The Customer is always Wrong!

I’m a valued customer somewhere. There is a corporation out there, probably many, that are fighting tooth and nail to keep me informed of new products, solicit my business, and make me feel welcomed through there many tentacle'd expansive customer friendly locations. It is typical of most consumers to expect a warm and friendly scripted greeting from minimum wage employees to let them know they are important and special in the eye of the great incorporated vortex. If corporations could speak with an Omni-present voice it might sound something like this

“Greetings valued customer, welcome to our comfortable well lit epicenter rife with familiarity and manufactured merchandise. As you browse our vast selection of lifestyle necessities allow us to exclaim how exuberantly peppy we are to receive your business. If you walk away unsatisfied let us know and we will happily kiss your ass until are tongues are buried tonsil deep inside your rectum.”

Unfortunately corporations are (by all legal ramifications) invisible entities free of the cumbersome burdens of the policies that they set for their unfortunate army of minimum wage employees. The same employees they shuffle the former responsibility too.

If you’ve ever left a retail location and thought to yourself “wow, what sincere and caring workers” don’t fool yourself. Those workers are forced to be disingenuous at risk of losing there income, most of them hate you, some would like to see you dead, and all are the modern industrialized equivalents of indentured servants.

That is the reality.

Despite what corporations claim about having “excellent customer service” they invariably shift the weight of the claim to the employees that have the least to gain, make the smallest wages, and have the most minimal influence over the policies they are called on to enforce.

This creates discontentment in the heart of Joe Blow workforce. You may say too yourself at this point in my rant “They signed up for it, they knew what they were getting themselves into, they could get another job, haven’t they ever heard the phrase the customer is always right!” To this argument, my only refutation …''.fuck you.
 

Whoever made up this customer is always right bullshit has obviously never worked in any of the varied service fields that make up the bulk of employment opportunities in this country. For those of you that have, you know that most consumers will consistently live up to the standard of laziness and automation that corporations create for them; an entire culture of incompetent, incapable, self important deficit spenders lamenting the days of old and the death of customer service.

An entire culture of marketing chumps waddling around looking for another fix in identity of product. Demanding “customer service”. There’s another multi-syllabled distortion that creates dissent among the workforce, the use of special titles that make a position sound more important than it really is, of course the pay never reflects the euphemism and addressing the disparity is tantamount to treason against the company. They might fire you under the guise that “you were lowering morale.” Ahhh, the flexibility of at will employment.

Are you starting to see why the employees that work for some of the largest corporations on earth might be a little less that satisfied with there current position? No? If not let me enlighten you with an example of a dilemma I experience firsthand everyday. I get up to go to work at about 6:30 in the morning, running out the door without eating breakfast and a change of cloths in tow. I go strait to my second job at noon without eating lunch and I work there till five.

All in all I work ten hours a day for which I receive no overtime, no benefits, and a meager barely sustainable wage. I have no chance of upward mobility, nothing left over for savings after bills, and I have to fundamentally alter my personality throughout the course of the day to provide a safe and comfortable atmosphere for people to purchase frivolities in. At this rate I’ll never be able to buy a house,

I’ll never be able be able to own property, and I’ll never be able to retire assuring I’ll work to the day of my death and still owe money on my grave stone. If I get injured I’m fucked. If my car breaks down I’m fucked. If the corporation I work for decides that I am not enthusiastic enough at 7am they will fire me, and then I’m guess what? Yea, fucked. Welcome to the gilded ghettos of America, here’s your barcode.

What happens if I get fired, well them I’m a marked man.

Try explaining that you got canned because your former employer was a dehumanizing and degrading autonomic machine seeking to gentrify the community and homogenize the culture. Try explaining that you refused to stand idly by while an emotionless omni-present organization encouraged the debasement of human connection by reducing people to rats and feeder bars. Could you say that during an interview? Would you?
 

Most of us would lie, most of you would tell me to lie, to get the job. See the vicious cycle here? Nothing is accomplished, no goal is reached, no battle won and my problems would simply change settings, and now I’m a liar. Are you starting to see the frustration here? Is it making sense?

I feel this frustration when I’m closing up at the end of the day and all I wanna do is go home and rest my back. At one minute to closing, in walks some inconsiderate asshole saying shit like “Hey, looks like I made it just in time!” and then proceeds to waste my time with his indecision . I feel this frustration when I sell thousands of dollars worth of tickets to some asshole who bitches about an 8 dollar handling fee, and can’t pronounce the name of the schmuck he’s paying to see. I feel this frustration every time a fat ass tick like house wife walks into my work wearing jewelry that could feed me for a year and buys shit she doesn’t need that’s worth more than a day of my toil in wages.

 
I feel this frustration when ever I here anybody complaining about the lack of “customer service” in the retail industry. I think to myself “hey shit for brains, isn’t it enough that you get what you pay for, ya gotta have someone there to make you feel good about yourself too.

Maybe it’s time you didn’t get your way, maybe you have an unjust sense of entitlement, maybe your expectations are inflated, maybe your just a spoiled brat with a tiny dick inspired God complex who likes to treat people like shit because their behind a counter and your not.

Maybe you should scrub toilets or flip burgers for a while and get acquainted with the work you’re evangelizing about. Maybe you had everything handed to you and you’re not familiar with struggle and disillusionment.

Maybe the problem is not “customer service” it’s “customer supremacists”

Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.

Since 1996 I have probably worked for 20 different corporations, their all the same and they all make the same claims; that they deeply care about their employees and customers and just want to make the world a happy place with rainbow sunsets and candy cane forests.

This is utter horseshit, all corporations care about is a ledger. If they could suck quarters out of your cock, you’d be getting a complimentary blowjob every time you walked into Wal-Mart, or McDonalds or a hundred other temples of avarice and sloth that dot the landscape these days.

And guess who’d be doing the sucking, that’s right “customer service representatives.”

Because corporations care about their employees even less that they care about their customers, to corporations, Joe blow workforce is just a tool to be used. Why do you think they call it a “human resource” department? To the neo-corpocracy, we are all just targets, marks. Big game in the great corporate shill of the 21st century. Like soldiers, we are an expendeble asset, a herd to be led and culled.

Think about what I’ve said next time you walk into a retail location. And if you see a customer hassling someone behind the counter, give them a verbal broadside, make them feel stupid and childish, because they probably are. Then if you feel so inclined, urinate on their leg. Cash register monkeys everywhere will thank you.

PS: On a positive note at least I don’t live in Alabama

-Scurvy

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