Read on Twitter
in fact, if you're saying "the customer is always right" it is almost 100% certain that YOU ARE WRONG and you are trying to make yourself "right" through a temporary, monetary-based status that allows you to impose your will on others. Don't. https://twitter.com/m_older/status/1277229673404129287
I think a lot about how much in our consumer and service culture is designed to make people - people who are not at all rich - feel like they are "upper class" or "nobility" by allowing them to treat others in the same shitty way that those classes treat(ed) people
which is even uglier when you consider the present history of slavery and how much that intersects with service culture today
so much of it is designed precisely to make the customer feel like they're "above" other people, giving them people to look down on, as a way to make them "happy" or show the "quality" of the experience/service/consumer goods
Uniforms come from livery. Respectful terms of address like "sir" excuse me you are not a knight of the realm just because you walked into retail establishment.
The entire hotel thing is a fantasy of live-in servants, and while it is entirely fair to want to pay to have some time off from doing housework, the uniforms, rules of customer service, etc reference a specific era of servitude (one that did not work out well for servants)
and it's amazing (except not really), because supposedly the US was throwing off the strictures of the old class system! but only to then romanticize the shit out of it in movies and books and also repeat it and copy it in desperate homage
this rant was inspired by Nora Roberts' GLORIOUS smackdown. if you look at what that woman was saying, she thinks that because she can afford to pay- FOR A BOOK! A! BOOK! -she should control everything & the workers should give her everything she wants.
That kind of thinking is wrong if you "own" the land, and it's wrong if you're buying a book, and it's wrong if you're paying for dinner and deciding how much to put on the tip (don't get me started on tipping). FFS.
The next level, extra sinister twist on this dynamic: the people who really have the power, who ARE always "right" in sense of getting what they want, are the bosses. https://twitter.com/BFHodgdon/status/1335250900613525505?s=20
The bosses(/owners/CEOs/board/investors/founder-comemierdas) use frontline workers to fool customers into thinking they are like the boss, have all that privilege and wealth, AND to insulate themselves from any of the anger or fallout when they don't bother to do that well enough
I think about this every time I board at Penn Station *spits, floor is still cleaner than Penn Station floor* because everything about the process is awful and the only people you can possibly complain to are the lowest paid people who can do nothing about it.
Or on the phone with customer service, because that is the epitome of this. "Customer service" operators are there as a pressure valve, letting you expend your energy and anger without getting anyone near anyone who could change anything.
a friend of mine answered phones for a heating service for a while -in Spain, US is not the only country at fault here - the things people would say where unbelievably abusive. Low-paid people absorb that trauma, "customers" are made to feel like it's okay to abuse people, and
the bosses neither have to listen to the customers nor change a thing from how they want it to be.
I see all of you ready to tell me that if a company doesn't listen to customers it will fail. That's true for some businesses, esp small ones. The fact that it's NOT true for insurance, telecom, cable, etc, etc, means our economy isn't working the way they told you it should.
