Good Service

I was cleaning off my dresser this morning and I found an old receipt from County Market folded around another piece of paper. The receipt was from last week some time. The message with the receipt said:

“Did you receive excellent service from the cashier? If so, please turn this note in to the customer service desk. Cashier name: ___________...”

Wow. When I go to the grocery store I never really look at the receipt because I usually buy few items. I began to wonder if anybody else paid attention to the note when they got it. I’m sure some did but probably not most.

I began to wonder if someone’s employment was riding on that note. The cashier with the most notes turned in must have received some award or was spared expulsion, but what about the cashier with the least?

I imagine some manager got the idea from watching Survivor or some other reality program. The next phase might be a style change in uniform, like oversized tan cotton Gatsby style hats with matching overalls, accented with a lime and orange striped long-sleeve turtleneck shirt and white steel-toed patent-leather Boondockers.

And then what, pieces of flair? Well. How many ways can you vet your staff by humiliating them?

I’m sure the note was meant to be an incentive for employees to be more pleasant than usual. It would work well in the right context. There should be only a positive reward associated with the note and no punishment associated with it.

This means making sure the employees don’t have an opportunity to draw negative conclusions on their own about the incentive program. They should be notified that having the fewest notes turned in doesn’t mean they are the worst at customer service and will suffer for it. They should be told that most customers might not even look at the notes until they get home, if ever, and the program is actually more effective at gathering information about the customer’s habits than the employee’s behavior anyway.

Also, if you are going to post statistics on a board in the break-room about which employee is ahead of the game in this challenge, you’re really not doing the employees any favors, only fomenting animosity among them.

Don’t post the actual number of notes that were turned in for any employees. This way, when the prize is handed out, nobody will know who came in last place, including the person who actually came in last place.

The greatest disincentive

The most salient symptom of our current economic strife is the housing crisis. The situation is blamed on Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and sub-prime borrowers who suddenly were sapped with gas prices that triggered a cascade of overdue bills leading to foreclosure and bankruptcy.

The last seventy or so years led “free market” operators to hypothesize that consumers eventually forget the relative value of money. One could look at the saw-blade patterned increase in gasoline prices and compare that to short-term consumer trends, ten cents up, two cents down, twenty cents up, four cents down, three dollars up, seventy five cents down.

When the gas prices approached four dollars a gallon people appeared to permanently alter their spending habits. This may be happening, not because people stopped forgetting about the economic situation from months earlier, but because they no longer need to remember it. The Internet does that for all of us.

Another theory is not that everyone suddenly changed their consumption habits based on a single major event, but an accumulation of individuals experiencing temporary negative events, changed their behaviors enough to cause our economy to reach a tipping point.

The continuing cycle of unemployment and reemployment has kept the unemployment rate below double-digits, but that number only represents people still on the unemployment roles. It doesn’t represent the number of people that fell off the roles because their unemployment benefits have run out.

The unemployment rate also does not represent the number of people who struggled through unemployment and then found a job, then cut up their credit cards and vowed never again to use credit. I am one of those people.

It’s not that the unemployment rate has increased to the degree that negatively affects the economy; it’s that the total number of people who have temporarily experienced unemployment within a generation is larger than ever in history.

To my knowledge this kind of creeping influence has been ignored. It permanently changes consumer behavior. The so-called “free market” luxuriously inhaled and exhaled employees in a vast worker surplus, all the while failing to make the connection between employees and consumers.