Customer Disservice

[migrated from myspace blog]

It seems to me lately that people in service industries aren't even trying. They don't really care anything about doing a good job, and would do their job from home if they thought they could get away with it. It's like not effort is being made, and the only reason anyone will help you is to get you to stop bugging them.

Red Lobster: Clueless waiter allowed three of us to sit at a table with garlic cheese biscuits and 1 dirty biscuit plate without ever bringing any extras or clean ones. My side dish was not what I ordered and I think he stopped at the table a total of two times after taking our order. We actually had to send a waitress to look for him so we could get the bill.

Sam's Club: After making a purchase that required going to the customer service, they took approximately no interest in actually getting what was already paid for. Couldn't find the keys to the cage, and after they did, took their sweet time actually getting it.

Circuit City: Okay, first of all, their stores are just arranged poorly. The cash registers are scattered all over the store, and they apparently don't do any training whatsoever for Black Friday the way Best Buy does. But $13 for a 2 gig micro flash drive for my keychain was too good to pass up at 5 AM. The girl running the cash register in the back by the computer products wasn't even in her own department. At least one employee had failed to show up. It took two people to figure out how to open the little plastic boxes that hold smaller products using the magnet. It took her about 35 minutes to get through 6 customers. Meanwhile there are about 300 more people still in line outside in the cold because she doesn't know how to ring up a computer, and the cash register software is running slow. (Then I saw the guy who figured out how to open the security boxes later tonight at the Schuster Center where he was apparently seeing Cats. I wasn't there to see Cats, but that's a whole different story.) It's one thing to find a good deal, but is it really worth is when it costs 2 1/2 hours of sleep and a total of an hour standing in line as well?