By Dr. Bruce Smith ——Bio and Archives--January 8, 2024
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This all began about three weeks ago. I’m not a “fast food” customer all that often, maybe once a week or a little less. Of course, it isn’t really fast food anymore, either. Still, I like to go there on a whim or as a little treat now and then. I usually go inside because I can check what I get before going back to the car.
I go to the counter in the oddly remodeled building. The order area is disorienting now, not familiar, not logical somehow. The lighting doesn’t seem quite right.
I go to the small, very low counter. Some one comes from around the corner to help the person who is ahead of me, but he is told they want him to order at the kiosk.
So I take the hint and I go to the kiosk for the first time. I want an egg biscuit, an item I have ordered face-to-face many times all across the country, that is always a bit unusual and requires clarification to get it right. I look on the kiosk at the breakfast menu. It isn’t there. I look further. No where to be seen. I say half out loud, ‘well, this is just bee-ess.” A 20-something employee walking in at that moment doesn’t look my way, but laughs at me, then disappears behind the counter. Nobody offers to help. I give up at the kiosk and walk over to the odd counter. I wait maybe 20 seconds (it seems longer) before someone comes around, again from out of sight, and looks at me. She doesn’t ask if it’s in-store or carry out. She makes that decision. I volunteer that I’d like an egg biscuit.
“Anything else,” she says in a monotone, and with just a hint of attitude. Yes, I say, and an egg mcmuffin. I get the total, again in a monotone. I slide in the card, and in about four seconds, I’ve paid and put the card away. She disappears. About 15 seconds later she reappears, bag in hand. She hands it to me, saying nothing. “You’re welcome,” I say to her back as she disappears again. I leave. There is no one else in the seating area. Outside, there is a small but steady line of cars in the drive-through. I brush it off as a ‘kids today’ moment, forgetting about the expectation that I start at the kiosk.
Then just last week I’m running behind schedule on a trip into town. Just in time, there’s a Mickey D’s. It’s past my lunch time and I like my routine, so I pull in, this time to go through the drive-through. That’s right, not the ‘drive-thru,’ but the drive-through. I don’t have to wait long before pulling up too far to put in an order because the speaker is behind me to the left now, the order board ahead. I’m in a Honda sedan, so I’m looking up at the board. The first thing I hear is “Will you be using the app today?” I’m a foot too far forward and it’s a speaker, and I wasn’t ready for the question. Usually it’s “Hi, welcome to Beefy’s. May I take your order?” I say, Excuse me? Again it is just a little garbled. “Willg you be _sing the ab today?” I decipher it, pause, then say no, I just want to place an order and pay for it. Pause. “Go ahead,” in the now-familiar monotone. I want a filet of fish and a small fry.
“Anything else?” I say that’s it, hoping it’s not quite clear on the other end of the horn. She gives me a total, but it must be wrong, so I pull around to the first window. The person I was talking to is already busy talking to other people. I wait maybe 15 seconds. It seems longer. “Seven fifty-eight,” she says. That can’t be right. How much? “SEVEN FIFTY-EIGHT,’ she says a little LOUDER. I hand her the card, disappointed today that I can’t demand change from a thirteen-dollar bill. I get the card back quickly because there is very little delay when it comes to taking my money. On a lark, I ask a question: If I had the app, is the price better? “Oh, yeah. You get the coupons with the app.” This last delivered as though I had just fallen off the turnip truck. I’m a little unbelieving, so I say, it would cost less if I had the app? “Yep, it’s easy to get the app, you just downl. . .” I miss the rest of it as I’m pulling away. At the second window, my order comes up pretty fast. Over this one’s shoulder I get a “Have a good one” as I try to set the bag down on the console. No one asks if I want anything else. When I look up again, everybody’s gone. I drive off.
These two experiences have served to confirm a trend I’ve been observing for quite a while. More and more frequently I’m finding places that have decided they don’t have to cater to my wants as a customer any more. The new corporate policy is to tell me how to please the corporation. If I comply, they may give me a break on something, but if I don’t sign on right away, they’ll laugh at me, then soon they’ll make rude noises as I go out the door. Not long after that they’ll refuse to do business unless I have the app and they can have someone in Manila debit my account for me.
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I’ve worked in customer service-oriented jobs many times in my life, and no boss I ever had would have tolerated the customer treatment I had at either of these places. I get it that with COVID and the increase in wages they are scrambling to eliminate as much help as possible. Those times also put a premium on drive-throughs and distance shopping. But that makes it doubly ironic that the people who should be welcoming customers warmly think that old timers like me are just too stupid to get with the system that’s way better. I’d like to see the look on their faces when they get the pink slip that is coming sooner or later. They still do an eye roll or laugh at me when I don’t want to take a seminar on using the kiosk because I still think the food ought to be faster than it is. After all, I came in the door with a means to pay for products they sell. Most businesses run by people with sense would be happy to see me and want me to come back more often, but not this crew.
They’re riding the wave of the future. I think some of them might not be asking ‘do you want fries with that?’ but rather might be making one of those cardboard signs I see people holding at busy intersections. Neither job seems to hold a lot of promise for the future, but hey, laugh at me if you want.
They like everything to come through the drive-through because people expect to wait out there. They want everyone to order on the app or kiosk because it distances the help from the customer and allows more time to get the order ready.
The trend can be seen at other big corporate branches, too. I occasionally go to a mega-supermarket for a few specific things I can’t find elsewhere. I’ve been a loyal cardholder for many years. This place has been ordering customers around for quite some time. For a while they tried to get everybody to check their own groceries on the shelf before putting them in the cart.
That failed pretty quickly. Doing all their checkout work never appealed to me. Then they just cut all but one (or very rarely, two) checkout people and put in self-checkout lanes. To wait for a real checkout person takes quite a while now, and I really think they’ve told them to slow down so more people will go to the self-checkouts. I’m sure those setups are really cheap. Meanwhile, almost no one gets paid to check groceries and take money like in the old days. In the store aisles, most people I see are pushing stacks of totes collecting orders for curbside delivery. Very few people work in the departments, which means there is almost always a wait and even a search to find someone to help at the deli or the bakery. Help is scarce everywhere these days, and has been for years. Go to Walmart or Kohl’s and try to get someone to help you. Good luck with that.
And then there’s the digital coupon scam. At the mega supermarket I have a loyalty card but I don’t have the app and I’m not going to get one. I see a sign on, say, butter. In big letters it says SALE! $1.98 per pound, which is better than most places these days, believe it or not. In very small letters, it says digital coupon, but I’m so happy to find something I can afford that I grab two and proceed with the rest of my stuff to the checkout. I found out Saturday that if I raise cane with the self-check monitor, they will usually do an override and give me the price if I ask for it. If I don’t ask for it, they just take the extra $2 per pound and don’t let on to me that they’ve done it. The loyalty card makes me think I have gotten all the sale prices. If I pay for it without checking, then I have to go to the “customer service” counter to make my case. There’s a wait there, too, because it’s shorthanded, too. My rule is that if I don’t get the price on the sign, even if it’s digital coupon, I’m not taking the product.
They can put it back themselves. No sale price, no buy. But I have to watch carefully to make sure they don’t pull a fast one on me. It doesn’t bother them to do that. I’m sure old folks and many others get nailed all the time without even realizing.
The corporate message to the unwashed masses is very clear: do it our way or just don’t come back. They don’t care if they tick me off. There are plenty of customers who will just meekly comply, I guess, but I’m not one of them. There are fast food places and supermarkets where people go out of their way to welcome me and try to offer what I want. Retail is tough, there is no doubt about it. Who up in the corporate suite in headquarters on the 47th floor thinks that they can just order the customers around and just expect to just go on making money hand over fist, so they can buy up a few more supermarket chains? Are the franchise owners of restaurants so out of touch that they think that if they own all nine Mickey D locations in the metro area that no one will have any choices left? Let me know how that works for you.
Announcement to whom it may concern: There are always choices in a marketplace. There are stores that welcome me and make it easy to make my purchase in any way that suits me. They want me to come back again, and that attitude goes a long way to ensure that I will. The market works best when companies work hard to determine what customers will buy and then have a steady supply of it easily available at good prices. Several places ought to consider returning to that model that helped make them large concerns. I’m sure they’d be surprised at the result.
So at the hip places that demand conformity with their policies, the message is clearly this: Do it our way and like it, or just don’t come back.
In the case of one mega restaurant chain, that has already been arranged.
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Dr. Bruce Smith (Inkwell, Hearth and Plow) is a retired professor of history and a lifelong observer of politics and world events. He holds degrees from Indiana University and the University of Notre Dame. In addition to writing, he works as a caretaker and handyman. His non-fiction book The War Comes to Plum Street, about daily life in the 1930s and during World War II, may be ordered from Indiana University Press.