'Welcome In.' The Two-Word Greeting That's Taking Over and Driving Shoppers Nuts

"Following guest"

Sucks too. It's clumsy.

"Welcome in!" cannot hold a match to the gerundified abomination of "How's everything tasting?"

I was surprised that this was a grammar treatise. I hear it often in a variety of businesses, too, but haven't been particularly annoyed at the phrasing. In fact a native Russian speaker using it, sounded like perfectly normal English. And I'm not much of a German speaker, yet.

It seems like a "customer CAPTCHA". "Prove to us that you are not a thief!" Some stores have Greeters stationed at the front. Sometimes, it's just someone at the counter, even if they are helping someone else, will be distracted to welcome people who are breezing into the front door. It's not always an overture to an interaction.

The standard waitress line is, "What can I get started for ya?"

It's interesting that they say the phrases are not imposed by Corporate. It was beginning to seem like something standardized. Just traded around by peers in the biz?

As for "pinning pieces of flair", I've seen everything from a single button advertising "Ask Me About ____" from the company, or one of the emo kids who attached 4 dozen attachments to their backpack and jacket in high school, and now there's a blur of color on her chest larger than the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I will glance at her nametag and then try not to interpret each individual 1/2" button that surely represents her deeply-held beliefs and signals her identity to her coworkers.