Photo Credit: smartkarrot.com

How are you doing? Not so good.

We've all heard the tired service mantra, "The customer's always right."  But anyone who's ever worked a single day dealing with us knows this piece of propaganda holds less water than the excuse, “I must have missed your text.” We're not always right, and sometimes our demands are unreasonable and border on insane. We've all seen the videos of the Karens and Kens and their incredulous behavior. In these instances, a taser doesn't seem like an unreasonable customer response tool. 

But most of us aren't like this. A sharp tone might creep into my voice, and I might clench my jaw or roll my eyes. But these are rare. My asks are simple. A little courtesy, some value in exchange for my money, and no unreasonable inconveniences. But regardless of how many surveys I fill out and the honesty of my responses, nothing changes.

I am not ignorant of the problems created by the global pandemic, and I understand the economic pressures you're under and the supply chain issues you face. I fully appreciate the fragile nature of employee/employer relationships and the great resignation and the quiet quitting.   

Many of you increased your options like take-out, delivery, and curbside pickup. You expanded online capabilities and allowed employees to escape from the confines of the cubicle corral and work outside the office. I recognized the reality of the situation. Like the Rolling Stones say, "You can’t always get what you want.” 

I adjusted to limited hours, decreased services, smaller selections, and longer wait times. But in my patience, I seem to have been forgotten. I'm sidelined by the tug of war between you and your employees and tangled in your web of excuses. 

What were supposed to be temporary fixes have become permanent solutions. I'm expected to continue to adjust my calendar to align with the frequent and random changes in your hours of operation, just so I can contend with poorly trained, disinterested, and sometimes discourteous employees.   

Every day I’m met with door signs warning me of staffing issues and website pop-ups apologizing for decreased services and options. I spend long periods listening to pre-recorded messages telling me how important I am, even though my wait time will be longer than normal. I silently pray that when I do connect with someone, the line won't go dead, and they can help me. By the way, longer than normal should be measured in minutes, not by the number of newspapers and magazines I read to occupy myself. 

But the pandemic has waned, and you've had three years to respond. Many of your other challenges are not new and are part of the cyclical nature of business. To be successful means adapting to the realities of the marketplace. 

There’s a scene in the movie, The Fugitive, where the escaped, wrongly convicted killer Richard Kimble, played by Harrison Ford, comes face to face with his pursuer, US Deputy Marshal Sam Gerard, played by Tommy Lee Jones. Kimble declares he didn’t kill his wife, and Gerard responds, “I don’t care.”  The marshal isn’t unsympathetic to Kimble’s plight, but it's not his job to determine guilt or innocence. His job is to bring Kimble to the people whose responsibility it is.

To those businesses still telling me about their staffing issues, labor problems, and supply chain kinks, "I don't care." It's your job to address them. Not mine. There are restaurants, stores, service providers, and product manufacturers who don't expect me to share responsibility for managing their business. They made considerable effort to adapt to challenges that didn't just appear overnight. I am willing to be patient with mistakes, misunderstandings, and miscommunications with businesses who don't greet me with warnings of what they can't do but show me what they can. 

Starting today, I will not take the time to answer your emails, complete online and in-app surveys, answer a register receipt survey, or ask to talk to a manager in hopes it will affect some change. 

I’m just going to quietly leave. 

The Rolling Stones were right. You can't always get what you want. But they also understood when they added, "But if you try sometimes, well, you might find, you get what you need.”