"Can I Help You?"

It’s a Gilded Age, writes Peggy Noonan, an age of fabulous wealth, but the manners aren’t so good.  Noonan reports daydreaming into a store on Madison Avenue recently

"Hi! Let me help you find what you’re looking for!" She is a saleswoman, cracking gum with intensity, about 25 years old, and she has made a beeline to her mark.

Hmm. And another store:

"How are you today? How can I help you?" Those dread words.

The angle, of course is that the shop assistant is trying to engage, to have a relationship.  And that makes it easier to sell.

No doubt.  But I rather look on the bright side of this.

It is, I believe, hard work to be cheerful and outgoing to every customer that comes into the store.  This is particularly so when you enter the produce department at Safeway and you are greeted by a worker restocking the food displays. 

“Hello, can I help you find anything?”

I find this affecting.  There is nothing in the world that I would find more difficult than to stop what I am doing to take a customer half way across the store to find a product and be cheerful about it.  Yet the folks working at Safeway greet me like this every time I go in.

I try to respond by being cheerful in return.

I found out recently why they are so careful to greet me.  They never know when a mystery shopper might come by.  If they don’t greet the mystery shopper then they get into trouble.

They work hard in retail, and they do it right out in the open, not hidden, like many of us, in a cubicle.  I think they deserve our respect and consideration.

It’s a question of manners.