The dark side of “service with a smile”
knowablemagazine.org
knowablemagazine.org
You know this smile, the strenuous contraction of circumoral fascia w/ incomplete zygomatic involvement – the smile that doesn’t quite reach the smiler’s eyes and that signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler’s own interests by pretending to like the smilee….Am I the only consumer in whom high doses of such a smile produce despair?...
And yet, the Professional Smile’s absence now also causes despair. Anybody who’s ever bought a pack of gum in a Mahattan cigar store, or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows full well the soul-crushing effect of a service workers’ scowl, i.e. the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile. And the Professional Smile has by now skewed even my resentment at the dreaded Professional Scowl. I walk away from the Manhattan tobacconist resenting not the countermans’s character or absence of goodwill but his lack of professionalism in denying me the Smile. What a fucking mess.
I'd like just normal interactions with a range of people and to be able to leave thinking any conversation was real rather than an essential term of their contract of employment. No surprise that the best conversations and experiences are in small shops not chains with mandated policies.
When I first visited the US in the 90s the difference was quite marked, and it was quite a relief to get home. Now we've imported the approach wholesale. Course it's still perfectly possible for staff to smile, greet you in the corporate mandated manner whilst keeping 99% of their attention elsewhere and being diligently inefficient.
That said, you can separate emotion from the equation and still provide an outstanding level of service by focusing heavily on polite speech, manner, and tone. Forget the individual and treat them as the prototypical customer.
Some businesses try forcing their employees into casual banter or engaging emotionally (see Starbucks and the let’s talk about race). I’ve never seen that garbage at high end hotels, restaurants, or other businesses where service is critical to their success.
What you describe and what your parenthetical refers to are not the same thing.
To support them, give 5-star Yelp/Google reviews, as well as your business.
I guess in the end its a matter of taste, if you prefer your bad service personnel to be hiding between shelving to avoid customers or serving you a fake smile while staring through you and wishing they were dead.
> The service workers I met were mostly pleasant.
No. Simply nope. Perhaps you visited only for couple of days during the summertime?
If customers walked out without buying it never worried me because I'd seen enough come back later to know that 'not being pushy' was actually something people actually seemed to like?
I always sold more than anyone else btw and had my regulars who would sometimes just call in to say hello. My colleagues could never understand how that happened, especially since I am not a naturally outgoing person.
Does management really think this improves sales, service, or encourages repeat customers? Fake sincerity has to be exhausting for the staff (for the level repetition if no other reason), but I don’t expect most customers believe it’s genuine.
Edit: I notice this mostly in food and coffee shops. Others its a loss prevention approach in retail makes sense. But it seems uncommon to steal a sandwich made to order.
An article I read yesterday mentioned that Japanese train workers will point and speak whenever they are doing something. This technique helps workers communicate and think about what they're doing and reduces mistakes.
Greeting customers as they enter may have similar effects. It makes sure someone notices the customer and acknowledges they are new. It lets the customer know they've been recognized as a new arrival. Acting like you're in a good mood may also help you feel that way too.
I am an introvert - and interacting with strangers is painful for an introvert. I got over it. Working with strangers helped me overcome my shyness and later gave me tools to empathize with customers. When I ultimately became a software engineer, this empathy helped. When I was a manager I noticed that the best engineers initially worked with customers in some capacity.
As an introvert, I agree completely.
The extroverts that I meet seem to have little insight into the feelings of the people they are energetically talking in the direction of, and desire little truthfulness in their conversations. It's all surface-level small talk. I can do it for a short time but every one of those conversations kills me a little inside.
We were on a transit corridor so there was a big morning rush. You'd get to know the regulars to the point where you could queue up their drinks to be ready by the time they got to the register, get a good flow going. There's all kinds of people: bubbly chatters, grumpy don't-talk-to-me-until-coffee folks, etc. and it was really fun and rewarding to try to get each of them to leave with a smile. You couldn't always do it, of course, but for me I hope to retire to e.g. Shasta someday and open a little coffee shop and bookstore.
All that to say this: one of the reasons why I am excited about the automation econo-pacalypse and the rise of what we're calling "Universal Basic Income" is that it will relax the need for people to "earn a living" doing something they don't genuinely enjoy. A general relaxation of the "profit motive" will permit optimization along other, more congenial dimensions.
Oh, I don't. I was reading Lovelock's "The Revenge of Gaia" this morning and now the only thing I think is inevitable is climate shift to a hot house mode. We'll be lucky if 0.1% of humanity threads that needle. It's not inevitable, but I don't think we'll change course rapidly enough to make it.
So a ton of not particularly outgoing/not extroverted/no particularly 'people orientated' individuals who'd objectively be better off working in absolutely anything else are stuck doing service jobs they're not at all well suited for.
Unfortunately, there's not really an easy fix to this. In theory the best solution would probably be to get 'service' work treated like any other career path (a viable field that people go into because they're passionate about that sort of work and have the right mindset for it) and make it less 'if you've got no relevant skills, Walmart/Starbucks/whoever is hiring'. But that's probably not happening, since this sort of work is seen as something anyone can do and hence valued so low it's basically a 'last resort' job.
Also I think that faking a smile thing only works every now and then, not 1000x a day, every time another consumer wanders into your store.
If they really want to make them smile, employers should try making the conditions so good that the workers actually want to smile. Actually, no, god forbid! That might cost more...
Also, as a consumer, I really hate the fake smile, "how's your day?" kind of garbage. I just want to buy my items in peace, and if I need help, I'll ask for it thank you very much. As an introvert it really deters me from going into your stores.
So they basically have ZERO incentive to do any work and therefore their default face = "Cara de culo".
Intersestingly enough, as millions of new Venezuelans have immigrated, they have now become the most sought after service-industry workers, simply because they always smile, work hard, and very happy to have a job. Hopefully these market forces will have some nice overall affects on the whole.
That seems weird. How does corruption end up favoring the fired workers? Usually isn't it the business owners that have the resources to bribe or provide favors for corrupt officials to get their way? What do the fired workers have to offer to influence a corrupt official?
One check out person, who seemed fairly new, ask me where I found a cleaning sponge... this was just a regular green sponge with blue on the other side for pots and pans. Ever since that time, their chit chat often seems forced.
No dark side here, only discipline and the recognition of opportunity for advancement to better things.
Tell that to a bricklayer. I've worked crappy service jobs and I've nailed shingles to roofs in 100+F degree heat. I'll take the fake smile job any day of the week.
> “I would come home from a day of barista-ing and my face would hurt. I thought I was just being whiny.”
One of those times when one should stick with one's initial thought.
Everyone should have to work a retail job to get a sense of what a broad selection of the public is like. Everyone (who is physically able) should have to work in manual labor to get a sense of what hard work is like. Say, 6 months of each. You’d probably get a lot less whining, and people might not be such pricks to cashiers. Ideally a third period would be spent as a nurse or EMT, but that would be prohibitive in terms of training and break too many people.
As someone who's done both, oh yes please, come into "the trenches" and see how customer-facing support, even at the enterprise level, is done and what demands and limitations we face. I have a story on this.
I used to work support for a large technology company in the big company software division. Our support tools were pretty limited. We could get logs, we could try to make sense of them, we could ask our peers, and, In Case Of Emergency Break Glass, we could send an inquiry to the developers. This one developer for this one component kept getting upset with us about "how hard could it be" and all that.
The problem was, the logs for that component were obtuse. They'd just say "ERR852019" or something like that and we couldn't have access to the source code or symbols to go look it up ourselves and our entreaties for a list of ERR codes was met with "we'll do it when we get to it." Finally, that group hired somebody new and a manager somewhere had the bright idea to send the new guy down to us (support was in a different area, many states away, as these things usually are) to see if the new guy could "straighten us out."
We unloaded on him. Poor sod. But, he went away with a vision. He realized the staggering amount of time, effort, and, yes, money being spent on us sitting around getting yelled at by the customers with no real way to help them other than poking the program with a stick and seeing what happened.
He championed our cause to that development team and, later, as he moved through the company, made support a priority, if not a focus. Logs stopped just saying "[DATE] [TIME] ERR91" and included full error messages and file paths and even abbreviated stack traces. Senior people on the support teams got access to source code so we could find the error strings and figure out what the program was doing. We even got mini tools we could use to tweak the program to get better logging or maybe even fix the problem for the customer instead of making the (overloaded) development team do it. And the big payoff? We bothered the development people less with "this is making a funny noise" and brought them quality bugs with, in some cases, proposed fixes that saved them time.
Oh, and people from the development team started coming down to sit with us "in the trenches" once a year or so.
The owner devised a plan where each of the employees had to work for a few shifts with the other group to see what their jobs entailed. It made for a better understanding between them and gave each side an idea that the other jobs weren't exactly easy. Made for a better working relationship between the two groups.
Are rude clients in service jobs a worse emotional load than people that think that specs are just vague suggestions?
Generally, it's a good idea to aim for improving quality of life for everyone, overall, not reducing things such that everyone is merely slightly less miserable than the worst possible misery.
- been at the help desk
- waited tables
- worked in concrete repair (noisy and often really cold or really hit or really wet)
- worked at a go-cart center (smiling to customers)
- showeled tons and tons of grass and manure in smaller farm buildings where tractors where not an option.
The thing that broke me was the smiling part in the gocart center. It took 6 months or so before I cried whenever I was alone.
Full disclosure: the job was stressful in other ways too.