I would claim that by and large, professionals are no longer valued. This development is by no means limited to any one walk of life, but is highly visible to everyone in places like retail sales and customer service. Primarily the experts are not valued by the employers (i.e. they’re not willing to pay for expertise as witnessed by the recent Circuit City incident), but the real fault is with the customers who apparently don’t demand good service.

I’m most likely hopelessly old-fashioned because in addition to shopping on the ‘net, I love visiting actual, good-quality, physical stores and shopping there. What’s more, I assume a person should know the product(s) they are selling. But visiting a store isn’t always a pleasant experience, and that’s the part that makes me sad – and drives me to do more of my shopping online. Some of biggest problems are poor attitude and aptitude:

  • Lack of knowledge is probably the single biggest issue; like I said, in my books, a salesperson or a customer service rep should know the product they’re selling or representing. Yet, 90% of them don’t seem to know $hit – if you ask even the simplest question, their first source of information is to look at the product tag or the box or whatever. Ask something more complicated and you’ll either get a BS answer or no answer at all. Any idiot could tell you the same stuff – or more – after spending three minutes with the product box.

  • Customer discrimination. Try going to a jeweler dressed in shorts and a t-shirt in the US; you’re usually treated just like everyone else, professionally and with dignity. This is because any weirdo in a ragged t-shirt is a potential billionaire. Try the same in Finland and you get sized up immediately and categorized as a persona non grata in the store – and it shows from the service, or the lack of it. In many places even good appearance doesn’t help – you still get treated in a demeaning manner. Apparently many stores here make so much money that they don’t really need customers. I find that a bit strange. Maybe we need more eccentric millionaires here.

  • Ignoring the customer. It can be hard to completely ignore somebody when you’re dealing with them face-to-face, but salespeople in Finland often pull that off pretty well.
     

    Online, however, ignorance is remarkably easy. You just delete the incoming e-mail or whatever and forget about it. Maybe that’s why in many places it’s the norm to never reply anybody to anything. Be it an offer, request for information, job application, complaint or praise, it’s considered “normal” to completely ignore the contacting party. This, of course, is far from polite, normal behavior. Or so I like to think, which is why many companies and organizations have ended up on my mental black list. Of course there are positive exceptions, too – for example, Helsingin Sanomat usually responds quickly and lately the City of Helsinki Rescue Department also impressed me by their thorough and quick replies to some inquiries.

  • Making customers wait is another way of saying they’re not really appreciated; in this sector, mobile operators and banks seem to be the worst culprits.

  • You get what you pay for and people don’t want to pay for quality. This obviously has more to do with customers than merchants, but it goes under the same category anyway – that professional, well-made products just aren’t appreciated.

So why does this happen? Why is such lame service so prevalent? I can only come to the conclusion that most people don’t care about customer service or quality in any of its forms. People want stuff cheaply and they’ll not only tolerate substandard goods because of that, but also like to be treated like idiots and waste hours of hours of their own time dealing with the problems ensuing from poor quality.

I find all of this really, really baffling. To top it off, we have these morons who find the rare knowledgeable store, go ask them a zillion questions, play with their products at the store, choose the one they want – and then buy it from the cheapest place online! What a cute way of stealing their expertise just because they’re too lazy to do the research themselves. And I don’t even run a store, so I can only imagine how annoyed the merchants themselves are who get ripped off like this.

And NO, I don’t mean buying online is bad. Heck, I buy most of my books and stuff online and online shopping is great provided you have time and energy to study whatever it is you’re buying long enough to make an informed decision. But I don’t go to the stores asking questions about expensive products if I don’t intend to buy them from there provided the experience is good.

So thanks to the lazy, ungrateful cheapskates the selection of good-quality brick-and-mortar merchants is decreasing for those who would appreciate them.