When Did Courtesy Become a Luxury?

Less service. More surveillance. When the customer does the work, who exactly is being served?

When I began my PhD, I worked for a professor researching soft skills.

At the time, I could not quite get my head around the term. My son Jerome had just died, and I was struggling to function, never mind get excited about academic terminology.

Eventually, I realized much of what was being described sounded remarkably familiar.

Courtesy. Listening. Communication. Knowing your job. Treating people properly.

It was simply how customer service used to be defined.

When I was growing up in England, there was a television comedy called Are You Being Served? It made fun of department-store culture: the departments, the hierarchy, the salespeople who knew their merchandise, and the sometimes ridiculous rituals surrounding serving a customer.

But the joke worked because the practice was recognizable.

People expected to be served.

Today I find myself asking a different question: Who exactly is being served?

We Seem to Be Doing the Serving

Walk into many stores today and you scan your own purchases. You bag them yourself. You navigate the automated checkout.

And while you perform work an employee once performed, another employee may stand nearby watching to make sure you do not steal anything.

At some stores, you are checked coming in and checked again going out. At others, customers may be asked to leave bags at the front.

We seem to have reached an interesting point in commerce: Less service. More surveillance.

For Black shoppers, that surveillance does not arrive in a vacuum.

I have spent too many years being followed through stores to pretend that it does.

Sometimes security tries to be discreet. Sometimes there is nothing discreet about it.

I once became so frustrated with being followed at a Shoppers Drug Mart around Yonge and Bloor that I turned around and followed security instead, loudly telling the white customers they had better get to stealing because security seemed far too enamoured with me to notice anybody else.

Funny in retrospect? Perhaps.

But shopping should sometimes be a moment to browse, relax and buy something. Too often, as a Black woman, it has been uncomfortable.

So I am not nostalgic for some glorious past in which every customer was treated equally. We weren't.

What I am asking is why even the standards businesses once claimed to value seem to be disappearing.

A customer standing in front of a business should not be treated like an interruption. They are the business.

Then Came the Promise of Convenience

Online shopping initially looked promising.

For some of us, it meant avoiding uncomfortable interactions altogether.

Order what you need. Pay online. Have it brought to your door. No security guard following you around. No unpleasant exchange at the counter. No wondering whether the person being rude to you is rude to everyone or whether your Blackness entered the conversation before you did.

But something else happened. The burden moved.

The suspicious employee could be replaced by the delivery driver who leaves your groceries beside the buzzer without notifying you. The unhelpful salesperson becomes an automated customer-service system. The manager who will not solve the problem becomes five different representatives, each asking you to explain it again.

And delivery can apparently mean getting your purchase somewhere in the general vicinity of your home and declaring the job finished.

That is not convenience. That is work transferred to the customer.

The Company Gets Its Money First

Perhaps that is what bothers me most about today's arrangement.

Businesses generally get certainty before customers do.

They take the money. Then we wait to discover whether the product will arrive. Whether it will arrive on time. Whether it will be what we ordered. Whether it will work.

And if something goes wrong?

Now the customer gets a second job. Call. Email. Take screenshots. Track the package. Photograph the damage. Explain. Transfer. Explain again. Contact the seller. Contact the carrier. Contact the bank.

You purchased a product and accidentally acquired a part-time job.

Somewhere along the way, the company's failure becomes the customer's responsibility to resolve.

My recent experience trying to get a bed delivered brought this home rather dramatically. A heavy product I had specifically explained I could not move from a lobby somehow became my problem when the delivery system failed.

I live on the ground floor, only a few steps from the mailboxes.

Now imagine the mother on the fifth floor. Or the ninth. Two small children. Groceries downstairs. Maybe one child is sleeping. Maybe she cannot leave them alone. Maybe the frozen food is warming while somebody's delivery system proudly says: Delivered.

But was she actually served?

Paying More and Receiving Less

And all of this is happening while consumers are paying more.

Prices rise. Packages shrink. Sometimes products feel cheaper. Sometimes quality seems less dependable.

So the customer may now be paying more money while receiving less product, less service, less expertise and more responsibility when something goes wrong.

At some point, the question becomes unavoidable: What exactly improved for us?

Courtesy Includes Cleanliness

There is another standard increasingly treated as optional: Cleanliness.

I avoid many public washrooms in businesses because some are simply disgusting.

Tim Hortons used to be one of my favourite places during my academic years. I could sit with coffee, read, work and think. Over the years, that feeling of care has quietly disappeared.

I do not think cleanliness is some petty complaint from an older woman longing for another era.

If you serve food and your washroom is filthy, I notice. If the tables are dirty, I notice. If garbage is overflowing and nobody seems concerned, I notice.

Courtesy is not only smiling.

It is communicating that somebody cares about the environment into which customers are being invited.

What Does This Do to Us?

This is where poor customer service stops being merely irritating.

Repeated uncertainty, waiting, surveillance, dismissal and the struggle to correct other people's mistakes can wear on people.

There is the interrupted day. The repeated checking. The anger. The feeling that you have to remain vigilant because nobody else involved seems particularly concerned about what happens next. The fear that somehow you will be blamed. The energy required to explain yourself again. And the humiliation of having to prove repeatedly that you did what you were supposed to do.

That is a psychological bill.

It may never appear on an invoice, but somebody pays it.

And when something goes wrong, recovery is about more than money.

There may be several things a customer needs back: The money. The product or service they actually paid for. Their time. Their peace of mind. Their sense of control. And sometimes their dignity.

Returning someone's money does not return the afternoon they spent fighting for it. Replacing groceries does not erase the experience of finding food abandoned in a communal area. Delivering a product eventually does not erase days of uncertainty.

And giving a Black shopper a refund does not restore the dignity taken from them when they were followed around a store as though they were a criminal.

The Procedure Should Not Be the Punishment

There is something deeply wrong with a system in which a company's best defence against accountability is the customer's exhaustion.

Because exhaustion works.

Some people stop calling. They stop emailing. They accept the loss. They pay for the replacement themselves. They abandon the complaint.

Not because the company was right.

Because they ran out of energy before the corporation ran out of departments.

That should concern us.

A consumer right that requires unlimited stamina to exercise is not equally available to everyone. A disabled customer may not have that stamina. A parent with small children may not have that time. A person working two jobs may not be able to spend an afternoon on hold. Someone living paycheque to paycheque may not be able to wait weeks for money to be returned.

So perhaps consumer protection needs to ask more than whether a refund was eventually issued.

How difficult was it to obtain?

How many times did the customer have to explain the problem? Was the process accessible?

Did the company correct its own mistake, or did it simply hand the work back to the consumer?

And what did the customer have to endure before the company finally made it right?

Perhaps Soft Skills Were Never Soft

Which brings me back to that professor.

Soft skills.

Perhaps we called them soft because they were difficult to measure.

But there is nothing particularly soft about what happens when they disappear.

Courtesy creates trust. Communication gives people certainty. Competence solves problems. Cleanliness signals care. Product knowledge helps customers make decisions. Accountability tells people that when something goes wrong, they will not be abandoned with the consequences.

Those things hold businesses together.

Customers notice when they disappear.

I Don't Want Servants. I Want Standards.

I don't want employees bowing to customers.

I don't believe workers should tolerate abuse.

And I do not want to return to some imaginary past that was fairer to Black people than it actually was.

I want standards.

I want businesses to know what they sell. I want products worth buying. I want clean environments. I want food handled properly. I want delivery to mean delivery. I want technology to make life easier rather than transfer corporate work onto consumers. I want customers with disabilities considered before somebody leaves a heavy product in a lobby. I want parents to receive what they paid for without making corporate incompetence another family responsibility.

And when a company gets something wrong, I want recovery to mean more than eventually returning the money.

Because perhaps the real test of customer service is not what happens when everything goes according to plan.

It is what happens when it doesn't.

Who carries the inconvenience? Who does the work? Who absorbs the stress? Who gets their money back?

And who gets their dignity restored?

Perhaps the simplest question is still the one that British comedy was asking all those years ago: Are you being served?

Because these days, I am no longer certain who the customer is supposed to be serving.