We (Don't Really) Want Your Business: Taking Customers for Granted in the Sad, Bad Economy

People love to argue, but there is one thing about which it seems that everyone is in agreement: The economy is in very bad shape. In light of that, businesses and services should be trying to build clientele, reinforce customer relationships, and gain customer loyalties. In times of economic hardship, our best bet for financial survival is a revival of the local economy. Money earned and spent within the smaller community means a better life for all who participate in the economy of that community.

Recently, I went to take the Praxis I exam in Pittsburgh, and on my drive into the city, I noticed a sign on the electronic billboard of a hotel in Greentree. It said, "We Want Your Business!" It sounds nice, but do signs like this mean anything? I think not. In this world full of cliché and trite buzz terms, advertising like this seems hollow and impersonal.

In writing workshops, people often remark, "Show me, don't tell me." Recently, the way that businesses have been "showing me" their appreciation for my patronage is something less than desirable.

The most offensive of the lot is the Amsterdam Post Office. I stopped going in last year, but my mother still sends things out for me through that branch. When the people who work there are not on a personal phone call, they will help customers to a certain extent, but only when they deem appropriate. They refuse to give itemized receipts. They refuse to help customers when it is near closing. Sometimes they close ten minutes early for no reason. However, it's a small town. People say it's best to not make waves.

I went to McDonald's a few weeks ago with a friend. I ordered the number 10, a chicken mcnuggets meal with fries and a drink. They have a self-serve soft drink bar. The cashier gave me the wrong size cup. When I reminded her that I had ordered a large, she waited until I walked away and said to her co-worker, "Does she really need the large?" When my friend told me that she made that remark, I went to the counter to complain to the manager, who assured me that there was no possible way that the employee would have said that, and that my friend must have been mistaken. He is a very articulate person, and very trustworthy, but I went to sit down and eat my then-cold lunch. Within ten minutes, the original cashier came to our table and said, "I have to come apologize, but I didn't say that." When my friend retorted, and said that she most certainly had said it, she said, "Well, I did what I had to do and apologized, so if you don't want to accept my apology then whatever." Instead of leaving, she kept stammering around, telling me that she was pregnant. I spoke to two other managers, one of which ended up being the woman to whom the remark had originally been made, but the end result was that the manager sent the only overweight employee out to tell me that the pregnant girl was not "against fat people" and that she knew this because she was fat herself. That's no McExcuse for the behavior.

These two experiences are not isolated instances. I have witnessed employees at several local businesses walk into the restroom and sign their initials on the restroom cleanliness check list without even glancing into the filthy stalls. I have seen checkout lanes closed in the faces of the slow-walking elderly at Wal-Mart. At G & J's One Stop, I have had cashiers treat me with such rude and obnoxious behavior that I haven't stepped foot in their store since November. Last week, I went to Arby's, and ordered a Roastburger with no tomatoes. When the sandwich came out, it had cheese sauce instead of the cheese slice that comes on it. When I complained about it, they made me another sandwich, but put tomatoes on it. The third time the sandwich came out wrong, I asked for my money back. The manager did not apologize. She said, "You know, people make mistakes."

Yes, people make mistakes. They make them, and they pretend that it is the customer's fault. They make mistakes and pretend like they did not. They make mistakes; they refuse to apologize. Their employers refuse to apologize. They are not sorry. They are indignant. They are doing the customer a favor by keeping their doors open. They are providing a service, so they can be obnoxious if they like.

There are a few hold-outs, however. Merrin's Market in Amsterdam is one of them. Family owned and operated, Father Doug and daughter Natalie will order in anything, try to get anything a loyal customer says they're willing to buy. I told Natalie I like homemade pizza making ingredients. They sell out fast, but they get them in. They carry more flavors of the Starbucks Double-Shot canned coffee than anywhere else in Jefferson County, and have more zero-calorie beverage choices than any other store in the area. They sell good, homemade hot foods like cabbage casserole and beef & noodles, and their meatball subs are the best I've had in Ohio. But that's not why I spend my money there.

What really makes the difference is that when their employees make a mistake, they take care of it. They apologize. It might seem unusual, but they show their customers kindness – a kindness that should not be the exception, but the rule.

So for the McDonald's and Arby's, the post office and Wal-Mart, for the G&J's and the myriad other businesses who take customers like me for granted, I say: Talk is cheap; actions speak louder than words; show me, don't tell me.

When you deserve my business, I'll be back.

Cavemen, human nature, and man versus machine

I'm currently taking a graduate course on human development.  Nevermind that I've already taken the same exact course before in undergrad, and nevermind that there isn't any new information between the two.  It's a different school, a different teacher, but the same hoops for jumping through have presented themselves.  

In my world, and through its eternal glass-half-full lens, I see that this is all just means to an uneventful end, in which I teach Secondary English for a few years, pay off some student loans, get my masters and Ph.D in something more meaningful, and move on.  

My professor is an interesting guy, though.  He's got some fun interpretations of the world.  One of these is this:  That human nature hasn't changed.  Everybody always talks about how children are different "these days" and how "in [their] day, school was like" this or that.  The thing that people are missing is that the slate, the chalkboard, the stack of paper, the composition book, the Five Star Notebook, and the word processor are one in the same.  The students have not changed any.  The way in which they see the world - in which we see the world - is what's different.  People pick on the methods of moving the knowledge from one person to the next - they don't see what's important - that the knowledge keeps moving.  Trying to force old ways on new dogs doesn't work.  

So my professor said, "People always speculate why people are the way they are.  But it's been that way since humanity's beginning.  You had Trog running around saying, "Why is Ugg such a jackass?" 

And I'm sitting here right now wondering the same thing.  Why are all these people with whom I go to class such class-A Idiots?  Why do people think I'm such a weird bitch?  

The other day, one of my classmates said that she has a "class full of morons." I don't think women like that need to be educating anyone, or passing those kinds of opinions on to students.  Kids pick up on that stuff.  When they think that adults around them think little of them, they in turn think little of themselves.  

And these adults are the same people who think that machines make everything.  They think human hands don't make the blue jeans they are wearing, that somewhere, some Chinese man throws a bolt of fabric, a spool of thread, a pair of scissors, a zipper, and a bag of buttons into a big black hole, and somewhere, in another part of the factory, a Pakistani woman drives by on the Wonkatania and blue jeans magically fall out of a chute into the truckbed behind her.  As if by Magic.

That is not real.  

That is the Easy Bake Oven version of the world.  

What's even more horribly offensive is that the people who manage the places in which things are actually made don't do anything about this modern misconception.  They let people think these things.  The public's ignorance is their bliss.  Why?  It allows people to allow other people to suffer all sorts of bad working conditions so that they can buy their pants for $20 and throw them away not when they wear out, but when they grow tired of them.  They don't feel bad about using resources because they think that everything is produced by magic machines.  

When I look at photographs of people from long ago, there is something endearing about a coat that's been patched where it's worn.  It reminds me of my grandfather.  He had this blue quilted winter jacket that he wore out in the wood shop, and it had been mended in a bunch of places.  Some of these stitches were done with white thread, and some had been done to match.  But they were there.  My grandmother fixed it.  When a pocket got a hole in it, she sewed it back shut.  

People don't do that anymore.  They think the machines will make more.  Why not just throw it away.  The machines spit new ones out all the time.  The machines will take care of us.  

I was at an open house at Christmas time.  There was a girl selling one of those home party plans like Home Interior, but with a more country bumpkin slant to it.  She had these embroidered pictures inside a cheap frame that cost $40.  I was trying to sell paintings and artwork, and this girl had these dumb pictures, and I was kind of offended because A) they were so expensive, and so carelessly put together; and B) the person who embroidered it probably didn't get a dollar for doing it.  She's probably living in Taiwan somewhere, doing piecework.  I said something about it, and this girl said, "That's made by a machine." 

When I tried to explain to her that machines can't tie knots like what were on this piece of fabric, that machines can't hand-emboider, she said, "Yes they can - they sell embroidery machines at Jo-Anne's." She thought I was stupid.  She thought I was a moron because I didn't know that machines make everything.  This girl couldn't tell the difference between something machine-done and something hand-done.  Not that it's important.  They think that handmade things aren't as good as machine-made ones.  They would rather buy something screen printed than something handpainted.  Is that why real art is such an elitist thing?  

That the majority of people would rather just sit around and think that machines do everything, that we should be thankful to them for what they do, and stop trying to make good things with our hands, stop trying to learn, stop trying to find the truth, stop trying to find new truths, make new discoveries?  

It makes me feel incredibly helpless to think that people don't care that we're proving Plato right.  He said that Gold is precious, so you make jewelry, not swords.  You don't make crowns out of steel, either.  And in this steel belt, where the collars are blue, education is much like gold.  Plato thought that people were in society, in the places where they should be, and that you might as well not waste education on people who aren't going to amount to much of anything, anyway.

I think back now, on that open house, where all these people were wearing the jewelry that they'd bought from the jewelry party plan girl, and it seems so surreal:  

The girl in the blue Lane Bryant sweat suit wearing the $50 Coral elasticized bracelet. 

Made by machines.  

Her matching $70 Coral necklace.  

Made by machines.  

The old lady with the sparkly rhinestone earrings/bracelet/necklace set. 

Made by machines. 

All these women, in their down-homey clothing, wearing overpriced costume jewelry, fauning around over home party plan decor.

Made by machines.  

Demanding not that the quality of the things they buy be anything other than exactly the same as the other people around them, gobbling up the plastic Christmas clock, the screen-printed tin sign that says "Friends Welcome / Relatives by Appointment" (and in Comic Sans, of all fonts!), the hand-embroidered muslin square in the cheap, glued-together frame.  

Made by machines.  

Demanding not that their children receive a good public education, but that their kids "get good grades," as if one was any indication of another.  I heard a woman say recently, upon moving her two children from one school to another, that the new school was a better school because her daughter, who had previously been "a C student" was now "an A student" - never thinking that the quality of the teacher may have gone down, that the standards were lower.  No.  Obviously, what's happened is that her daughter magically became more intelligent because of her mother's wise decision to enroll her in a different school.  Yes, that must be it.  As if by Magic.  

Demanding that their jewelry, their lives, and their children's educations be made entirely of fool's gold - and wallowing in that paradise. 

Bit of disappointment with Forklift, OH

So I found this journal:  

Forklift, and it's so charming and unusual that, of course, upon consuming all of the available text, I wished to submit something charming and unusual of my very own.  

I was a little bit hesitant because there are several big name poets (including Dean Young - and since one of the two poets who influenced me in a Great Big Way was my teacher, Bob King, and since Bob King was under the poetry-teacherish-influence of Dean Young - it makes sense to me that they might like my poems.  They might not publish them, but they might like them just the same)  I thought maybe submitting to them was a waste of time.  But then I got a little bit of that "don't hurt to try" spunk out of the closet (maybe it fell on my head) and decided what the hell.  

So I clicked around (not the most obvious website in terms of labelling their links according to the information stored within - instead it's all metaphoric, which might just be a little bit of an indication of their snobbery, but I didn't catch on), until I found their submission guidelines under logistics.  

Now.  I don't know about the average Joe (or Jane, and why does Jane usually get paired with Dick until she dies and then it's John, and what's up with Joe, anyway?), but this seems a little sketchy to me: 

"If you are interested in being included in an issue of Forklift, Ohio, we request that you first purchase and read a copy of the journal. 

Then, before sending any work for consideration, please query the editors by E-mail at editors@ForkliftOhio.com. " 

I understand that journals are often battling to stay afloat financially (as the editor of Plain Spoke, I can empathize wholeheartedly), and I often purchase copies of journals in order to read them and familiarize myself with them before I submit work.  However, forcing people to purchase in order to query is a bit snitty, to say the least.  

Also, even if I wasn't opposed to being forced into a purchase, I could not buy the journal if I wanted to because it's sold out.  I get that it's "Be hand-assembled in limited quantities from a variety of unusual materials," but that much exclusivity is just for the birds.  

I guess I just have to stick this one in that big heap of crap I'm not interested in, and move on.  

How disappointing.