Anita Creamer: Bad service is all about attitude, not about age

Bad customer service isn't young people's fault – at least not exclusively.

But there's nothing like a good generational war to stir up a little nationwide publicity.

As you may have read recently, an Iowa communications professor named William Withers has christened the phenomenon "the service gap." He blames inattentive and uninterested customer service on the generational differences between the people most likely to have money to spend and the people most likely to have to serve them.

Older people expect to be waited on politely and asked how they can be helped, according to this theory, while younger people, more comfortable with the impersonal milieu of text messaging and the Internet, would rather chat among themselves than tend to customers' needs.

Sure, blame the kids.

Why not? They're used to it.

No matter what, it seems, when you're 20, experts in widely assorted fields insist it's your fault that standards are slipping.

Maybe that's true. Or maybe it's ridiculously easy to indict an entire generation for the sins of a few.

The clerk who ended my 20-year patronage of a particular supermarket chain isn't a kid. He's 40ish, and he's been in the service industry much too long to try to heckle shoppers into acknowledging his presence. But heckle he did.

Lots of retailers seem to require their employees to chirp out greetings to customers. This, apparently, is what many clerks think the words "customer service" mean: If you say "hi" to customers, you never have to do something so demeaning as actually offer to help.

Blame their lack of training, not their age.

Even so, when busy and preoccupied customers fail to greet them back, it's the rare clerk who'll mutter: "Oh, my mistake. I didn't realize you had a problem with your hearing."

This one did.

The thinly veiled hostility of a Greetings Nazi isn't generally on my grocery list, and neither is the nagging fear of being videotaped on someone's cell phone while telling off a stock clerk.

Who needs the aggravation? So I've changed stores.

They don't care, these huge chains. Your many decades' worth of devoted business means nothing to them.

They've already gobbled up most of the competition, and according to their analysts' market projections, there are plenty of other consumers left out there for them to annoy.

Conglomerates clearly aren't interested in the individual customer, and the indifferent tone set by corporate parents goes a long way toward explaining why the state of customer service has reached such appalling lows.

Not to belabor the point, but young people can hardly be held responsible for the business models their elders have created.

If anything, lacking the confidence to take their complaints up the chain of command, younger people are too often victimized by corporations' impersonality. Sure, we're the victims of corporate bureaucracy, too, but at least we're not too shy to make a little noise about it.

Besides, even taking corporate apathy into account, it's simply too easy to pin customer-service problems on big businesses or generational differences. The fact is, some people are rude.

The hair stylist at a small salon who kept me waiting, then spent a long time texting rather than actually dealing with my hair? She wasn't a kid; she was certainly old enough to know better.

The sales clerk at a big furniture chain who took the time to call and make sure the coffee table I ordered had been delivered? She was a 20-something working her way through school.

Maybe the good professor in Iowa has studies that show otherwise, but most of us know from experience that hard work, good manners and decent customer service don't necessarily depend on an employee's age.

About the writer:

• Anita Creamer's column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays in Scene. Reach her at (916) 321-1136 or acreamer@sacbee.com. Back columns: www.sacbee.com/creamer.