Why Does Service Everywhere Suck?

Nobody takes pride in their work, and it shows.

Service today is terrible. I don’t mean cell service—though for me, at least, that also seems concerningly true—rather, I mean the service you get at an establishment that is at least superficially dedicated to providing good service to its customers. Let me explain.

The busboy or cashier at a restaurant or store wears AirPods. You’re not really sure whether he hears you when you talk to him, partly because he only really speaks in grunts and largely avoids making eye contact. At a discount clothing store, medium-sized shirts are often on large-sized hangers, and the hangers are all out of order. At Target, some pieces of clothing are stuffed on random shelves next to the pots and pans, and a container of Ben & Jerry’s has somehow escaped its freezer and instead sits melting next to the lightbulbs. As you navigate a discount shoe store, abandoned carts clog up the aisles, causing traffic jams. In the neighboring aisle, a woman is having a video call at top volume, seemingly oblivious to the other people in the store.

At restaurants, assuming you don’t order via a QR code taped to your table, servers take your order on a smartphone-looking device, which they present to you when it’s time to pay. You tap your card and then are asked to choose a tip option out of three, the smallest of which is 20 percent. (You’re also asked to tip at one of the QR-code restaurants.) It’s an awkward moment: If your service wasn’t great, then you either have to choose the lowest option (which was formerly reserved for great to exceptional service) or take the time to enter a custom amount, when you have to calculate yourself—and it’s not that you can’t do simple math, but it takes longer than just pressing a button, and the server is standing there the whole time, knowing that you didn’t choose the easy (and therefore more remunerative for them) option, and you know that your server knows this, and your concentration falters a bit, and you’re more likely to make a mistake or just take a longer time than you normally would to type in the amount you want to tip them, further compounding the awkwardness of the moment. At that same restaurant, if you have a party of six or more, the restaurant usually adds in a 20 percent tip automatically, regardless of the quality of the service you receive, and sometimes your server tells you this but sometimes they don’t, but either way, you’re presented with the device when you pay, and if your server didn’t warn you ahead of time, then you’re confused as to why the three options are 2 percent, 5 percent, and 7 percent instead of the more familiar 20, 22, and 25. You know that something odd is happening here, but you’re thrown off by it and you don’t want to seem like an asshole or an ignoramus, so instead of asking what the deal is you choose the highest option, because you’re normally a good tipper and think that 7 percent isn’t nearly a good-enough tip for the service you receive, but oh well, it’s the closest option to 20 percent that you see. Just after you tip, you realize that the tip was already included, and so you’ve accidentally just tipped nearly a third more than you’d normally tip under such circumstances, but it’s too late for you to do anything about it because you’ve already paid.

Grocery stores are poorly stocked, and the workers (who are nowhere to be seen) seem as perplexed as you are about where the Dijon mustard went, yet you sense no curiosity on their part about when the next shipment will come in and no urgency about trying to help you figure out what to do instead (“Would yellow mustard work instead?” or “Normally the Harris Teeter has this stuff” are both acceptable and not-difficult-to-manage responses to this inconvenience). Once you’ve collected all of your goods, you end up in a long line of similarly discontented customers—so long that you contemplate putting the stuff back in a convenient location and leaving the store. If you stay in line, you wish you hadn’t, or you wish you had chosen a less-busy time to shop, because the line moves at a snail’s pace. Once you get closer to the front of the line, you realize the culprit: the cashiers, who are themselves moving at a snail’s pace. Some of them are talking to each other as if there aren’t 30 people in line waiting for the cashiers to get their shit together so they can get on with their lives. Even if they aren’t rudely ignoring customers, they are rudely operating without any sense of urgency at all, scanning barcodes and folding clothes and removing security tags and placing items into bags as if they’d be fired for going faster. They don’t try to engage you in conversation, which is fine, considering conversations with cashiers are always awkward, but neither do they treat you with any respect other than the bare minimum. You leave grumpily 15 minutes after you got in line to check out, only to discover when you get home that the security tag on your bathing suit wasn’t removed (but the alarm didn’t go off when you left the store, leaving you to speculate about how easy it would be to just steal all the things you paid for).

But here’s the thing: This type of behavior is not just confined to the low-paid employees at places like Marshall’s or Walmart or Aldi. I see it every day, albeit in a different form, at my own organization, a high-powered think tank in Washington, DC. You email the president or other high-up person at another organization about an important and timely matter—for instance, you want to invite them to present at a conference. You are very clear and specific in your email, even including some strategic bolding and underlining to draw the reader’s eye to the important passages, because you know their time is valuable and you don’t want to waste it with an overly long and grating email. And yet: The person you email never responds. Not even after you’ve followed up two or three times and given them an extension on the respond-by date. This happens more often than you might suspect. At my own organization, there are scholars who consistently fail to produce a halfway-impressive amount of output in the form of blog posts, op-eds, articles, or reports, and yet it’s not clear that they’re doing anything more productive with their time. And you can’t really guarantee that they are doing anything more productive with their time, even if you want to take their word for it, because they live hours away by plane and almost never come into the office. (Robert, if you’re reading this, I’m not talking about you.) These people are getting paid six figures by my organization, and they receive excellent benefits in the form of health insurance and automatic 403(b) contributions of 12 percent of their salary once per month regardless of whether they themselves contribute. They too avoid answering emails if such emails require them to do something menial or even marginally time-consuming.

At the low-level employee level, you can never be sure if your employees are taking advantage of you by taking more sick time than they really ought to. Again, you want to take people at their word, but by doing so you’ve inadvertently left open the door for the nontrivial number of employees who will take advantage of the leeway you’re giving them to call in sick when they’re not actually sick, or ask to work from home for no particularly good reason other than because it’s more convenient for them.

I started thinking about all of this yesterday, when I went out to find myself a new pair of hiking boots. The last time I went for a real hike was close to a year ago, on a popular trail in Shenandoah National Park. The boots I wore dug into the front of my ankle, to the point where I had visible bruises there for several days. So yesterday, I went with my wife to Dick’s Sporting Goods in Falls Church, Virginia, to find myself a new pair of boots. The selection of hiking boots at the Dick’s in Falls Church isn’t as good as that of the Dick’s in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where I’m from, probably because the hiking around here isn’t as good or intense or common as it is in Berkshire County. Still, there were two pairs of boots that I wanted to try on. I looked around and saw a teenager in a green polo (untucked) wandering around the shoe section, not actively searching for customers to help but rather aimlessly stepping here and there, likely to avoid having to do his job. I cornered him and asked him if he carried a nine-and-a-half in either of the boots I carried in my hand. He scanned the barcode on one of them with his Dick’s-provided smartphone and said, without any trace of sorrow, “We only have these in a nine.” Ditto for the other boot. “Really? Only a nine?” I asked, hoping for more—at least a “Sorry, man,” or a “Yeah, that’s weird, let me check the back real quick just to make sure.” Neither of those responses was forthcoming, so we left.

As is her wont, my wife decided she wanted to also go to Ross, a discount store akin to TJ Maxx and Marshall’s (while we were in the store, she described it as a cross between a TJ Maxx and a Goodwill, which I thought was apt). In the shoe section, there were various sandals and heels and sneakers scattered about on the dirty linoleum. A woman speaking another language loudly conversed with an acquaintance on a video call; when I glanced at the woman’s phone, I noticed that the woman on the other end of the call was in a near replica of the store we were in, also in the shoe aisle, meaning that two women were chatting near the top of their conversational tone while shopping for shoes at different versions of basically the same store. I’m still not sure what to make of that. In any case, eventually we made it to the men’s side of the store, where the burglar alarm on one of the pairs of shoes chirped incessantly, cicada-like, without any intervention from store employees, who in all likelihood found the sound to be part of the general background noise of the place. We went to Marshall’s next, where my wife bought a sweatshirt that, as she learned today, has a hole in the arm.

On our way back to Arlington, we stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through. We pulled up to the speaker, whereupon we were greeted with silence for a good 15 seconds. A man’s voice eventually garbled something incoherently at us. My wife ordered two small, black iced coffees with one pump of caramel flavoring. “No cream or sugar?” asked the man’s voice. “No,” my wife replied. On the screen appeared our order: two iced coffees with cream. No caramel flavoring. My wife corrected the man, and we pulled forward to the window. We waited behind one car for at least a minute, even though the person in front of us ordered just one drink. We pulled up to the window and paid, and the woman there handed us two straws but no coffees. She didn’t say why she didn’t have them ready for us (recall that we had already waited for at least a minute behind the other car). We waited for a minute, then two or three. We could see into the restaurant the entire time. There were no customers waiting inside. It was just the two workers: the man who took our order and the woman who handed us our straws. They were apparently talking to each other. Eventually the woman handed us our coffees, without any apology or explanation for why it took so long. We drove away dissatisfied but not surprised—it wasn’t the first time this sort of thing had happened to us.

Is this problem getting worse than before? I try to avoid falling into the nostalgia trap—the dangerous notion that the Before Times are better on various dimensions than today, which flies in the face of much empirical evidence—but I can’t help thinking that today’s work culture, which in the service industry necessarily impacts the quality of customer service, is indeed worse than it was, say, before the pandemic. It’s not that you couldn’t get bad service before—it’s that the incidences of bad service were fewer and farther between. Now it’s everywhere, to the point where you’re surprised to get good service anywhere these days.

I can’t help blaming the pandemic. Some workers were deemed “essential,” which maybe gave them an inflated sense of their own importance. Those who weren’t deemed essential could work from home. This caused some resentment to be built up between the groups: The essential workers were risking their lives to supply the foodstuffs and the health care of the non-essential workers, who felt like they got knocked down a peg because they weren’t considered essential. Meanwhile, the professional class, who were working from home, no longer felt like they had a healthy work-life balance. When they were in the office every day, they had clear boundaries between work time and home time (even if these boundaries had been steadily eroded by smartphones, which allow you instant access to emails outside of work hours). But now that they were home at all times, they were implicitly expected to always be online. This pressure to always be available to answer emails led to a backlash against such pressure. That backlash expanded to include work in general: For some nontrivial portion of the working population, hard work itself became the problem, not just the eroding of work-life boundaries. As is usually the case, nuanced and fair critiques of a phenomenon quickly get lost in an all-encompassing rebellion against such norms.

But that doesn’t explain the degradation in service at, say, Target. Perhaps at such places, employees got used to blaming the supply chain for the various ills you encountered there. The supply chain was a convenient scapegoat because you weren’t blaming anyone in particular. Instead, you were blaming a vast, amorphous cloud of systems and companies and policies that led to a jumbled mess of poorly stocked deli meat and baby formula. Maybe people got used to blaming others for the problems at their stores, and so they stopped thinking it was their job to clean up the shelves or put the shopping carts back in their corrals or clean up the spilled Skittles. (Of course, many of these issues are the customers’ fault. But I think it used to be the mentality among service workers that it was part of their job to clean up after unruly customers—an annoying and inconvenient part, to be sure, but a vital one nonetheless.)

Still, the pandemic feels like an unsatisfying answer to the question of what’s to blame for the degradation of service and work habits in general. You can attribute a lot of bad outcomes to the pandemic, but you have to be careful about blaming the virus too much. After all, an explanation that explains everything ceases to have value as an explanation.

It’s tempting to blame technology. Everyone is on their phones these days, and that fries our brains and depletes our attention spans and makes everyone irritable. Maybe that has some validity—certainly in the case of the busboy wearing the AirPods, a relatively new technology—but does it really explain the slow service at the checkout line at TJ Maxx? Another explanation is that such poor service is a symptom of late-stage capitalism, in which multinational conglomerates own all the chain stores and nobody takes pride in their work because the people who work there don’t own the stores or even know the people who own the stores. That explanation also has some utility. But that doesn’t account for the large companies that do provide good service, or the isolated branches of large companies staffed by hardworking and pleasant employees. Finally, to wade into controversial territory, it may be tempting to blame immigrants for poor service, since many low-wage jobs in the service industry are taken by immigrants who haven’t assimilated to the hustle-bustle of American life. Again, there may be some validity to this explanation, but that doesn’t account for the fact that home-grown Americans often provide service that’s just as bad as that of their immigrant coworkers.

Whatever the explanation, there’s little doubt that service has taken a nosedive—or, at least, it’s just as terrible as it’s ever been, and I’ve just started noticing it more.

I’ll conclude with a note of optimism. You’ll recall that I struck out at Dick’s when trying to find a pair of hiking boots. After our Dunkin’ fiasco, my wife and I headed back to Arlington to a local store called Casual Adventures Outfitters. We were greeted as soon as we walked in the door by a good-natured cashier who commented favorably upon my Black Crowes shirt. As soon as our conversation concluded, a second employee asked if I needed help finding anything. I explained what I was looking for and the employee gave me several recommendations. I told him my size. He disappeared into the back, coming out a few minutes later with a few options (including one that he hadn’t mentioned before). I tried on three pairs of hiking boots and weighed the pros and cons with the employee, who offered to measure my feet to see which one was larger (it was the left). Meanwhile, my wife was approached by another employee, who found a pair of shoes for her in under two minutes. After I made my selection, the employee offered to take my shoebox up to the counter so my wife and I could wander unencumbered through the store.

Yes, the store was a local operation rather than a big national chain. Yes, the workers there were Americans rather than immigrants. No, none of the employees were on their phones or listening to music with headphones on. But that doesn’t mean that other stores need to look exactly the same as this one in order to provide excellent service. All it takes is pride in one’s work and a desire to serve customers well. Is that so hard?