Whenever I see or hear the phrase “customer service,” I have to roll my eyes. Customer service? In the United States? No such thing.
There used to be. I remember it because I experienced it as a customer and I practiced it as a retail staffer.
The unspoken but obvious ethos is: ‘The customer is always wrong, and also he is oppressing me, a poor proletariat worker.’
We can get it back, but that requires understanding how we lost it. It also requires laying out the unspoken assumptions that drive the current “the customer is always wrong” attitude.
McDonald’s, Best Buy, Home Depot — sub in your favorite — all of them operate on these unspoken assumptions, and that’s why the “service” at all these places is nonexistent at best and hostile too often.
Service with a stare
First, let’s describe the problem with two anecdotes.
1. I walked into Tractor Supply. I asked the 19-year-old girl slouching against the counter where the kerosene was kept. “If we had any it would be, like … over on one of those aisles,” she said, waving her hand in a direction.
I said, “Are you able to check your system to find out where and if you have any in stock?”
She responded: “I can’t leave the register.”
That’s not what I asked. A second employee walked me to the aisle after (wait for it) logging into the register and checking the stock list. When I told him about the lazy response from his front-counter worker, he immediately defended her, with no apology: “Yeah, but she’s new.”
2. I went to a “casual dining” restaurant. It was the kind of local place that sells burgers for $19 along with local beer on tap. The waitress took our order, dropped the food on the table, and walked away. There was no silverware. No napkins. No salt and pepper. No plates for the shared dishes. It didn’t even occur to her.
When I asked, “May we have some silverware, please?” she stared at me with that blank look, turned around, got the silverware, and set it down. Yes, I’m saying she gave me the silent treatment; it’s common these days.
Communicating contempt
I’m going to stop at those two stories; they stand in for hundreds of similar transactions over the past 10 years or so. It doesn’t matter if it’s a chain restaurant or a corporate outlet store. Any time the staff are younger than about 40, this is what happens.
Several decades ago, I was a young staffer in my teens and 20s. I worked mall retail, then spent about a dozen years as a busboy, waiter, and barback. From my first job at 15 to my last retail job at 28, I would have been fired on the spot if I had behaved the way those employees did.
Why? Because it’s incompetent. It’s lazy. It’s not doing your job; it’s standing there getting paid while neglecting your work. And worst of all, it communicates contempt for the customer.
How did we get here?
I suspect we got here by the same means that brought us young adults who can’t do arithmetic, can’t write a topic sentence for a paragraph, and can’t sound out the word silhouette. That route can be called “lack of parenting” and “lack of teaching in public school.” Examining that is for a different article.
Whatever the reason, this is where we are today. It’s something we need to fix — and can fix, if we decide to.
Workers of the world … be polite!
When I was in retail, there was a too-hard bias toward the idea that “the customer is always right.” Too often, staff were expected to tolerate abusive behavior from customers — name-calling, lying to get free food, and so on — while the manager handed them their order for free.
But over the past decade or so, the pendulum hasn’t merely swung back toward protecting workers from abuse. It has swung toward a deeper assumption: that the customer himself is the problem.
Now we’ve reversed it in the other direction. The unspoken but obvious ethos is: “The customer is always wrong, and also he is oppressing me, a poor proletariat worker.”
The Marxist lens of “oppressed/oppressor” has seeped so far into our cultural fabric that restaurants openly admit they pay waiters low wages, then guilt customers into “remembering” to tip. If I had even hinted at that message when I was a waiter, I would have been clocked out and sent home permanently.
RELATED: The four Americans who just restored my faith in ‘customer service’
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Going off-script
Along with the customer-hostile attitude, modern retail tries to lock down employees’ actions with rigid steps. Maybe it’s fear of liability; maybe it’s not wanting to pay competent managers; maybe it’s something else. But the reason every customer-staffer transaction feels robotic is because it is. Businesses no longer allow staff to exercise judgment. You can hear it when the cashier works hard to recite the script verbatim. You can tell they’re not allowed to think, because if you ask a question the script hasn’t anticipated, they get flustered — and that part isn’t their fault.
Compare today with this McDonald’s training video from 1992.
– YouTube
First, marvel at how much emphasis they put on making sure employees are pleasant to customers.
But more surprising, the trainer in the video explicitly encourages staff members to use their own judgment and alter what they say based on context. That happens around the 1:47 mark: “I was talking to [an employee] a little bit earlier, and he said that he was feeling really stiff having to say, ‘Welcome to McDonald’s, welcome to McDonald’s,’ over and over again,” she said. “So I told him what we tell our people all the time: Say what feels natural. But say it with a warm, sincere smile.”
Customer feedback
Sound crazy? It used to be normal. And we can bring it back if we make that choice. Customer-employee interactions don’t have to be fraught and robotic; the business world chose this.
Here are some guidelines every retail establishment should return to, none of which cost a single cent:
Make eye contact with every customer who approaches you. Greet every customer, and do it pleasantly. Prepare your workstation before customers arrive. Put down your phone; that’s not for work time. Think like a customer and figure out what they’ll need. Do not write verbatim scripts for employees. Walk them through customer service basics and answer their questions. Act it out. Role-play. Encourage employees to use reasonable discretion. Tone and personality vary from person to person; successful customer service depends on adapting to the person in front of you. If you don’t trust your staff to have the wiggle room to modify the exact words they use with customers, you’re either hiring bad people or you don’t know how to run a business. If that’s the case, find another trade.
This is a taller order for employers in 2026, because it’s sadly true that a large percentage of young staff today are badly socialized — or not socialized at all. Employers shouldn’t have to do what parents failed to do, but they’re going to have to if they care about the quality of their service. Good luck.
Mcdonald’s, Culture, Customer service, Lifestyle, Manners, Marxism, Retail, Intervention
