Service With a Sneer

Published April 5, 1992 in North Shore Sunday.

For some, it's George Bush going to Japan, hat in hand, asking business leaders there if they could please take it a little easy on us.  For others it's a presidential campaign where the hottest issue is who slept around, or a solemn committee of congress examining on live TV in titillating detail every off-color remark allegedly uttered by a Supreme Court nominee.  But for me, the starkest symbol of the closing of the great American Century is having to pump my own gas.

You don't have to be old enough to remember tailfins and record hops and Old Scollay Square to remember when service stations actually offered service.  Not only would attendants pump your gas, they'd check your oil and tires and battery if you asked them to, and they'd clean your windshield (front and back), headlights and even tail lights whether you asked them to or not.  Then you paid the man your 30-cents a gallon and you were on your way.

That was back in a time when service had meaning beyond mere sloganeering – as did pride, as did Respect for the Customer.

Today, the sum total of a typical service station's level of service is making change.  In effect, by pumping your own gas, you become a temporary employee, earning wages of a few pennies a gallon.  Who says there's no cheap labor pool in America?

The idea of service with a smile is becoming another casualty of our downsized, re-org'd, leaner and meaner America.  What's taking its place is the idea of service with a sneer.  Respect for the customer has become a quaint relic of the past, and replacing it is contempt for the customer.

This realization came to me one recent cold night when I stopped for gas in wind chill-adjusted temperatures of well below zero.  First, as I tried without success to get the pump to work, a tinny-sounding voice rasped at me through a loudspeaker that I had to pay up front.  Fine.  That businesses routinely treat customers like common thieves is another sign of how far we've fallen from Normal Rockwell's vision of America, but I'm starting to get used to that.  As if agreeing I don't deserve their trust, I meekly paid without protest.

Back outside, Jack Frost was really nipping at my nose, only it didn't feel nearly as nice as you might expect from the song.  But what really frosted me was the way the last 10 cents of my purchase was pumped v-e-r-y slowly, even on this bitterly cold night, as if the company was toying with me, taunting me with its power over me.  And all the while I'm freezing and earning my 6 cents a gallon, I'm subjected to some happyface loudspeaker voice hawking oil and antifreeze and high-priced gas.  To me, that's service with a sneer, contempt for the customer.

Trouble is, I'm getting used to that, too.