From the Daily Telegraph:

Sales assistants are ruder, more ignorant and less helpful than they were 10 years ago, according to one of the biggest surveys of its kind.

Overall, customer service has fallen by 3.3 percentage points while customer satisfaction is down by 1.6 points. The biggest decline was in knowledge - which fell by seven points.

Only one in four customers were served within a minute of queuing for a cash till, a fifth of sales staff did not smile while serving customers, 22 per cent had little knowledge of their products, and 24 per cent failed to say goodbye at the end of a transaction.

The survey was carried out by a consultancy called Grass Roots and was based on 1775 visits by mystery shoppers. The consultancy’s spokesman said,

…pressure on costs meant there was less money to spend on staff and training. “Staff are equally ready and willing, but less able to provide good service.”

It seems odd to me that the only way a member of staff can say thank you or greet you in a mannered way is if their company can afford the right kind of training. Manners which, apart from product knowledge, are what constitutes most people’s experience of customer service, are difficult to teach. If a person has them then training is of marginal use; if they don’t have them then training is of no use since all the training will give them is a set of techniques - which will be eventually forgotten.

At my local supermarket cashiers are told to greet each customer and offer to help pack their shopping for them. It’s a nice touch - made much more noticeable when you go elsewhere and the cashier barely acknowledges you at any point in the transaction. However, even within my local supermarket’s courtesy regime there is plenty of scope for the individual to adapt the company’s rules of engagement - from the cheerful, smiling greeting and enthusiastic assistance of one employee to, well, a total ignorance of the rules by another.

What it comes down to is the norms of society, the standards of behaviour that we insist on in our dealings with each other. And these have been degraded over time such that, now, it is a fairly accurate rule of thumb that if it’s polite service you require the older the assistant the better. These people have, in most cases, carried their culture’s habit of courtesy with them and have not succumbed to the brute insolence of today’s ‘rights but no responsibilities’ brigade.

They also have some command of the English language which means they can convey requests or information in whole, meaningful sentences - unlike my recent experience in my bank where the person allocating appointments asked/instructed (I’m not sure which) me to ‘Sit over there, yeah?’

In the end though I wonder if the decline in customer service - which may well mirror a general decline in incivility - is necessarily an increase in rudeness. For somebody to be actually rude implies they are aware of society’s norms and conventions with regards to manners but chooses to ignore them. Something I detect in the blank visage of the average youth when spoken to is actually the absence of confidence, rather than the wilful ignorance of accepted courtesies. Too often the person seems to lack the conversational skills necessary to navigate the white waters of mainstream communication - and he or she appears to be acutely aware of it.

This is faintly tragic. As the wonders of cultural instant gratification erase the human ability to focus and pay attention and the evils of state-provided education keep the lower classes well and truly in their place the victims of these attacks on human potential seem aware at some primitive level that they’re being marginalised, left out and deprived in a truly fundamental way.

If there is any such thing as social exclusion it is the removal of the basic ability to communicate with one’s fellow citizen that is its ultimate manifestation. Unable to perform adequately in a job interview, to debate with local or national representatives, to engage in the daily affairs of their community or country or to speak up effectively for themselves or their families when the need arises it seems that some people are condemned to live next to society but not necessarily in it.

It is an affront to democracy - and a betrayal of the working classes who are least able to spend their way out of difficulty - that a significant portion of our children cannot speak, write or converse effectively and it is a crime against all our people that the means of their subjugation - vacuous and corrupting entertainment, readily available narcotics, free and easy response to criminality, the state-sanctioned demeaning of the family, removal of most structures of authority, the subordination of educational striving to the more pressing needs of meeting governmental targets, and the exalting of the satisfaction of individual impulses over the need for humans to attend to duties before rights - are becoming more rather than less prevalent. All attempts to improve people against such an onslaught is an uphill struggle and one destined to fail.

Next time your local supermarket oik responds to you with a belligerent frown and a meaningless grunt it might be well to recognise that, rather than being wilfully ignorant, he may simply be a product of a depraved society and a corrupt governing class. In a country awash with so-called victims, he might be a genuine article.