You really need to pay attention to how your people treat customers. Today I was shopping in our local Office Depot store when some kind of alarm went off. It was a loud, ear-slashing, painful squeal that just went on and on. One of the employees, possibly an assistant manager of some kind, sauntered slowly out of a back room, saw me holding my ears in pain, and smiled a "sorry about that," but he did nothing about it.
The noise dug into my head and just as I was about to drop the box of 100 manila folders I'd come to buy and run for the exit, the noise stopped, leaving me with a crashing headache and the urge to see if my ears were bleeding.
At the checkout counter, I commented that I was still trying to recover from the obnoxious noise, and the trainee cashier laughed, then had the nerve to ask me stupid questions about 'membership' and my zip code. I just said "I have no idea. Just ring this up. I just want to leave."
As I headed for my car, I silently chided myself (my ears were too raw for anything other than silence and the mellow, now quiet-seeming drone of rush hour traffic). I should have had a spine. I should have been brave.
I should have gone back inside, asked for a manager, and said, "You know, I totally understand that sometimes alarms get tripped. But to let that ear-torturing noise harm your customers, make them uncomfortable to the point that I was holding my ears and my eyes were watering right in front of your workers is just crappy behavior.
I'm a good person and I try not to let bad things happen on my watch at work. If they do, I don't shrug it off with a 'sorry' or laugh at people who are visibly in distress.
A truly classy establishment would have given me two things:
1. my $7 box of manila folders on the house
2. an apologetic reassurance that the screaming skull-cracking alarm would be fixed, or at least turned off promptly when customers are cowering in the store aisles, looking for the nearest exit.
That's all. Grow up and treat people right. This town isn't that big: word gets out.
