I’m not sure if hospitality in customer service has become a thing of the past or if I have just finally reached the age where I complain about all the changes happening in the world around me. Either way, I have felt my blood pressure rise when shopping or ordering food lately, and don’t get me started on a trip to Walmart.
When ordering fast food, I find myself waiting in a line I’m sure went faster when my parents were behind the wheel and I sat in the back seat, to arrive at a speaker where someone shouts at me with a voice whose every word sounds like incoming cannon fire.
Suddenly, I feel under attack when all I wanted was a sweet tea.
Does this sound familiar to you? Do you sometimes get the impression that your order, which is the basis of the worker’s paycheck and key to maintaining a standard of living by extension, is not only a waste of their time but that you ordering it is an inconvenience for them?
These types of experiences are not limited to the food industry, no, they have crept into healthcare, the banking industry, even big box stores that once prided themselves on treating customers like family.
Respect is a two way street and bad customer service experiences aren’t limited to workers, as many employees often mirror the behavior of customers they encounter during their work day.
The everyday American has had access to the internet for a few decades now and it may be time to have a check up on how it has affected the overall well being of the nation.
Sure, in many ways the advent of the internet has initiated leaps in technological growth and discoveries, but has it made us better or kinder people? Has it really made us any smarter? Would you know half of what you “know” now if your access to the internet were gone tomorrow?
Some might argue it has made people lazy and more reliant on devices doing the thinking and working for us.
This may prove true as more professionals find their careers replaced with a hunk of metal and wires.
A fast food restaurant near me has recently changed from a live drive-through person to a robotic voice.
While I find the disembodied voice to be less hostile sounding, it is still unnerving and leads me to wonder if we aren’t truly headed to the dystopia imagined in author Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” of machines and government.
Younger generations of Americans are already struggling with interacting on an in person human level; what happens when we take away the most basic of human interactions and replace them with those of a machine?
Children learn how to socialize from watching the social cues of the adults around them. How mom and dad interact with a cashier or the teller at the bank absolutely shapes their child’s attitude towards fostering a relationship, no matter how brief, with those we don’t know in a social setting.
In the South, we have always prided ourselves on our hospitality.
I remember in my younger years helping a customer and at the end of our conversation she thanked me for restoring her faith in the South. She said she was from up North and all her life her family members who grew up in the South told her how nice the people were but after visiting for a few days, she said I was the first person to show her hospitality. I was horrified to hear her experience but I can’t say I don’t live what she described every day now.
When I moved back home to North Carolina from New York, I could not wait to get back to my southerners.
Only, I came home to find everyone changed in my absence.
I miss the South I grew up in, the good folks who took the time to ask how a stranger’s day was or what they thought about the weather while waiting in line at the grocery store. When I was a child we not only knew our neighbors, half of them helped raise us.
So much has changed since the internet, and I wonder if the very qualities that make us human will be next to go?
Though the times may have changed, can’t we slow down, take a breather, and remember where we came from? For starters, maybe a return to “Please” and “Thank you?”