What is customer Service ?

30 or 40 years ago when you wanted service, you asked for it and it was delivered.

Not perfectly and not quickly, but you really had no other choice. Machines didn't wait on you in a never ending drive to improve efficiency, people did.

We were not "irrationally exhuberant" about getting a meal or buying shoes.

If you needed a suit, you went to a tailor and had one made or went to a mens store and had one fitted. If you needed to cash a check on Friday night, you went to a grocery store or a bar where they knew you and probably also knew you were coming. If you were hungry and were not at home, you would go to the local restaurant and sit down and get waited on, because that was the way things were , ....back in the day. Shoes came from shoe stores, Watches came from watch shops, sporting equipment came from sporting goods strores and every one of these places had one thing in common.

Can you guess what it was ? ......People waited on you and not machines.

Now days you can go to super WallyMega World, buy all of your stuff, pay for it at an automated checkout and never have to speak to another human being during the entire time.

They said when computers were invented and made popular that it would be the beginning of the paperless office. They didn't project it would be the end of human contact though.

Think about it.

You wake up in the morning to an automated clock radio, have coffee from an automated maker, read the news on-line or watch headline news, get in you creature comfort car with cup holders for your coffee, drive to where ever you work, talk on the phone all the way in to the office, answer voice mails, answer emails, fullfill request for your paperless time, zip through a drive for lunch where the motto is "service in 60 seconds or less !", eat , finish up at work, go to the filing station and pay at the pump for your gasoline, stop at the supermarket for milk and tonites dinner, pay for it at the automated self service cashier and go home, lock your car with the beeper on your key ring, see if your DVR recorded all your favorite shoes, pop pizza in the oven and you concievably could have went through this entire day with very little interation with any other human being ! We were efficient though weren't we?

Then we sit and around and bitch about how someone who served us at the restaurant we went out to on Friday night was "rude" to us. We do not even know how to communicate to one another anymore and we expect good service at restaurants?