Customer Service? What's That?

My rant today is about customer service in America today (or the lack thereof).

Yesterday, my daughter experienced a blowout on the freeway and needed to get some new tires on her car. She had purchased Wal-Mart tires in the past, and was pleased with them, so I went with her to Wal-Mart to get some tires. What a disappointment!

After fighting traffic in rush hour to get there, we stood at the tire and service center counter and waited for twenty minutes before getting a clerk to help us. Then we waited with the clerk behind the counter while he waited for someone in the garage to come and do something with the register so he could give us our tire quote. So we stood there, alongside the clerk, looking out into the glass of the garage and watched what seemed like a shop full of cars with only one lone mechanic doing lubes, oil changes, tires, and other jobs. We waited patiently. To be fair, the clerk behind the counter was nice, but not helpful. He was finally able to get the register open and printed out the quote for us.

The tire price was good, until you added the cost of road hazard insurance, the cost of rotating the tires, mounting, and balancing, and a new stem; now the advertised great price is up fifteen or twenty dollars a tire. But that was not bad enough. When the clerk turned to me and handed me the printed quotation he said we had to go the mechanic to write it up.

So we walked out into the garage area to the mechanic juggling four different tasks with paperwork in one hand, a pen in his mouth, and the door swung wide open on a car waiting in line for him to pull forward for an oil change. This didn’t look too promising.

He immediately told us, “I can't get to you for at least an hour and a half. If you want to wait an hour and a half, then I can help you.” With this little speech, I gathered up our quote, turned to my daughter, and said, let's go somewhere else. The clerk, who gave us the quote, quietly apologized and told us the location of a couple of tire stores nearby.

How can companies make it with this type of customer service? Actually, their LACK of customer service. Wal-Mart lost my tire sale and I'm sure several other tire sales, lube jobs, and oil changes yesterday due to a lack of mechanics and sales personnel. I’m afraid that customer service is shortly going to vanish from our vocabulary. I know it has from many of the places we choose to do business with.

And don’t get me started on the airlines that raised their prices twenty-five dollars for a piece of baggage, then fifty dollars, and to add insult to injury (nice cliché) a three dollar fee for a skycap (expecting you to be happy to add a tip to that because they don’t pay the skycap anything). United Airlines has just announced that at Dulles International, if you are going overseas there's no free food, drinks, or snacks on your flight. However, if you want something during the exhausting flight overseas, they will be happy to sell it to you.

Just one more.

I was shocked when I asked my wife to go next door to her work to the Comcast office and ask them about something on our bill. She told me she would have to go to the drive up window while it was open, or do it by telephone, because if she went inside their office it would cost almost four dollars to ask a question of a customer service representative. Has Comcast forgotten what the word customer service means? What the hell are they doing with the money we are paying them for our service?

I give up. It is time to fight back. I will find companies who want my business and want to serve me for my hard earned American Dollars.