I AM A CUSTOMER, NOT A GUEST!

[sidur_mishpacha]

In the past few years, businesses have taken to calling the people who come into their stores “guests.”  Guests and hosts share a reciprocal relationship based on hospitality.  When I invite people to be my guests for dinner, I am either paying for that dinner or cooking it for them.  The quality of the food is nice, but less important than the

Comments

[olaanar]

I think the power in calling a customer a guest comes from the notion that if you are inf cat a guest, you have an obligation to respect the host and the host's home (or hosting environment). But this idea is obviously false if the customer is being unruly and making unreasonable demands, and it might even extend over to the social sphere if the idea of being a guest becomes synonymous with being a pain in the ass. And I've also been in the service industry (though it was much shorter term), and there were two things that really pissed me off about it, lack of respect from the management and lack of respect from the customers. And I think the latter is because customers know about the former, and know that the service person is in a powerless position as a result. Management should fix the problem by paying their service people enough that they can hire people they trust to have more freedom to navigate difficult social situations. I don't see that happening and so I doubt the status quo will change any time soon. But for the most part, when you go into a big store and are called a guest at the check out, it's because of store policy, which is dumb (I've been on the service side of that, and in training there was equal parts eye-rolling and sagely nodding the head in agreement).