At the end of a kind of a day that makes you want to buy a bottle of scotch and a straw, I had to go to the A&P supermarket. I was disheartened to see that the shortest line was that of the surliest checker (recently she told a friend of mine to put down a magazine unless she was going to buy it). I just wasn’t in the mood to to deal with rudeness on top of my already taxing day, so I went to another line.

Miraculously, I ended up with a checker who was cheery and pleasant and made you feel like you were in a neighborhood grocery store. Her cordiality made the three people on her line smile. It so lifted my spirits that I actually took the time to go to her supervisor to compliment her.

Big mistake. After my saying how nice it was to be treated so cheerfully, the supervisor made a face and essentially said that the checker wastes time being nice and has to pay more attention to making the line move faster. I was horrified!  Here I was paying a compliment to the employee and the supervisor starts criticizing her to me, as well as pretty clearly inferring that I was wrong.  My bad day came hurling back through this exchange. Rather than having a pleasant conversation about satisfying service, I end up complaining to a surly supervisor about her bad behavior.

Is this just a New York thing? Have we gotten so miserable, pressured, and jaded that we now prefer speed over civility? The cashier wasn’t slowing things down that I could see, just doing her job with cheer. And having seen how badly some customers treat the cashiers, her ability to remain pleasant was an achievement.

The thing that bothered me the most afterward is the feeling that I have no remedy. I can’t go to another market without greatly inconveniencing myself. Yet it irritates me to give them my money. In reality I know I am going to have to be content with writing one of my famous letters to corporate headquarters, and writing about it here on my blog. I may not get anything but a form letter in reply, if that. But, you never know when that one more letter will tip the scales.

Maybe it’s time for a new grassroots movement – complete with catch phrases for your placards: Don’t Settle for Surly, Profit from Pleasant, Rue your Rude, Nuke the Nasty. But what I really want to do is find another job for that great cashier, before they crush her spirit.

Have a lovely day, and come back again soon.

“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world,

they might each tell 6 friends.

If you make customers unhappy on the Internet,

they can each tell 6,000 friends.”

–  Jeff Bezos