range from the inconvenient to the impossible and even, yes, insane –– have on a person, you ask?
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For instance, I often work alone at the gas station. There is absolutely no way I’m going to risk a drive-off by turning on your pump when I can’t even see you, and I’m not going to stand there and let you call me names because of it. Six dollars an hour is not adequate recompense for this arrogant breach of simple courtesy, nor would any amount be.
I am forced to wonder if any of the people I have observed and dealt with in these contexts have ever, themselves, had any experience with service. There does not appear to be any awareness of the limits of the concept that it can be your way all the time. The uniform in no way endows any service person with the ability to read your mind or be in two places at once.
Being subjected to this daily consuming process has the effect of making service people “burn out,” which is in turn perceived by customers as insolence, insult or laziness.
It is quite the cycle, then, with each interaction usually lending itself to the continued nastiness, which is quite palatable in most service establishments.
No matter what any commercial or even some service professionals themselves might tell you in search of a tip, there is a limit to your way — anything past the bounds of courtesy might be a start.
Give the service people a little break. It takes most of us awhile to realize that you aren’t going to be cruel or unreasonable.
Oh, and another tip, people in customer service are absolutely never going to have a say in company policy — we just aren’t that important.
Carrie Cutler-Maxwell,
UNM student
