b52s Posted December 31, 2009 Posted December 31, 2009 The fact that you are getting so wound up here does still make me think you saw things in the behaviour of others that is not really there. Why on earth would the teenager deliberately ram the trollies in to you? It just does not make sense. Probably not deliberate, but teenagers sometimes can have their heads up their arses....I wouldn't have said what the OP said though. At least the clerk apologized.
Author Marek Posted December 31, 2009 Author Posted December 31, 2009 Is that the way you think? Not at all. It's the way others think. At least the clerk apologized No, she didn't. That was the trolley pusher. It seems like I'm making mountains out of molehills here; however this happens to me all the time.
littlebittle Posted December 31, 2009 Posted December 31, 2009 "...the supermarket is very crowded... the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out... So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college. But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera. ...if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is... ...Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The point is: "The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people... the alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing." from http://goaheadsueme.blogspot.com/2005/05/david-foster-wallace-at-kenyon-college.html
theBrokenMuse Posted December 31, 2009 Posted December 31, 2009 Customer service has gone downhill in the US. But visit japan, it's the opposite. I remember when I used to work at the grocery store, we had to greet customers, wear a shirt and tie, count the money back at them, offer them plastic or paper, were required to make at least some kind of conversation. When I was sixteen and worked at the major grocery store chain for this part of the US, I was reprimanded for being 'too personable' with the customers. The store manager told me that certain regulars were seeking me out and then holding up the smooth flow of the line because they wanted to chat with me. That jerk actually put me on probation for it and forbade me to engage in small talk with the customers. That's the state customer service is in the US. Many corporations flat out don't find it of importance anymore.
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