OK, we’re now officially fed up with the new customer service style that requires store clerks to ask us personal questions.
You can’t run to the supermarket for a loaf of bread without a grilling from the kid at the checkout stand. How are you today? How’s your day going? What are you up to today? Got plans for the weekend?
None of your beeswax, Junior. Just ring up the bread and let me out of here.
You see this new style of customer service at more and more stores. Business is cutthroat these days, and customer service is one way for a store to get the edge. And all it takes is a mandate to the staff that they must engage with every customer.
I don’t want to be engaged. I want to buy some bread. I want a business transaction, not a new friendship.
I find particularly objectionable the line of questioning that begins with “What are you up to today?” For one thing, that’s none of your business. For another, it forces me to come up with some answer when, in fact, my day probably didn’t have much structure and I haven’t accomplished anything much. I usually mumble something like, “Oh, just running errands.” But on the inside, I’m replying: “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
I don’t take it out on the clerks because I know it’s not their idea to strike up a meaningful conversation with a graybeard customer who’s strangling a loaf of bread. They’re forced by their bosses to do this. Their bosses set the mandate because their bosses require it. And those bosses are reading off a corporate memo from some guy near the top who listened to a high-paid pointy-headed consultant who told him this new retail model was the way to victory in the trenches of business.
We’re never going to get those corporate guys in one room to tell them to cut it out. So we can only hope to save the souls of the store clerks who try to engage with us. When the checkout kid asks you questions, give snappy answers that subvert the whole process. The employee will either be smart enough to understand that we don’t have to play the game or dumb enough that the comeback will sail right past his empty head and he won’t even realize that he has been served.
Some suggestions:
Q: How are you doing today?
A: The question is not “how” but “who.”
Q: How are you today?
A: Homicidal. You?
Q: What are you up to today?
A: Oh, just breeding rabbits. Busy, busy, busy.
Q: Planning a party?
A: Nope. Stocking up for the Big One. Heh-heh.
Q: Got plans for the weekend?
A: Oh, yeah. Big orgy over at Fred’s house. You should come.
I encourage you to come up with more snappy answers of your own in the comments section.
