Dean Minnich: The best customer service is good manners | COMMENTARY

I recently thanked a Walmart clerk for her great customer service. She broke into a great big “Wow, thank you grin” and thanked me for thanking her. It could have gone on longer than a Japanese goodbye at the Tokyo train station. Everything but the bows.

It’s social media coolness to poke fun at Walmart shoppers, but I have a lot of respect for people who don’t care what friends think about where we shop.

Labels on clothing mean little to me. I don’t even expect something I bought a year or so ago under one label to be as well-made now as it was before. The model of big business is to become bigger business by charging more and delivering less product. I recently bought some shirts that have already been consigned to the rags box after just three times through the laundry.

The people who stock the shelves and run the cash registers are dwindling in number and they are under increasing pressure from an impatient and sullen public. But that’s part of the profit plan that rewards executives at the expense of employees and customers.

Some clerks in a local food market told me the public seems angry, and people take it out on clerks and employees.

My take on the supermarket wars is that the robotic self-checkouts do more harm than good as far as service is concerned. Company management is happy to amortize the cost of electronic check-out service and not have to pay to recruit, hire, train, pay and offer incentives and benefits to real people.

So, the customers are assailed by dictatorial machines that insist they put the item in the bag or do not put the item in the bag and implies you are stupid and too slow to shop here. To make things worse, the automatic system is so inefficient it takes two or three employees to step in and reset the process, which adds to the customers’ sense of insult.

So, when I walked into Walmart and inquired of an employee straightening a shelf of products if they carry little Swiss Army knives, she dropped what she was doing. Then she cordially produced them from the front of the bottom shelf of a display case —  as far away as they could be — and came up smiling.

I told her I appreciated her. And the people in the pharmacy and the checkers who monitor the bags of customers on their way out the door. And the people in returns and the customer service counter.

Big stores ran a lot of small-town stores out of business, which was part of the plot line of my first novel, Angel Summer, and I have been a longtime advocate of local small business.

But now robots and online sales are putting pressure on the big local stores, and the essence of customer service is threatened when we forget that no matter how big the business, the local people who interact with sales and service keep it all going.

I did store work, back-breaking work with low pay. Stocked shelves, bagged groceries and took out the trash for minimum wage. But it was a job, and it was local, and it was an integral part of my education and my life journey.

Dad said it doesn’t cost you anything to be nice to people, and sometimes that’s just a matter of taking time to show appreciation.

We’ve devolved into a culture that demands choices, and we have chosen to devalue personal interaction for a good deal. Bad choice.

Dean Minnich writes from Westminster.