I was wondering today if the City of Columbus or Georgia and the South as a whole need a little improvement with customer relations. I started wondering this because of a grocery store tale my neighbor told me yesterday and it reminded me of when I first moved here from California 3 years ago.
My neighbor Mr. Marshall, an elderly retired man, said he was at Wal-Mart and a frustrated woman stopped him in the aisle with a baby in tow. She asked him if he could help her find something because the employees either would not help her or were rude to her. Mr. Marshall helped the woman find her things and as he did she told him that they were just visiting from the West Coast and was curious to know if all the store employees in businesses were this rude. She told him of a few other examples from different stores where she had similar problems. Mr. Marshal has lived here his entire 72 years and is very familiar with the area. He told her that within the past 10 to 20 years it has gotten very hard to find helpful and nice employees and it is almost impossible today. He did tell her that Wal-Mart is the worst offender but most places are similar.
Now as I stated this reminded me of when I first moved here. Initially when I would think employees were being lazy my parents, who had already lived here for a decade, would tell me and my wife that we are just not accustomed to the slower pace of the south. But as time went on it was not just about slow service, employees were constantly rude everywhere and would downright refuse to do their jobs. Initially I would do what I did in California and complain to the manager. I did that at numerous fast food places, Wal-Mart, AT&T and a few other places. The weird thing is I got the same response from every manager, “What do you want me to do? If I fire a bad employee another one just comes in to take their place.” I stopped going to many places after the first few months. But slowly I realized pretty soon we would not be able to shop for anything anywhere if I continued to cut businesses out of our lives. So we had to compromise and only cut out of our lives the really bad businesses.
Now the whole point of this is many businesses have lost my family’s business here, Captain D’s, McDonalds, Taco Bell, Wal-Mart, Cracker Barrel, AT&T, Knology and a few gas stations of which I can’t remember their names. But there is one place I like to use as an example in this area that has excellent customer service all the time, Chick-Fil-A. Now I don’t even like the food there but we go there because it is always clean and the employees are always friendly. Now why can’t other places do that? I am sure that all the places we stopped going to could care less that we no longer buy their products but maybe if they had better service they wouldn’t just win us back but many other people.
But how do you tell an entire city, community, maybe even state to hire better employees?
PR Memoirs 