Surviving 'Uinique' Service Quality Standards

Retailers. Haiz… I suppose there’s no getting away from them, those who have poor service. I suppose if I wrote this, some people will start pointing fingers at my staff (hah) but really, they are responsive enough unlike some places I’ve visited over the Chinese New Year weekend. In fact, one of the things I ask my staff to do is to pay attention to how reasonable a request is and do it for the customer’s sake.

Conversely, I was in a queue, and it said ‘express lane’ for 8 items or less, right… so it ended up that I was the second person in front of the counter. Lo and behold, when I ended up at the counter, after having passed my stuff through, one of the items had no tag, and was not registered in the POS machine. This girl, whose name according to the company’s kind name tag was “New Staff”, promptly walked away from the counter, leaving me standing there… not a word uttered. The express lane turned into something of a ironic paradox… she came back a several minutes later and still couldn’t get the offending item to reveal itself in the POS database. So as a forgiving customer, I just told her to forget it. She was so slow, that although I had change to receive from her, I just walked away, half worried that she might not know what to do with the excess change.

I’m certain that there are instances where service quality doesn’t always meet our standards, but I figure I don’t have to make a mountain out of a molehill. After all, it wasn’t really life threatening… well it did kill a few minutes of my time, but I’m still alive…