Don't hand me the #^*!$& receipt with my change, you #^*!$& moron! Put it in the #^*!$& bag! I don't keep my receipts in my wallet, pinhead.I admit, that's harsh. It also blames the wrong person.
Before you say to yourself, "This is more of some old curmudgeon bitching about rude retail workers," read on. It's not. It's some old curmudgeon bitching about corporatism and consumerism.
I'm reading Cloud Atlas. If you saw the movie, the Sonmi~451 segment left out what I think was a salient point. In the corprocratic future, everyone is required consume. If you can't afford it, you still have to consume and go into debt. Debt means lifelong indentured servitude.
Back to the present, the corporate oligarchy wants us to consume and consume. It wants us to buy more stuff, and it wants us to use our credit cards to do it. We buy things from the corporate oligarchy using money we borrowed from the corporate oligarchy. If you have a large balance on a credit card, say $10,000 or more, it can take 15 years or more to pay it off if you stop using it now and make the minimum monthly payment. Now you're indentured to the corporate oligarchy. All of this, and we happily, brainlessly comply.
Customer service has died, partially because we're just not nice to each other any more, but mostly because the corporate oligarchy wants to shove as many of us through the consumer pipeline as possible in as short of a period of time as possible. At the big box stores, have you noticed that you have to chase an employee down to help you navigate the maze? That's not because the employees are hiding, as much as you would like to blame them for it. It's because the corporations want to keep their employee to customer ratios as small as possible. At a WalMart, what used to be called a floor walker (maybe they still are) has to cover an area double the square footage of my house. At Lowe's, there may be a dozen or so floor walkers to cover the entire store. At the cash register, employees are required to keep their lines as short as possible to reduce the number of employees manning them. That means they have to pump you through as quickly as possible.
As a consumer, you expect the corporations to treat you like a king (or a queen). You expect them to require their employees to treat you like a king. After all, you're keeping them in business. When they don't, you become an arrogant, swaggering asshole. As an employee, you're underpaid to have to deal with arrogant, swaggering assholes. You become sullen and unhelpful. That causes customers to swagger more. And so on. The corporate oligarchy plays to our baser natures. The corporate oligarchy doesn't have to be nice to us. We'll just keep mindlessly consuming.
It would be tempting for me to sit in my chair and cheerlead a consumer revolution. That's just dumb. It's also unnecessary. One way or another, the consumer palace will eventually collapse under its own weight. It would also be tempting for me to sit in my chair and preach kindness. A guy did that about 2,000 years ago and it still hasn't worked out. Try this, though - If you're a customer, give the employee the benefit of the doubt, even just a little bit. Read this. If you're an employee, take the extra 10 seconds to count the customer's change out to them, or walk them to whatever they're looking for rather than mumbling something about aisle 10. Every employee is not a sullen shithead. Every customer is not a swaggering asshat.
There. Mea culpa for getting pissed off about my change. In my defense, I'll note that I just vented on Facebook rather than on the employee in question. I'll try not to let it happen again.
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