Actually, I honestly think the bias is on your side this time. You're assuming that you're nice and therefore everyone else is nice like you.

I've actually walked into an enterprise (the car rental company) and found one of their cards lying around that details how to start a conversation with a customer.

It goes along the lines of:

<Enthusiastic Greeting> <Enquire about abc / def / ghi>

and some more non-sense like that that I forget.

Plus, you can judge by someone's tone if they really are being honest or if it's just that they've been doing it so many times, it's become fairly mechanical. In cases like that I think a simple 'Hi', works much better anyway.

But the the thing I was going for with that post was, cultural differences can sometimes throw you off quite a bit, like the original article says.