Why Do We Get Bad Service Everywhere?

How employees, businesses, and the government together are hurting consumers.

EMPLOYEES

Have you noticed that lately, you get bad service everywhere? No matter where you go – restaurants, car wash, government offices, medical clinics, or a bank – you have to deal with increasingly rude, negligent, forgetful, lazy, and incompetent workers.  You have to wait in line for hours for a customer service rep to pick up the phone just to transfer you to another department within the same institution where one department doesn’t know what the other is doing by design. When you encounter a live representative talking to you from India or the Philippines – their politeness can not compensate for their incompetence and reading from the script to answer your question. When you get bad service at an upscale restaurant and are facing a lazy and rude waitress, managers will read you the riot act for being a “Karen” rather than scolding the lazy ass waitress or firing chef assistants who keep burning your bread and meat making it carcinogenic. 

When you call an attorney’s or doctor’s office receptionists will be very short and often rude to you. Attorney’s paralegals will make mistakes preparing your documents that might ruin your case. If you have the misfortune of being seriously ill and spending time in the hospital, nurses won’t come to change your diapers or urgently help you when you desperately call them to your room.  When they do come, they will let you know that you are being a spoiled brat for demanding the quality service they are supposed to provide – their federal lunch being far more important to them than your racing and irregular heartbeat! 

Government employees rarely even understand what good quality service means – they treat you as an inferior and a nuisance coming to bother them with you silly needs distracting them from their sublime mission of serving the public (we don’t know which customer is considered to be a part of that “public” they are supposedly serving).

Government employees being secure in their well-paying tenured positions rarely concern themselves with the petty affairs of us, mortals, and when they do so they do it out of charity and benevolence, not because their duties require them to help you.

Why is all this happening? 

The number one reason is poor work ethic. New generations of workers no matter who employs them have developed an unsubstantiated sense of high self-worth that is not being derived from doing their job well or being proud of what they do. 

In countries like Japan and China for example, employees are being instilled by their employers and the government a certain sense of pride in what they do – no matter how much they get paid or how prestigious their job is. Janitors are proud of their ability to sweep the street clean, waiters are proud of providing high-quality service RUSHING to your table at first request to satisfy your needs, professionals are proud of meeting your expectations, etc.

In the U.S. and even more so in Europe, workers have been brainwashed by “workers’ rights “ advocates and progressive intellectuals that “you are enough,” that your self-worth doesn’t need to derive from pleasing others, being liked by others including providing excellent performance to your boss and clients at whatever job you do. In modern Western civilization, you are at the center of the universe, you are entitled to various rights, and you are exempt from the need to EARN love and respect because you are so precious in AS IS condition that naturally everyone must love and respect you for who you are without you making any extra effort. The value of your life is derived from doing what you enjoy doing and not working for money which is degrading. 

You are supposed to somehow only do what you enjoy doing and money is secondary: if you can’t make the money then the government will make sure it will take money from someone else and give it to you in the form of a social safety net. In addition, there is no hierarchy in society except that you are on top and everyone else is below; so if a customer or boss dares to criticize you – it’s a form of abuse that you must resist without changing your behavior.

A young generation raised with this mentality of entitlement is incapable of providing good quality service because they are not proud of what they do.

If they have to work for money not for fun, it’s just a despised tool for them to pay rent and a stepping stone for them to some more advanced stage in their life, so they are half-assing themselves through a series of part-time or short term jobs hoping to do something they enjoy doing in the near future .

Unionized employees will also give you an attitude and provide low-quality service because they know they can do it with impunity – they are tenured and in order to get fired they need to sexually molest a child like it happens at public schools sometimes; nothing with less gravity than molesting a child would get them fired! 

In the past, workers were more proud of their skills no matter what they did, but also they had a real fear of losing their jobs and losing means of survival for themselves and their families. 

Even if someone was not proud of their career, they performed well out of fear and it worked and consumers were happy. Today, even if employees’ jobs are not unionized or in government positions, and they abuse customers to the point of getting fired, they are still not afraid to lose their jobs as much because they can rely on unemployment benefits and due to labor shortages, they can get a job very quick upon being fired. In addition, ex-employees sometimes can even sue former bosses for giving bad references, i.e. telling the truth about an ex-employee’s poor performance and lack of work ethic to make sure future employers don’t hire a bad apple. 

Under these circumstances, workers have no incentive to work hard and deliver quality customer service to you.

BUSINESSES

However, poor quality employees delivering horrible quality service based on poor work ethic and availability of social benefit safety net is only one of the three elements that ensure shitty service to you.

Businesses are also out there to CHEAT YOU. Businesses naturally want to squeeze as much profit as possible with the least amount of investment and resources involved. 

As a result, they tend to hire less skilled, less experienced but cheap labor to deliver the most basic service and you get incompetent and poor quality service. 

Also, more importantly,  large corporations love to force you to switch to online operations pretending like it’s going to be more efficient. How did they make it “more efficient?”

 First, they intentionally reduced the number of in-person customer representatives like tellers at the bank, then they reduced the number of representatives that are supposed to help you on the phone when you call them. As a result, wait times increased tremendously, and to “remedy” the problem, large corporations and especially banks offered you a “relief” – “online banking” or any other online services where you have to do everything yourself instead of them providing any service! While this reduces their labor costs and other expenses and increases their profits, they are not reducing the fees they charge you and you end up servicing yourself at your own expense !!

This is how they cheat you!

And then online you end up dealing with multiple technical failures no one can fix in real-time, there is often no one to call, especially after hours, you create multiple passwords, fill out endless forms, correspond with AI chat and you get very frustrated and angry.

You go back and stand in lines at your bank branch and suffer endless hours of stress dealing with uncooperative “customer care” departments and technical support to resolve your online issues.

Corporations know how angry you are so they avoid any direct contact: they prefer to have virtual offices and chat instead of calling, you can’t go to their office to express your dissatisfaction and you never get the full name of the customer representative who is being rude and incompetent with you over the phone – they are hiding from justice you want to deliver to them.

That’s how we end up witnessing angry scenes at some bank branches where tellers who operate at the very bottom of the food chain and are actually not responsible for the wrongdoing of the bank’s online team have to face very angry customers but can not resolve their issues.  The reason is most important banking decisions like denying your loan application or closing all your accounts are done by anonymous evil bank officials hiding from justice in some secret out-of-state offices.

Banks live off your money but they give you little due process whether you qualify for their product or not.

GOVERNMENT

Unlike some parasites living off public assistance, most of the self-sufficient consumers do not have to deal with the government that much directly. 

Everyone knows about classic DMV red tape, rude and lazy post office employees, and Nazi-style parking enforcement hyenas,  but by large most of us are lucky enough to have limited contact with low-quality government services. 

In fact, the government has the power to improve the quality of service for consumers, but for the most part, is making things worse indirectly. For example, the government could require minimum staffing at call centers for large corporations to make sure customer care representatives answer your call after the first or second ring instead of putting you on hold for 30 minutes or longer; the government could require large corporations to make sure the first point of contact that you are calling can answer all your questions without putting you on hold or transferring you to another department; the government could limit the use of foreign call centers and require companies to hire professional competent staff to handle customer complaints over the phone instead of forcing customers go online in a futile attempt to resolve the issue.

The government could have relaxed labor laws to allow employers to withhold pay from negligent employees, punish them for being rude to customers by depriving them of lunchtime, or force them to work overtime without overtime pay if it is proven that customers are getting bad service. 

The government could change labor laws to allow both the private sector and government employers to demote and fire employees based on customer dissatisfaction after full due process is provided to both sides (employee and complaining customer). You, as a customer, should have the right to know who exactly is handling your loan application with the bank and be able to meet with them in person and complain if they are refusing to approve your loan for the wrong reasons. You, as a customer should be able to know the full name of the customer care representative on the phone you are talking to and have easy access to a speedy complaint process that will easily get them fired if they hand up on you or are being useless or rude on the phone with you.

You, as a customer, should have the right to confront any government employee who is ignoring you, abusing you, or unfairly giving you a hard time –they should not be able to hide from you using anonymity as a shield – after all their cushy jobs are being paid by your money, taxpayer money!

Some government fans will argue that offices like consumer affairs and other oversight agencies are on the contrary providing consumer protection to us – protecting us from cheating and fraud by businesses big and small. In theory, it’s true that the government can help consumers by punishing businesses that cheat us and forcing them to provide better customer service; In fact, that is one of the main government functions when it comes to government regulation of the economy.

However, in practice, the government takes either the labor side or the corporate side but never the consumer side! 

How does the government hurt consumers?

First of all, the government is approving and enforcing anti-business pro-labor legislation that expands employee rights not only to hurt businesses but mostly to hurt consumers

It is the government that prevents a conscientious business from punishing or firing a tenured and/or unionized employee who provided poor service to a consumer.

It is the government that requires the employer to pay certain minimum wage and health insurance benefits to employees, thus making labor costs higher which justifies higher prices charged by a business

It is the government that imposes unbearable environmental regulations on corporations that also force corporations to raise prices and cut down personnel which results in poor quality service

It is the government that creates a safety net for workers who are no longer afraid to lose their jobs and therefore have no motivation to work hard and provide quality service to you, their consumer.

At the end of the day, elected officials don’t really represent consumers – they represent the bureaucracy, the big business, and those who live off public assistance (even though they also get poor customer service but still re-elect the same government because they’d rather get some free money than good service).  The government has the power to regulate large businesses and enforce anti-trust legislation already on the books but it declines to do so. As a result of stricter banking regulations that were supposed to protect consumers from a repeat of the 2008 real estate market crash and recession, consumers are now struggling to get a loan from the bank to start their business or buy a house. 

SUMMARY

As a consumer you get screwed by everyone: by bad employees providing poor service to you, by businesses cheating you, and by the government ignoring or neglecting your consumer rights.

The first step in a fight for a better service is to know who your enemy is and that was the purpose of this post to educate you about the identities of your enemies. Customers tend to go easy on employees in part because many of them are employees themselves and hate big businesses more than low-level workers or government and that is a big mistake!  As a customer, you must understand that your enemy number one is employees with poor work ethics and bad attitudes. The second place is taken by the Government which prevents the employers from punishing bad employees and or businesses that are cheating you to increase their profits. The third place is taken by the big corporations that use their monopolistic power to ignore your needs as a consumer. 

The next step once you realize who your enemy is would be to form consumer organizations that are more like consumer unions that have the power to boycott cheating businesses, shame certain employees of a business who are providing poor customer service, organize picketing outside of the business to shame not just the company but specifically its employees, pressure government officials to do more to help consumers, etc.

The third step would be to vote for those candidates who are willing to take on corrupt unions, pro-labor government, and cheating corporations and fight for consumer rights vigorously and relentlessly by changing laws in the consumer’s favor.

There could be a lot more done to improve the quality of the service but these steps could be a good start!