The Christmas Spirit and Customer Service: An Unhappy Marriage

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By Christopher Gabriel, Blog Harbor

Christmas is, without question, my favorite time of the year.  The meaning of the holiday, the music, the snow, the decorations, the hot apple cider . . . I’ll take it all, and more.  I love this time of the year.  And yet . . . the Grinch lurks.

In this case, I’m speaking of The Collective Grinch in Your Favorite Store and I’m thrilled to report, you need not search very hard to find them.

They come in all shapes and sizes, these men and women, though much to my surprise, The Collective Grinch tends to be older rather than the young high school kids filling up so many stores this time of year.  And the store itself — pick one: From the big boys like Macy’s, JCPenney and Dick’s Sporting Goods to the smaller ones like the Gap, it’s as if each store has all of their employees gather at an undisclosed location so that the big bosses can roll out their holiday bonus plan:  Structured financial and merchandise incentives to the individuals who can offer up the fewest smiles while conveying the time-honored, non-verbal message to the customer, “Consider yourself damn fortunate if I even decide to glance in your direction because actually helping you . . . well, that just isn’t happening.”

Just about anywhere you turn during the holidays, you’re greeted . . . well, often times you’re not greeted at all . . . by someone who offers you warmth just a notch above disdain.  Most of these folks have forgotten to refill their happy-pill prescriptions.

At the end of the day though, it really is very simple: If you don’t like your job, find another one.  If the volume of shoppers, many out with their children which is an even greater challenge for parents in stores, is simply too much for your emotional center to handle, spare all of us your glare, your stare and your overall indifference to the mere notion of a random act of kindness: A smile.  Notice I’m not going completely overboard here asking for both a smile and a pleasant greeting.  I think we both know that would be entirely out of line, requiring a Herculean effort from the store’s employee.

And to be fair, many of us out and about aren’t always the ideal customer.  Certainly there are many who don’t like shopping to begin with and as soon as we see you, with the black cloud hanging just inches over your head to go along with the pursed lips and furrowed brow, the potential for sparks is heightened.  Still, as one who grew up in a service-industry family, it has always been my experience, without fail, that there are more jerks wearing store nametags than there are customers from hell.

Of all the grimaces, frowns and outright rudeness I’ve seen, heard and been subject to over the past few weeks, the “best” of them all was perhaps the briefest encounter: The Woman Who Couldn’t Be Bothered at JCPenney. 

Out with my wife and two young daughters, we had a few pairs of socks and underwear that needed to be purchased while we strolled through the store.  Suddenly, and without any warning at all, both little girls decided to implode.  That’s what kids do: They have a seismic eruption over — who knows what – that the greatest child psychologists on earth wouldn’t be able to shed any light on.  We happened to be in the jewelry department at the time so I went right up to the closest register.  The woman behind the countery said loudly, “Who’s next?”  Mind you, I was the only person at the counter much less within 30 feet of her.  Still, she looked to her right; she looked to her left; she looked everywhere but at the person directly in front of her, me.  I finally said, with a smile on my face because she seemed rather harried, ”I think I’m next . . . I just want to pay for these before my daughters go completely nuts.”  Without making any eye contact with me whatsoever, she mumbled “we don’t take underwear in jewelry . . .” and, incredibly, walked away. 

Are you telling me in a store the size of JCPenney, with their high-tech computer registers that can analyze your cholesterol level while simultaneously calculating the store’s overall inventory, they aren’t able to punch in a code for the department the items come from and ring up a customer?  If this woman would have dared to connect the dots, she would have seen two parents trying to put out a seven alarm child fire while still trying to put money into a JCPenney register.  Rather than make a sale for the store and doing something that really would have been appreciated by my wife and I, she chose to mumble she couldn’t do it and . . . walked away. 

No doubt many would ask why we didn’t just leave our items and come back to purchase them another time.  With children and busy schedules not to mention having only so much time to buy gifts at multiple stores before Christmas arrives, leaving the items wasn’t a great option.  But, thanks to The Woman Who Couldn’t Be Bothered, that was exactly what we did:  We left, sans items.

I often wonder about the thought process an individual like this possesses.  Is there a thought process?  What runs through that mind in a situation like the one I described? 

Surely you’ve had your own situations with a woman or man just as delightful as my gal from JCPenney. 

And let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that she truly wasn’t able to ring us up.  Perhaps there is some very important technical reason that JCPenney cannot, under any circumstances, take underwear in the jewelry department.  Realizing she had two adults in front of her that wanted to spend money at her counter but had crying children that had detonated, was there nothing she could have done?  Was there absolutely nothing she could have done to help us out?  My guess is that she damn well could have done something but needed to grab a cup of coffee, have a cigarette break or was nearing the end of her shift.

While there are many who go out of their way to give great service to people in stores, especially this time of year, sadly there are far more of her type throughout America that seem bent on doing little more in their customer service jobs than sharing and spreading their own indifference to kindness while reminding us if we’re really fortunate, they’ll be downright nasty for no additional charge.

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Filed under Christmas, Culture, Holidays, Life, Shopping, Thoughts

Tags: Christmas, customer service, Shopping, JCPenney, department store, Macy's, Dick's Sporting Goods