The Customer Is Always Wrong

What the heck happened?

There was a time that, though lacking, customer service was still a thing. 

Those days though seem long gone now as we have entered the post-Covid world of Meh. 

If you ask the corporations they tell you it’s the workforce. 

If you ask the workers they’ll tell you it’s the customers. 

If you ask the customers they’ll blame the companies. 

The thing is though that we’re all to blame and while it could be fixed, we just don’t care enough to fix it. 

Naw. 

I remember deep into Covid when the world had opened up a little bit and you could get groceries and food delivered and while it wasn’t ideal, it was something. It kept you sane, kept necessities in the house, and it kept some folks that needed to work working. 

It honestly surprised me though that in a time when restaurants were clinging to survival that their service and meals got worse. 

Take out seems like the easiest thing for a restaurant – you still make and sell food but don’t have to deal with customers for an hour or more. 

Sure, there’s still the overhead of a business and there’s people that were laid off because of no sit down service but the core business could survive. 

Over and over again though we got orders that weren’t done correctly, or weren’t even good. 

It didn’t matter if we placed the order online or on the phone, they were never right and rarely good. 

The customer service wasn’t any better as you dealt with sullen and ‘over it’ workers over and over again. 

And I get it. 

I didn’t wanna work during the pandemic. 

I admire anyone that was willing to put themselves at risk for us lunkheads but that doesn’t mean you should act like a petulant child because of that. If people are jerks, I am sorry, it sucks and it isn’t fair, but some of us also have families and just need to get the things that we need. 

The thing is though that it felt like these restaurant managers were asleep at the wheel, figuring it didn’t matter if they had good food and service or not because people would still come. 

That worked for the bigger establishments but many, many places had to close because they didn’t have the resources to survive closure. How crummy is it to take your customer base for granted when others didn’t have that luxury?

Now that we’re out of the heart of the pandemic and the world is getting back to normal, well, the ‘new’ normal, it’s startling to see how things have changed. As if someone moved the furniture around while we were out. 

Businesses we once loved have closed. 

Banks we frequented have reduced their size and in-person service options, and there’s a strange hangover of frustration that hangs in the air. 

People are still mad but they aren’t sure who to be mad at. 

We lost so much during that time away, during the pandemic. 

We lost so much of the connections we had, so many of the places we loved, we lost people, and more than any of it we lost time. 

And now that we’re on the other side…the anger remains. 

And I get that too. 

It’s weird that restaurants still have a sort of attitude of – whatever – as service and quality still aren’t firing on all cylinders. 

Some of it is the side-hustle nature of the world that seemed to take hold too where so many of us worked remote and the world just sorta fell into the habit of a sweatpants/yoga pants mentality and, hey man, it’s cool. 

And while we all need to be a lot more laid back about things and not treat everything as if it is the end of the world we do also have responsibilities and, call me crazy but I don’t need my groceries smelling like the blunt you just smoked. 

Is that too much to ask?

It feels like, with everything we lost during the pandemic, the thing we lost and are slowly realizing we have is ourselves. 

Our compassion and connectedness. 

Our empathy. 

We just don’t care about one another. 

We barely seem to care about ourselves. 

It was like some of our joy was drained from us as we hid from one another in our homes and apartments and watched as our leaders fought, as people called for justice that had been refused them, and so many of us screamed that the world was all a lie and that only they knew the truth. 

We all went a little mad during the lockdown so it’s no wonder that it is showing. 

The most insidious part of this is that businesses shrunk their staff and their service under the cover of Covid and never went back to normal as we all had to. They cry now how OH, DEAR, NO ONE WANTS TO WORK but they want part time workers who don’t earn benefits and who sorta take what they can get because the market is harder than ever. They want interchangeable parts so they can retain profits and not worry about the overhead of workers. 

We keep chipping away at the foundation of our economy, the blue collar frontline workers, and wonder why the economy sucks while there are more and more millionaires complaining over how they are treated in the media. 

It’s crazy. 

The rich have someone write a check to a charity then sit back in their chairs and feel good about that money they never even knew they had and won’t realize is gone while so many of us have to take second and third part time jobs to try to survive. 

It’s madness and we’re all locked in the asylum together. 

It’s sad, how much we have lost but sadder how little we refuse to do to reconnect and make the world not even just what it was but better. 

We’re too busy brooding and being frustrated to see world right outside of ourselves. 

The world moves on, we just won’t move on with it, like a breakup we refuse to let go. 

We’re stuck, stuck, stuck. 

…c…