I met Matt in his hybrid Cafe, when a customer stormed out and Matt exclaimed: Everyone is crazy. What happened to people why is everyone crazy?. A customer had picked up something to drink and thrown the change on the counter. Matt told me it felt mean but he made this about 19 year old pick up the change and place it properly on the little dish.
We talked about customer service for a long time. I had spent many summers working in clothing stores as a student. The customer was always king. I had picked clothing stores because I liked interacting with people. The commission was great and I made more than I would have in a student research position. We didn't idle around. On quiet days we folded, shelved and made everything look neat. I was trained that even if a customer spent two hours trying something and buying nothing, that customer if treated well, will come back to buy something. Despite the fact that it was minimum pay and heavily customer oriented we obviously never got tipped.
Many years later during caregiving there were stretches with my father where food delivery was the only option, to get any cooked meal into both of us, especially during covid. The meds was making him loopy and aggressivethe more food i got into him, the more lucid he became. I would order and after a few snafus decided to wait outside. Cranky exhausted beyond physical endurance I still managed to be friendly.
I was hustled and scammed by the delivery guys. There was no compassion or understanding. The proverbial last straw. I was lied to. I had paid the delivery and service charge and considering that regular customers like me were keeping restaurants above water, I expect customer service. Delivery guys would show up three hours late with cold food. They would ignore instructions and wake my father. They would walk into wrong buildings. If I paid a certain amount they would try to weasel an extra ten out of me by telling me that the receipt was wrong.
One in particular saw that I was injured (happened while care giving) and wouldn't drive into the driveway but wait for me to limp toward him. Why? So when I switched to COD he could give me back the wrong amount where it was not well lit. Another delivered something worth 20 showed me some number in a foreign language and demanded a forty dollar tip pretending not to speak English. Another guy told me that he was earning three bucks an hour and had to pay fuel costs. Restaurants who offered a lunch time discount ended up with deliveries past five so that the driver would scoop the difference. The delivery company handled all of this so that restaurants weren't even aware this was happening.
That there was a senior going hungry; no one cared about.
When I asked a really nice guy he told me that they get minimum but a bonus for number of deliveries per hour. Any fuel or vehicle cost was carried by the company. The drivers had gotten public support by lying and telling sobstories. The entitlement was unbelievable. In dire circumstances I was forced to tip and feel sorry for them, but what about me?
There was a problem. The company wasn't paying them their tips. They got successfully sued. (I'll post the article again when I find it), but in the interim the customer got the brunt of that by being asked to triple tip. The customer has no responsibility about how a company treats their employees.
I'm still angry and my support has changed. I thought of my customer service days. I would have never treated a customer that way. In a restaurant if a waiter kept screwing up an order or provided bad service he would have gotten the 10 percent. But a waiter is cleaning tables and actually doing much more than bringing a bag from a to b. And when a senior's life depends on it? No tolerance.
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