Commerce vs Connection
Early retail pioneers understood that in a crowded marketplace, superior customer service was a weapon. A bridge between a company’s promises and a customer’s experience that could transform a transaction into a relationship.
It can excuse higher prices or late delivery. A single positive experience could create loyalty that lasted generations. We buy our groceries from the old neighbourhood corner shop because they greeted our grandparents by name. When customers feel respected and valued, it satisfies that need for human connection and acknowledgment. It creates an emotional bond that transcends the transactional nature of business.
Customer service sits at the heart of every business interaction, yet it feels like we’re witnessing a steady decline across virtually every industry. From restaurants to retail, airlines to online shopping. There’s a consistent echo: “Service just isn’t what it used to be.”
But this decline raises questions about responsibility, expectations, and the changing dynamics between businesses, employees, and customers.
The Rise
“The customer is always right”
-Harry Gordon Selfridge, early 1900s
Our expectations for customer service didn’t emerge in a vacuum. They were carefully cultivated over decades of marketing and competitive differentiation. As quality of life improved in the early 1900s, businesses competed not just on price but on experience. This golden age of service created generational expectations that many customers still hold today.
Advertising reinforced these expectations:
• The smiling representative who instantly solved problems and seemed genuinely excited to serve you
• Retail stores offered personal shopping services and banks provided relationship managers
• Home delivery services for convenience
These became the benchmark against which all real-world interactions are measured.
The Decline
The erosion didn’t happen overnight. Money dictates everything. Profit margin for the business and cost saving for the customer.
Companies pillage to protect profits. Cutting staff numbers, hiring less experienced workers on lower wages and minimal investment in training equates to a burnt-out workforce struggling with strenuous workloads. It’s hard to ask someone on minimum wage to do backflips with a smile.
Restaurants promising quality food with fast-food convenience, operating with skeleton crews where servers handle too many tables to provide attentive service.
Airlines offering dirt-cheap fares, stripping away almost every amenity to where basic courtesy feels like a luxury upgrade.
But the workers don’t get off scot-free.
We need to address this toxic tipping culture that’s emerged. Once upon a time, a tip was a reward for exceptional service that went above and beyond basic job requirements. Gratuity for outstanding effort.
Somewhere along the way, tipping transformed from appreciation to an expectation. A subsidy for inadequate wages and poor employment practices.
The argument that supports the tipping culture goes like this:
Customers should feel obligated to tip because service staff are paid poorly.
But when did it become the customer’s responsibility for an employer’s failure to pay a living wage?
The majority of people have no issue rewarding outstanding service. But who wants to reward mediocrity with 15-20% of the total bill? Why would you reward anyone for fulfilling the basic requirements of their job?
This does nothing but normalise poor behaviour and encourages businesses to continue taking the piss with underpaying staff.
The Entitled
The distinction between entitlement and legitimate expectation is very simple, yet most people can’t grasp it.
Many customers today are entitled brats with zero self-awareness or accountability. This isn’t speculation, it’s evident in how people treat each other daily when there’s no money changing hands. If we can’t be decent to strangers without money involved, imagine our behaviour when we’re parting with our hard-earned cash?
These customers expect red carpet treatment whether they’re at a drive-through or a car dealership. But being a customer entitles you to good service, not royal treatment. Whether you’re spending £5 or £50,000, you deserve to be treated as a paying customer and potential future business. Nothing more, nothing less.
The truth is: customers are exactly like service staff, just standing on the other side of the counter. Both are overworked and financially stressed, grinding away for companies obsessed with boosting profit margins while minimising costs, which is natural… that’s what business is. But the result is a population trapped working 40-80 hour weeks building someone else’s dream for salaries that buy a decent weekend but never enough to escape the cycle.
This creates a hunger for validation and importance. These customers believe their spending gives them a licence to treat service staff as inferior beings. They expect policies to bend, abuse to go unchallenged, and basic respect to flow only one direction. After all, “the customer is always right,” so common decency becomes optional creating friction in every transaction.
Staff who don’t earn enough to care vs customers who think their dollar buys privilege. It’s a perfect storm of mutual resentment.
Commerce vs Connection
“I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days, before you’ve actually left them.”
-Andy Bernard
I can’t remember the last time I stood in front of a bank teller or called a customer service number that connected me to an actual human voice instead of an automated menu maze. Most of my purchases these days happen online, where I find myself arguing with AI chatbots and receiving generic automated responses when I need real help.
There’s a mutual surrender between customers and service staff these days. We’re all too exhausted to care anymore. What used to be human interactions have become empty exchanges of commerce.
The neighbourhood grocery stores are shutting down as mega discount chains take over. Pubs and cafes are being replaced by UberEats orders and the rush home to drink alone “because I hate people.”
Besides my barber, there isn’t a single place I frequent where I’m on a first-name basis with the service staff. It’s a far cry from the world I knew as a child.
It’s a fundamental shift in how we’ve structured society. We’ve prioritised efficiency over connection, convenience over community.
Every Tuesday is elderly shopping day at my local supermarket. I usually avoid shopping then because it takes forever when you’re stuck behind old people talking about “the good old days.” They complain about prices, the weather, the youth. That “service just isn’t like it used to be.”
These elderly shoppers are the former service staff and customers of yesteryear. They’re not complaining, they’re reminiscing. They remember when service workers took pride in their expertise and customers respected that knowledge. When business owners lived in the same community as their customers.
• The local hardware store owner who could diagnose your plumbing problem and recommend the exact solution has been replaced with part-time workers who can barely locate the aisle you need
• The chemist who knew your family’s medical history replaced by chain stores with rotating staff and automated dispensing systems
• The local pub where regulars gathered to complain replaced by the antisocial comfort of delivery apps and streaming services
Customer service isn’t dying because people stopped caring. It’s dying because we feel the world is forcing us to dehumanise each other by making every interaction transactional, reducing each other to an economic function.
So maybe we start making efforts to visit the local businesses while they’re still open.
Argue with the service staff, complain to each other, engage in the messy human interactions before they’re all gone.
Call out mediocrity and tip when someone goes above and beyond.
Hang onto those strands of connectivity.
And one day in future, we can stand in a queue on a Tuesday
complaining about prices, the weather and the youth.
And how “service isn’t what it used to be.”
