I’m a Boomer and relatively old. I attach more than a little wistfulness to this declaration. As I’ve aged, my personal nostalgia quotient has advanced along with the passing years, and find myself at times feeling maudlin moving through today’s world where so many of the values, ideals, and social conventions—critical elements of the foundation upon which my own character has been built—have been forgotten, or disappeared entirely.
Humanity, with all of its contrivances and machinations, is as informed as it’s impelled by the passing of time. Hairstyles, clothing, architecture, cars—everything that meets the eye—manifests itself in differentiated, evolutionary fashion along time’s fundamental continuum. Interpersonal decorum is likewise impacted in this way, but generally speaking, now exists as a pale, diluted facsimile of what I remember of human interaction when I was young. Indifference, half-heartedness, and even mild levels of disrespect and rudeness more often than not typify the current dynamic of people engaging with one another. And nowhere is this condition more keenly perceived than in the milieu of retail customer service.
I was recently at a pet store, buying dog food. In the aisle where I’d hoped to find my pup’s favorites, a young female store employee was struggling to shove a couple of gigantic bags of kibble onto one of the shelves. When I asked if she needed help, she shot me an unpleasant look over her shoulder and said “Huh?” I repeated the question, and she answered “No” in such a way as to suggest that mine was the stupidest question ever asked. When she finished loading the sacks, she looked red-faced and sweaty, and seemed to be out of breath. So I waited a few seconds to ask her if she could now help me. I wanted to know where I could find my dog’s brand of food. She brushed past me without answering my question, and without giving me any help. She just walked away.
When I was a kid, I’d spent a few years in a vocational arena that would, by most standards, be considered retail customer service (I was a busboy at a local country club—my folks were members and they got me a job there, along with some of my high school football teammates), and I know bad customer service when I see it. And that young lady at the pet store was guilty of engaging in some bad customer service that day. But it wasn’t bad customer service the way I remember bad customer service was. It was nowhere near as bad as the bad customer service my gridiron buddies/fellow busboys and I doled out to the diners at the country club. The rude little chick at the pet store, on her best day, couldn’t generate the paying customer-directed assholery of days gone by. Compared to the shittiness dispensed to those dining room customers by my buddies and me back in the day, not only was her performance feckless, it was polite. Next to us, she was a fucking customer service angel.
On his last night of work, my teammate and fellow busboy Brian, working with one of the country club’s most senior and most popular waitresses, had seated at one of his tables, an elderly couple. Shortly after this couple’s food was served, the husband called Brian to the table:
“Hey kid. Come over here.”
Brian, at tableside: “Yes sir?”
Old guy, pulling Brian by his sleeve down to his level and hissing: “Listen, I’m a hog farmer. This crap here that you’re trying to feed me isn’t fit to feed my pigs. Get it outta my sight.”
Brian, maintaining eye contact while demonstrating the appearance of contrition: “Fuck you.” And then, to the old guy’s wife: “Can I get you more coffee, ma’am? No? Fuck you.” (Offers a slight bow, then departs the vicinity of their table and heads off to see to the needs of other diners.)
Brian’s demonstration of bad customer service blew away the pet store chick’s weak attempt by a country mile. His brand was horrific, yet in its unabashed honesty, there was also nobility. But the best kind of bad customer service (what today’s practitioners really should be emulating) is the kind that’s delivered surreptitiously and deceitfully, and with great personal gain accruing to its perpetrator. This was the kind of customer service I practiced at the country club during a time in America when people were different. Back when people gave it their all.
For me, it started in this way: “Dear, could you please wrap these up for me? They’re delicious, but I simply can’t finish them.” This from an elderly lady diner, indicating the eight Alaskan King Crab legs remaining on her plate. The order came with 10, so two was her limit that evening.
“Certainly, ma’am.” I took her plate and made for one of the dining room’s more remote server stations where I contemplated eating five of her remaining crab legs. I estimated this lady’s anility multiplier to be high, and I was pretty sure she’d never miss them when she pulled the doggie bag out of her fridge the next day to eat what was left. Plus, as country club dining room employees, our meals were free, but we could only get a hamburger, cheeseburger, or grilled cheese sandwich. The place was famous for its crab legs, frog legs, and lobster tail. So, eat a free grilled cheese sandwich or five expertly prepared, not inexpensive Alaskan King Crab legs? There could be only one outcome.
Sated, I brought the remaining three wrapped and bagged crab legs to the elderly diner, and set in motion a pattern of dining room customer service malfeasance that informed my own doggie bag preparation methodology going forward, and that, like a foul and evil wind, would ultimately spread to infect the morality of each of my high school football teammates cum busboy co-workers. Scores of doggie bags and their decimated payloads would leave the country club in the clutches of the elderly or the unwitting. Our justification? If you don’t finish a whole plate of awesome food when it comes out of the kitchen and is set down in front of you in our dining room at the country club, you don’t deserve to eat the leftovers in your dining room at home. At least not all of them. And in more than a few extreme cases (all inspired—and many executed—by me) you don’t get to eat any of those leftovers in your dining room at home.
Prime rib was the house specialty, what people traveled for miles to order. And, one evening when a particular elderly lady diner ate only one tiny bite of her perfectly-cooked (rare) and seasoned (lots of garlic) Lady’s Cut (14 ounces) and asked me to wrap it up for her, I once more returned to the scene of my original act of illicit crab leg consumption and committed an act of gluttony and deception far more egregious than any perpetrated before by either my fellow busboys or me. I ate the entire cut of meat, wiped my mouth, nose, and eyes with a cloth napkin, and prayed that my breath didn’t smell like garlic when I told the waiting diner, “I’m very sorry, ma’am. Your prime rib accidentally fell into the garbage can in my station when I was wrapping it for you. Please forgive me.”
This went down fine with the understanding little old lady, and from that point on, I was emboldened. News of my exploits soon reached my football teammates/fellow busboys. Before long, lobster tails, rib eyes, and bigger and bigger cuts of prime rib would periodically be ordered by customers and subsequently eaten, in their entire practically-intact form, by the hired help while hunkered down in scattered, remote country club dining room server station locations.
We were 16- and 17-year-old football players. We needed the protein. Besides, rich, cholesterol-laden foods have never been good for the elderly.
I look back with fondness and some pride on those days, all those years ago, working at the country club, where my buddies and I tried our hand at the customer service game. Our execution, in those days, of bad customer service—of customer disservice—could be overt, unapologetic, and ultimately regal (as in the case of my teammate Brian’s intrepid demonstration on his last night of work), or it could be duplicitous and gluttonously self-serving, as in the thieving-feeding-then-lying-about-it trend that evolved as standard operating procedure among our ranks once I’d pioneered it. What we practiced was the real deal. It was bad customer service at an elite level.
The bad customer service that I routinely experience today is a poor approximation of how we did things back when society and the people who comprised it acted according to principle. There was nothing weak or half-hearted in the way folks treated each other. That day at the pet store, when that rude young employee couldn’t even muster a simple “Fuck you,” I knew we were all in trouble.
—John Stamos, along with his wife Ann, publishes The Renaissance Garden Guy (renaissancegardenguy.com)