Why is customer service so horrendous in shops nowadays?

[whyohwhymetoday]

No eye contact. Often chatting away to colleagues and looking disinterested at you whilst continuing their conversation as you hand over £££

Nobody to help on shop floor

Poor knowledge about returns and items sold in store

No interest in helping me choose. That type of thing

I recently went into a high street shop and held up two tops. I said to a nearby woman with a label on for that shop ''Oh I just can't choose! What do you think looks best, this or this? :D''

She sort of looked like I'd ask her to inspect my undercarriage and said 'it's up to you, they're both nice' and carried on with what she was doing

I know these (mostly women) aren't paid loads but come on, surely it feels better to do a good job?

Hats off to M&S, such lovely and understanding staff in there well, not the cafe. They all seem to be rude

Lady servicing me at No7 in Boots yesterday looked like she genuinely couldn't be less interested when I asked her what shade would work for me

My 2 local B&M stores have really nice staff, always helpful and make you feel like you're not disturbing them or being an inconvenience by wanting someone to scan your shop so you can pay

My local Waitrose has hideously grumpy women who appear to be taking up a job post retirement and feeling very bitter about it!

McDonald's always pleasant too!

Vue Cinema, awful

Amazon delivery men, amazing. Once again, proving why Amazon just works for a lot of stuff

Honestly, be warned High street, you'll all be gone within 10 years and bargain stores like B&M/Poundland will be there, alongside maybe Boots because it has a Pharmacy

And the assistants have become adjuncts to the automated process, not the other way around. Cory Doctorow calls this a "reverse centaur".

That's not an opinion but search assistance. An opinion is "do you think I should get the red or the grey?"

I agree with you OP.

I was in M&S in the run-up to Christmas and had to ask the Manager to speak to one of the staff members who was complaining loudly on the shop floor that all the customers were vultures!

Staff member was so rude towards customers, I was surprised she was in a job. Other staff were nearby, but nobody seemed to be bothered, which prompted me go look for the manager. I couldn't believe how low the level of customer service was, it was pretty shocking.

For most fmcg you will be buying from a low wage economy if you check out the supply chain.

Our manufacturers can't compete needing to pay £12 plus an hour.

Is buying from Vietnam (maybe via Decathlon) better?

From Bangladesh (maybe via Primark)?

For all I know the cage I'd have liked to buy from the shop was made in China anyway. I've just cut out (one of) the middlemen.

Yes, but this is quite different both to high street stores, and what the OP stated (which was holding up two tops and asking which the retail worker thought she should buy).

Utilise a bit of a common sense, in that comparing apples and pears isn't really worth very much.

@Drachuughtty I don't think that's odd either. I was asked for opinions frequently when I worked in retail 30 years ago. And I also remember shopping for a nye outfit in the early 2000s and having a really helpful retail assistant recommended shoes to go with my chosen dress in Oasis. She was wonderful.

Working in retail back when it was still alive and kicking was another world.

There was pride and energy in serving the customer, & if you were lucky or good at your job you were rewarded too. We used to have things such as mystery shoppers come in and evaluate our service and if we whoever the member of staff was mentioned did well would be rewarded a voucher.

Now there is no incentive; as there are not many'reliable' stores on the high streets, the staff know the customer doesn't really have many options, so there is no sense of urgency or motivation.

Its truly a shame how the retail space in the UK has literally shrunk. I mean, where do kids go these days to get part-time work or work experience?

I used to love Wallis.

Sadly I think it's closed? Ours has.

They were so friendly and I often bought things in both colours as they'd say "Ooh, you look great in both!"

😂

Their coats lasted years and their tops and jeans weren't bad at all for the price.

When I worked in retail, I found it utterly demoralising - it was just so hard to give a shit about a job that required no skill and didn't provide any kind of stimulation or enjoyment outside of chatting to your colleagues.

I know that's not an excuse to be rude or to provide poor customer service but I do think if employers want happy, proactive members of staff then they need to do something to make the environment more appealing.

Spending forty hours a week scanning tins or stacking shelves is just mind-numbing in the extreme, especially when you're doing it for shit pay and are generally on the receiving end of constant complaints and abuse.

And yes, I know other jobs pay just as badly and are just as hard (if not harder in many cases) but I do think that if you pay shit pay and ask people to do shit jobs all day long, you can't expect them to want to provide amazing service all the time too.

You complained to the manager about that? Some customers are like bloody vultures though especially when the staff are reducing goods.

@Namrah88 that's not my experience. I was paid just over £3ph in 1996 and never had incentives offered! I just worked hard because I didn't want to lose my pt job. I think some people just don't give a shit and it's reflected in their attitude.

There are many reasons a shop would close, doesn't mean it was unprofitable.
If a shop had no customers, where would the owner get money from to pay you?

Fair point @Toenailz 👍🏼

In the last 2 days, these have been my negative customer service experiences:

I went to the till in TK Maxx and the assistant didn’t say hello, but rather looked at me as if she hated me and wished I wasn’t there. I said hello instead, and she ignored me, she didn’t make any further eye contact, and then aggressively said ‘bag,’ I said ‘no,’ whereas I would usually say no thank you, but she had shown me no respect at all and I’m fed up with this from shop to shop. The next word from her was ‘card.’ I went to touch it on the reader and was told aggressively, ‘no TK Maxx card,’ to which I said ‘no.’ She didn’t announce the total, nor tell me to use my card to pay, nor say thank you at the end. She also didn’t hand me my products, nor push them towards me, just left them sitting there.

I asked an assistant if she had a particular lipstick shade at the Charlotte Tilbury counter in a John Lewis store. When she returned to let me know they did not have it, she put a sarcastic type smile on her face and shook her head which I found incredibly rude in itself - she didn’t say a word to me, and she then quickly walked over to a colleague to chat and laugh. These lipsticks are not cheap, and I look forward to treating myself to my favourite shade once in a while. I was let down again at another Charlotte Tilbury counter as they didn’t have my shade, but it was done so in a professional manner which made all the difference.

I went to Asda to buy chicken thigh fillets, of which they usually have copious amounts, but they didn’t have one single packet. There were also 2 other customers speaking to their partners in there saying they can’t find any. There were 3 members of staff in the aisle and two stacks of boxes full of meat and chicken they were replenishing the fridges with. Two of them just kept on talking to each other in their home language, and the third was slowly adding meat to a fridge. I asked the man closest to me if they have any chicken thigh fillets and was told to speak to one of the others, I asked him and he told me to speak to the third man. I was getting frustrated by this point, and then the third man spoke to the first man about it and then they spoke in their home language, and then called out to the second man and asked him and then the man I’d initially spoken to told me very dismissively ‘come back in 30 minutes and you can see if we have it or not!’ That is not customer service!!! I used to go there and be informed as to whether they had any what I was asking for by them checking a printed sheet. Other times, the assistants would move the boxes and get the products out for you and hand these to you. I had no choice but to shop elsewhere which really put me behind schedule for cooking for a family party.

I’m totally sick and tired of it. A few years ago, the complaints above would have happened across a whole year, not two bloody days! Nearly every time I visit a shop there is rudeness, and nearly always incompetence.

You pay peanuts, you get monkeys?

What an awful and insulting phrase to retail workers that is.

@Rosesgrowonyou indeed. Thankfully most customers I served in the decade I worked in retail were nice , polite people.

Because people are shit and recently they started to show it (even more).
Don't take it as anything personal and concentrate at the result, I tell myself.
Obviously, not just customer service and not just shops.

I worked in Primark back in 2006 and it was hell. We used to stack the knickers on these big wooden cake stand like displays and my job was to order them by size and style. The amount of times I did that and someone would come along, pull one from the bottom of the pile or knock them on the floor, look me in the eye and just walk off....
I even had a woman pick up a pile of tiny thongs and throw them at me shouting that it was disgusting to sell such a thing, then asked me to walk her to the ladies changing rooms and hold her items. My 16 year old self couldn't force a smile at that point and I probably was rude when I pointed to the changing room and said I couldn't do what she was asking. I still feel cross that my supervisor told me off for that. I imagine that my mood the rest of that shift wasn't wonderful.

Retail workers are human! They make mistakes, have feelings, have genuine reactions to things....

I had brilliant customer service from an older worker in a department store in Sidmouth in Devon, fabulous shop, right out of the 60s to my mind

She helped me choose between 2 sizes because my OH was useless!

You just dont get that anymore

I find it odd that people think the Op was wrong to ask the salesperson advice on which top suited her. The whole idea of a shop is to make a sale.
It doesn't take much to point out the different advantages of both if someone asks ie the blue one is great colour on you and the green one goes with the bag you have. Making the shopping experience easy and enjoyable means people will use you over and over again. See Amazon.

I worked in a supermarket and if we were out of stock of something I would always try to suggest something that might work instead. No one likes over familiar staff but people appreciate professional behaviour no matter how crap the job might be,

I work in retail. I don't think the general public have a clue how unreasonable a growing amount of customers are. People don't just ask your opinion (which is reasonable to me). They expect you to know what shoe size will fit their kid (who isn't there to get measured)...what sofa will match their curtains (they are that shade of bright blue OH YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN), where they can buy things you dont sell ( cos working part time in one shop automatically means you know exactly what other shops sell), will thet find that toothpaste too nippy??, what medicine is suitable for their condition (that you've never heard of), what duvet makes people sweat more (im not lying), would their mum like this perfume??....

I mean honestly its mind boggling. Try getting the above multiplied by a thousand for years on end and its hard to keep smiling.

Let me fix that for you, Portia. You pay peanuts, you get ordinary people who are trying to make a living struggling to heat their homes in winter and feeling, quite rightly, that they aren't being paid enough for putting up with abuse and entitlement all the livelong day.

It's depressing, isn't it? I do a lot of my clothes shopping in an old fashioned, independent, department store. They sell clothes and homewares. The staff are lovely and they wrap my clothes in tissue paper. But the store will probably close down in 5 - 10 years (possibly sooner). There are only ever a handful of shoppers and they're middle aged, like me.

The young folk are all in Penneys (Primark), or at home, bulk buying stuff from Shein.

My size is somewhere between a 12 and a 16 (varies massively - they don't seem to make standard sizes). So I like to take two or three sizes to a changing room, so as to establish which size looks/fits best. But inevitably, the clothes rack consists of 8s, 10s, 18s and 20s. There's no point in asking if they have any other sizes - I'm invariably told to order it online. But I don't want to order it online. I want to buy it there and then. And even if I order it online, I still don't know what size I'll need. I don't want to fork out €120 (e.g. €40 x 3) and then wait a week or two for the clothes to arrive, try them on, return the ones I don't want etc. That money is tied up for weeks. And what if I want the outfit to wear to an event tonight?

I miss the days when everyone (or at least, lots of women) would take the bus into town on a Saturday, spend a few hours shopping, go for coffee or lunch to rest their tired legs, and then return home with their shopping bags, tired but happy.

When we're abroad its so refreshing, shop assistants arent like this in France or Spain or Italy