5 ways rude cashiers rile shoppers

By Karen Aho

Retail stores are often huge and complex operations, but the battle for customers is won or lost at the cash register.

Lost, mostly.

"It's about respect, whether it's the cheapest place in town or the most expensive," says Lou Carbone, the founder and CEO of Experience Engineering, a customer-service consultancy. "These companies lose customers, and they're not even sure why."

• Talk back: What's your pet peeve about store clerks?

But the customers know why. Their pet peeves:

• Not making eye contact. This is the "grab and scan," as it's called by Karen Chalmers, a mother of three who recently boycotted her area big-box store after a different small act of rudeness. "They just ignore me. It makes me feel like I'm not even a person."

• Answering the phone. "We're ALREADY in the store!" blogger "Phil801" writes. "You've won our business already! Take care of us!" His tongue-in-cheek solution? While standing in line, program the store's number into a cell phone and call the misdirected clerk.

• Chatting to other clerks. "It's unbelievable. You can be looking right at people who are busy talking to an associate, and they ignore you," Carbone says. "It makes you feel unimportant, insignificant. It causes you to feel insufficient. It makes you feel very small."

• Not counting change back. When did it become the customer's responsibility to fumble through a wad -- coins balanced precariously on paper -- to ensure accuracy? "It's just another example of a disrespectful service act," says Leonard L. Berry, a distinguished professor of marketing at Texas A&M University's Mays Business School. "And then, once you get the change, not even thanking you for the purchase. That hurts more for many people." (For a refresher on the lost art of counting out change, click here.)

• Walking past shoppers who need help. American workers today are often disengaged from their jobs, "physically there but psychologically absent," says John Todor, the author of "Addicted Customers" and a psychologist and managing partner at The Whetstone Edge, a customer-centric consultancy in California. "That's what's at the root of some of these things. . . . What it says to the customer is 'I don't matter.'"

Customers who feel bad don't come back, even if the price is right.

"We always have these antennae out there," Todor says. "If the clerk is acting like a drone, doing their job technically, then you feel like you can be rude back."

Service is not dead

If you sense that there's more rude service than there was a generation ago, you're probably right, industry consultants say. It could be a general decline in manners or a decrease in social engagement, which dulls empathy, they say.

More people indicate a desire for helpful staffers in recent years, according to surveys by Gartner, an international research firm. And the American Customer Satisfaction Index, considered a leading indicator of customer service, shows a 5.2% drop from 1994 to 2007 in customers' satisfaction with discount and department stores. It's a significant decline, said the head of the survey, University of Michigan business professor Claes Fornell.

"Many of these stores are somewhat strapped for resources, and they're cutting at the front line, and customers are not pleased about it," says Fornell, the author of "The Satisfied Customer: Winners and Losers in the Battle for Buyer Preference." "In the long-term perspective, this is probably not the best strategy."

However, Wal-Mart, with an astounding 15% drop in satisfaction since 1994, accounts for a decent chunk of that decline. In scores by industry, supermarkets and hotels have remained constant in the past 15 years. Specialty retail stores have risen 2.7%, banks 5.4% and limited-service restaurants 13%.

Good service may have taken a beating in places, but clearly shoppers don't think it's dead. So why the register rage?

Bad service starts at the top

Alain J. Roy has been advising businesses on customer service for a quarter-century and says the answer is a no-brainer. In 99% of his cases, he identifies the same problem: "the owners and the managers."

"It is so simple, and managers make it so complicated," Roy says. "They go to seminars, they buy books, they change the color of the store -- all along not showing appreciation of the employees.

"I'd go in and say, 'I won't help you unless you change managers,'" Roy says.

Those that didn't oust management were back to bad service within six months.

"They did not show respect to the employees," Roy says. "In turn, the employees did the same thing to the customers." Only a small percentage of employees are able to keep a good face despite being treated poorly, he says.

The converse is also true. In the latest MSN Money customer-service poll, companies with the highest rankings spoke repeatedly of their efforts to treat employees with respect. (See "10 companies that treat you right.")

Attitude runs from the top down, Roy says, and bad service may be more prevalent in large chains that focus on profits and fail to oversee distant managers.

Continued: Improvement in service

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