#the customer is not always right

[nytehavyn-circle]

(I'd start throwing the meat at this fuckhead. Beat them about the head and shoulders with the bread.)

[roguekhajiit]

Something that I simultaneously love and hate the most about being a rural mail carrier is that you're always alone.

This morning, I received a call from a customer who said he never received a package I had delivered yesterday. I checked the shelves, looked up his tracking number, and saw that the package was scanned at the time I was at his stop. I then told him I would look for his package today.

Now, 90% of my route is comprised of CBU (cluster box unit) banks. Was it possible I accidentally misread the address on his package for a similar one in a dyslexic moment? Yes. I never rule out that possibility. But I know I have dyslexia. It's something I've dealt with since I was a grade schooler, and it's why I carefully read each address.

Maybe a minute after I arrive at his stop, and halfway through the CBUs, a large black pickup truck pulls up directly behind my vehicle. Being a rural mail carrier, I rarely, if ever, see my customers face to face. But my instincts tell me that this is the guy I spoke with on the phone early this morning.

Something to note here:

As a contracted rural mail carrier, I drive my own personal vehicle and don't wear a uniform. There is no way to tell from a distance that I'm a mail carrier, and there are no markings identifying my car as a mail vehicle. I look just like any of the other hundreds of cars on the highway.

This guy lives a mile and a half down the road from where his box is located. There is no other way to get to his house, no alternate routes out from his road. Yet, he pulled up right behind my vehicle from the highway. Almost as if he was driving around looking for me.

Having spent 7 years working retail, I immediately go into customer service mode and ask, "Hi, how may I help you?"

He stands a foot away from me and says, "I'm here to see about my package." Nothing wrong with that sentence itself, but there was just something sinister in his tone, and the way he held himself immediately made my skin crawl and put my nerves on edge.

I told him I wasn't done yet, and I hadn't gotten to his CBU yet. But he continues to stand there, unmoving, staring at me. He doesn't go back to his truck until a kind old lady pulls up in her little car. But he still refuses to get back in his truck. Instead, he pretends to be busy with something on his phone all while still watching my every move.

As I was working, I was checking every box and paying attention to those who lived on his street or had similar house numbers as his. None of them had checked their mail since before yesterday, and none of them had received any parcels.

After I finished with his CBU, I had to tell him. "Your package isn't here." But I get the feeling he already knew that. It was in the way he had spoken to me when he first got there.

"Well, what are you going to do about it then," he asks me, his arms crossed and staring down at my five foot, nothing AFAB self.

"Nothing at the moment," I tell him. "We can wait and see if one of your neighbors mistakenly received it and turns it in, or you can report it as missing." Now, I'm neuro-divergent, and my tone during this entire interaction has been flat, neutral, and matter-of-fact. It's my default tone when speaking.

But he starts getting agitated, "So, you're not gonna admit that you lost it?!"

No? Why would I? We don't know that it's lost, his neighbors haven't checked their mail, and at this point, I'm 75% sure he's lying so he can get a refund on whatever he purchased. The other 25% is he either lost it or another member of his household checked the mail before he did and just didn't tell him. But I don't speak those thoughts out loud.

He kept pressing for me to admit that I was the one who lost his package. He's following me as I walk around my vehicle and refusing to leave. All the while, the kind old lady is still in her car watching and listening to this all play out.

His behavior has long since crossed the line into harassment and I tell him this. "I have not!" He says, "I've been standing over here minding my own business. I just want to know what you plan to do about my package!"

So I tell him, "Nothing. You can call the postmaster. Now, go about your day."

He then calls me a fucking bitch, hops in his truck and slams the door, speeding off.

If it wasn't for the fact that that lady was there for all of it, I'm certain he would have tried to escalate things further.

[csbtv]

"The Customer is Usually Wrong." is a sketch comedy series about customer service and the eclectic customers. Only on CSB Television. Search for it on Rumble and YouTube.

[hotelhyena]

I think this one was the last video in that series, I just wanted to share these before my country bans TikTok.

[statisticalcats2]

How much longer until it becomes acceptable to start recruiting people to bug tumblr support to try and get their attention

[biodegradablebisexual]

In my mid 20’s I worked at a video store that was up the street from someone who had put several super rad gargoyles on their house (which was styled to look like a stone castle).

One morning one of the local religious weirdos came in and immediately engaged me in one of the strangest conversations I had while working there:

Customer: Have you seen those devils?

Me: (trying to reengage from my dvd sorting dissociation) Hmm, sorry, what?

Cust: That house *pointing wildly* down there with the devils on it?

Me: Oh the gargoyles? The house with the gargoyles on it?

Cust: Yeah, then devils.

Me: Like the ones they put on old churches?

Cust: *stares at me with her eyes nearly popping out of her head*

Cust: *leaves*

why did we as a society stop putting gargoyles on everything. what fucking loser looked at a building and was like no actually this doesn’t need a horrid little creacher

[magerites]

One thing they don't tell you about customer service is how effective silence is as a deescalation tool.

Silence makes people either think or talk to fill the space, and either can be detrimental for a customer who knows they're being a dick.

[roguekhajiit]

Funny customer story.

Today, at work, I was informed of a customer on my route having put in a complaint.

The reason for the complaint?

She had ordered something from Virginia to be shipped via Ground Advantage, and she expected it to arrive in 3 days.

That might be possible if you lived in Virginia, Karen. But you live in Alaska. You ain't getting anything shipped through Canada in 3 days.

[csbtv]

The Customer is Usually Wrong is a comedic mini series that looks at customer service in a different point of view. Only on CSB Television

Watch on Rumble and YouTube

For details go to

[keepinit-g]

Yooo story time!!!

so when I was 18 that's when I got my first job and it was at Walmart 💀. I was a cashier so one day this family came through my line. A Wife and her Husband and they had the grandmother with them. So they put all the groceries on my conveyor belt and the grandmother asked me about how much the grapes were and I said "It depends on how much it weighs will depend on how much it cost" .. so mind you, I'm new asf so I made the mistake of ringing up the bag of grapes twice. Because she was like "Why did it come up to that much?" and I said oh I'm sorry about that and she literally THREW the bag of grapes at me and said "Fix that" and gave me a disgraceful look....💀💀💀 maaaannnnnn it took a village inside me to not pipe up on her ass so I got a manager to handle that shit.

I have never met a creature as stupid as a customer in a store

[hotelhyena]

Did I neglect to mention that my country deciding to ban Tiktok is just fucking stupid?

[bribearoh]

🤣

[rollerska8er]

"The actual saying is the customer is always right in matters of taste"

One thing I see trotted out a lot is that the phrase "The customer is always right", often used to justify abuses by patrons interacting with workers in the service industry, is actually a corruption of "The customer is always right in matters of taste", something supposedly said by Harry Selfridge, an American retail magnate who founded the London-based department store Selfridges & Co.

What a shame, then, that there are literally no sources recording him ever saying this, nor any evidence that "The customer is always right" is a contraction of a longer phrase spoken by someone else. What Harry Selfridge is thought to have said (at least, according to Jeff Toister) was "Right or wrong, the customer is always right", which is, if anything, an even more emphatic way of saying "The customer is always right", and a response to an earlier adage: "Assume that the customer is right until it is plain beyond all question he is not."

As I have stated in previous posts, it is important to be sceptical of the things you see and read on Tumblr and the wider Internet, because oftentimes, they're not true.

I'm not sure why this myth persists in common speech. Maybe it's because it's nice to imagine that there was some time in the past where service workers were treated with dignity. Maybe it's nice to use it as a kind of counter-charm, a magic spell which dispels any notion that customers should be given free rein to behave any way they like when dealing with a seventeen year old retail clerk. Both very noble ends.

The fact is, "The customer is always right" has been used more or less the way it is used today for at least a century. I can't speak for Harry Selfridge - at the time "The customer is always right" entered popular parlance, it was quite common for unscrupulous shopkeepers and businessmen to fleece unwary customers; Selfridge wanted to create a relationship of trust between customer and seller.

Over time, however, that much-maligned phrase has come to mean that customers should be allowed to behave however they want and make whatever outlandish demands of minimum-wage staff they please, since if the business does not meet these demands, the business might lose their custom.

While many retail businesses balk at customers being allowed to outright abuse staff (verbally, emotionally and physically), many of them are genuinely concerned about losing the custom of assholes, so they of course instruct their employees to try to be as accommodating as possible. Hence, the saying persists, despite being clearly, factually wrong.

It isn't that there was a time when service work was not exploitative. It has been exploitative since the time of Marx. It's that retail work of the calibre offered by Selfridges & Co. used to be a fairly respectable occupation. Selfridges in particular used to offer a higher rate of pay than most other shops, which often required barbarously long hours with shit pay. The expectation was of distinguished service, to set Selfridges apart from the other shops, a place for the well-to-do to buy luxuries without fear of being swindled.

At this time, most of the people we traditionally think of as "working class" were involved in manual and industrial labour: manufacture, construction, material extraction, trade work, and so on. But as capitalism has advanced, manual labour has dried up for the most part, or at least been exported overseas, where regulators, if they exist, will happily turn a blind eye to things like basic health and safety and PPE in return for a few more zeroes on the national GDP. It's exploitation within exploitation.

So now, the people who used to be doing manual labour, making stuff, are told they have to work. Where do they go? McDonald's and Walmart and the hardware store, Primark and Tim Horton's and yadda yadda yadda. Point is, the dynamic of customer service has changed. No longer is it an exclusive occupation in which the service worker is expected to offer tailored service to every customer.

Instead, it has become a replacement for the factory line. It's a simple, manual job and considered to be close to the "bottom" of the career ladder. But the sentiment that customers should receive tailored service has endured. Why? Exploitation.

The ability to coerce another person into doing your bidding by through abuse, or by threatening to take resources from them, is probably as old as humans. As Marx himself pointed out, the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.

Being able to lord that power over someone, especially someone female, especially someone very young, is one of the simplest forms of exploitation accessible to the average consumer, who, again, due to the advancement of capitalism, may not actually own any capital at all. Instead, retail allows a kind of "rental" exploitation, where you can exploit any poor soul. It's part of the transaction between consumer and distributor.

The insistence that the phrase used to be "The customer is always right in matters of taste" is, it seems, an attempt to skirt around the real issue at play in interactions between customers and service workers. It is not that businesses used to treat retail workers nicely. It is that retail work has, through the advancement of capitalism, become more exploitative and abusive than it ever was at the time Harry Selfridge supposedly said that.

Your issue is not with the maxim that "the customer is always right". It's with capitalism for perpetuating an ever-accelerating race to the bottom in working standards.

[8trainsofthought-allofftherails]

Gotta love those grown adults older than my parents who brag to me about how they threw a fit to one of my coworkers so they would get their way. My guy, that is not something to be proud of, that’s you acting like a child. I’ve known toddlers with better manners than you.

[cognitiveleague]

Yesterday I emailed a recently inactive client to the effect of “hey, it looks like your old health insurance plan terminated shortly before your last two appointments with your therapist, please contact us so we can either rebill those claims to your new insurance if you were covered at the time of service or figure out a plan for handling those visits as self-pay if you weren’t”

First thing in the morning, one of my team members takes a call from the guy, and after insisting he had been covered and belittling my coworker about it for a while:

Client: Ok, so I’m gonna put you on speakerphone so my wife can hear you and tell you why you’re wrong.

My coworker: Ok, that’s fine. Can you both hear me?

Client’s wife: Yeah, we can hear you.

Coworker: Ok, so [insurance]’s provider website and the claims they processed for the two appointments in July say that the plan we have on file for your account terminated on 7/1.

Client’s wife: Oh, yeah. Yeah, that’s right.

Client: …

Coworker: 👀

Client’s wife: Yeah, you weren’t covered then.

Client: …I swear, this woman doesn’t tell me shit!

(I’m willing to bet that she did tell him and he wasn’t paying attention, tbh. No word on whether he apologized to my coworker for all but calling her an idiot, but he did at least calm down and let her help him work out a reduced self-pay rate for him after that, and paid what was left of three balance, so that’s one case off my list?)

[rosecentaur1916]

All of that is valid. I have a perspective to add: I've worked in retail off and on for nearly a decade. I quit due to being verbally abused by customers during the height of the pandemic. Its not just the company making it "us vs them" which... honestly, I've never worked for a store that did that. I honestly have been treated like garbage by customers. Its not a mentality I was "programmed" with at all. In all of my trainings it was "practice the platinum rule" or "Make sure you're always near so that guests can ask you where product is! Make sure to make yourself available!" It was never anything like a commenter below makes it sound... which... I'm sorry if anyone has ever worked in an environment like that! That is so toxic! I guess I'm one of the rare folk that makes sure that I am polite to everyone until they make me cry, and even then I try to be polite. I don't know where you are where you feel the need to say this. Yes, everyone deserves to be treated politely including retail staff. I've worked for places where the customers that come in have literally treated me like I was worse that the dirt under their feet, then the next customer is sweet as sugar. I've served deaf folk with very limited and shoddy ASL on my end, I've served those that are disabled, to those with stutters and other speech impediments. I've stood there and talked to the lonely. I've helped a woman who had agoraphobia and told her that I was proud of her. I also told her coming to our store was a good choice as our store had mostly blue decor and blue is a calming color. I'm not perfect though. I've had an attitude sometimes and I am *not* proud of that. I am only admitting my faults, and demonstrating that I'm not perfect. I've described child poverty to a customer in true terms, who accused me of guilt tripping them, I've given attitude back to customers who have given me attitude. I've tried to help and have it go south. I've even yelled at a customer as they've gone out the door. That one rightfully got me fired. I was pregnant, but that's no excuse. I've bent over backwards for customers to get them what they want just for them to call me stupid - to my face. I've lightened and color corrected photos that we previously thought were lost and had a customer nearly cry since they were from their vacation. I've been cussed at because I wouldn't sell cigarettes or beer to someone with out their ID. I've had cigarettes waiting for customers who were regulars and they were shocked I remembered. All of that to say yes, you're correct. Customers asking for help is part of our duty to help, even if it is someone asking if we work there, or if the socks that are in front of them are indeed socks. Its getting chairs, its checking the back even though we know that all product goes on the floor regardless just in case there happens to be something back there. Honestly, I didn't mind the last one. It gave me an excuse to breathe. I'm so sorry OP that you've run into customer service workers that have been crappy over things that are part of their jobs. That's not okay. I do argue that taking verbal abuse, like the kind I've talked about should not be part of the job, like I've been told it is. There is a burden on *both* parties to treat each other politely because we are *all* human. I am not a robot. I have to eat, I have to pee, I have feelings, I have bad days, and I have hard things like loosing loved ones outside of work, just like you do. Just because I'm behind the counter and working for an hourly wage doesn't mean I deserve to be treated less than human. You don't deserve to be treated badly because you're having a human moment either. We are both humans. We just need to keep in mind we all are human and treat each other as such with compassion. Not empathy, compassion. We need to also learn that just because we may be in different income brackets or socioeconomic classes that we shouldn't treat anyone worse or better, but that's for a whole different conversation ^.^;

very controversial opinion here, but sometimes customer service workers are the problem 😶