Re: Target restaurant is this discrimination?



Scott en Aztlán <newsgroup> writes:

FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED is a concept that many service people have
forgotten about (or never learned).

I'd say that in the case of fast-food restaurants, it's because the
employees are either too young and inexperienced, or too stupid, to
have much common sense.


[Albertsons]

There is one woman behind the deli counter who is cleaning the
rotisserie; she turns around, looks at me, and then turns back
to her cleaning. Obviously serving customers is not her job,
and of course it's too much trouble to call another employee
to the counter because customers are waiting.

I was sitting at the bar in a local pizza parlor one time, where
I'd stopped in for a beer after finishing some errands in the same
shopping center. After I'd waited a few minutes, a kid of about
16 came over to the bar area from the kitchen to get something.
He never even made eye contact with me, and as he was about to head
back to the kitchen, I called out, "Excuse me!"

"I can't help you," he said. "Then get someone over here who can,
genius! Initiative is a *good* thing!" Sheesh!

Then there was the time I went to Home Depot to return a few small
plumbing parts that it turned out I hadn't needed. Home Depot has
a dedicated register just inside the entrance for customers who are
returning items. The clerk at this register was looking at some
form on a clipboard, studiously ignoring me. After a couple of
minutes, I decided I'd had enough. "Excuse me, " I said. "You
have a customer waiting to be helped. You can do _that_ on your
_own_ time!" The guy reacted as though he'd been slapped. In
reality, he'd been knocked upside the head with a clue-by-four.

Now, I can understand the awkwardness of being in the middle of
some mundane but necessary task when a customer arrives. But the
guy should've at least greeted me, acknowledged my presence, and
said he'd be with me in just a moment. But the register's sign
was lit, signifying that it was open for business. And as events
showed, it was quite possible for the employee to stop what he was
doing and assist me, then go back to the task at hand.


And then there are banks with drive-through windows. There can
be 20 people standing in line inside the branch, but the moment
a car pulls up to the drive-through window, a teller will leave
the front and go back and serve the person in the car!

A corollary to that is the idea that anyone who calls on the tele-
phone takes precedence over anyone who's there in person. Of course,
that's precisely backwards -- but it illustrates the power Mr. Bell's
creation has on the modern psyche that so many people think that way.

If someone is in my office talking to me and my telephone rings, I'll
ignore it. This takes people aback, because they've become so condit-
ioned to the idea that the telephone comes first. Not with me, it
doesn't.

I was in another pizza parlor one time, having stopped in to order a
pizza to take out. When I was in midsentence, the phone rang. Without
so much as an "Excuse me," the counterman immediately turned around to
the back counter to answer the call. The caller obviously had a long
and complicated order. By the time the counterman finished taking it
and turned back around, I was gone. I never went back. The employee
was probably too damned clueless to perceive any connection.


Bottom line, most of the "service" people these days don't give a ***
about actually providing good service. They don't respect you or your
time, because they get paid the same $5.50/hour whether you buy
anything at their store or not.

That's a manifestation of a larger problem: the fact that people aren't
taught manners in any meaningful sense of the term anymore.


Should you tolerate it? Definitely NOT.

Hear, hear.



Geoff

--
"Meanwhile, I'm sitting there chomping on Cocoa Puffs
wondering what Life is all about." -- Scott Amspoker

.