Customer Service

After I graduated with an undergraduate degree in History, I went to UCLA to pursue my master’s degree in Semitic languages. To pay for all of that, as well as an apartment and food, I worked at the Burbank Airport driving a shuttle bus from a parking lot to the terminals and back, eight hours a day, forty hours a week. I met several famous people and got to chat with them on the way to and from their flights. I also met people who were not so famous.

One afternoon, I took an older gentleman to the airport. He was dressed in a dark gray tweed suit, with a plain gray tie. His hair matched the color of his suit. I struck up a conversation with him and discovered that he was the founder and owner of a major drug store chain. He told me that he was traveling back east to go to a hospital where one of his employees, a cashier, had just been admitted. She had been injured during a holdup at one of his stores and he wanted to be there and find out if there was anything he could do to help.

I suspect that such attention to one’s employees is now rare among CEOs in the corporate world, just as their attention to their customers is likewise not quite as intense. I thought of that man, doubtless long since retired, as I waited at the local pharmacy where I was attempting to pick up my daughter’s prescriptions that help her with her ADHD. The pharmacy I use is not part of the chain that was owned by that gentleman. In fact, that particular chain was bought up by some other corporation several years ago.

Perhaps if that elderly gentleman were in charge of the pharmacy I use, I would not have had the problems I encountered last year. I dropped off two prescriptions for my youngest daughter at 10:30 AM. The employee who took them from me told me they would be ready at 1 PM. I returned about 2 PM expecting—not unreasonably— to pick up the two prescriptions. But, not only could the employee who was supposedly helping me not find record of the prescriptions in his computer, he then spent about ten minutes hunting through the stack of prescriptions turned in during that day before he finally located mine. To this point, his attitude toward me suggested that I was lying to him about having turned in the prescriptions, as if I had nothing better to do than just to wander into a random pharmacy and ask for non-existent prescriptions. This from a man who has seen my face once or twice a month now for the last year getting this exact same set of prescriptions.

Having found that indeed I had turned in the prescriptions this morning he now informed me that “nothing had been done yet,” but he assured me that they could have it ready in “just five minutes” if I would care to wait—pointing to the pharmacist who happened to be in conversation with some other customer –since all she had to do was “count out the pills.” Since I had to pick up my daughters from school at 2:30, I told him that I couldn’t wait, but that I’d be back within an hour or so.

So, I returned again about 3:45 PM. Not only were the prescriptions still not ready—due to the fact that someone had “mistyped” the labels—only one of the two prescriptions I had turned in could be found. Of course, they didn’t know that there were supposed to be two prescriptions until I asked where the other one was as they handed me only the one—and once again, the implication expressed was that somehow I didn’t know what I was talking about. They called my daughter’s pediatrician and learned that indeed I wasn’t just making up a story to annoy them, but that now it would “take a few minutes” for them to get the new copy for the one they had “misplaced.” I told them I had to get my daughter to her soccer practice, so I finally was able to pay for the one prescription they had finally managed to give to me and leave. I noticed that they still had mistyped this one prescription—it had the name of my middle daughter on it, rather than my youngest, for whom the prescription was actually for. However, I was in no mood to point that out to them and then have to wait an additional half hour, especially since I didn’t have that half hour to wait.

Besides being frustrated by the continual disappointment of my not unreasonable expectations of having my prescriptions filled in a timely manner—and of having wasted my time and my rather expensive gasoline in making more than the one trip I had needed to make and knowing that I would still have to make an additional trip the following day to get the prescription that they had lost (and wondering, now, based on their track record, if I would have to make multiple trips on that next day as well)—I was frustrated by the rather blasé attitude displayed by the pharmacy staff, who spent all this time silently bustling about, who never apologized, and looked at me as if I was somehow disturbing their routine and probably behaving unreasonably. They weren’t obviously mean to me: they didn’t yell at me or call me names, but they seemed oblivious to the level of inconvenience they were subjecting me to.

I suspect, that if that gentleman I met many years ago when I drove him to his flight in Burbank was the owner of my pharmacy, those employees would probably never have been hired in the first place. What makes me very sad, however, is that the level of incompetence demonstrated by my pharmacy has become the norm: I see it at the department store, the grocery store, and every time I visit a fast food restaurant. And given that all the businesses I go to treat me with the same level of contempt, I have trouble “taking my business elsewhere.” There’s simply nowhere else to go…

Well…except online to Amazon–where I find service tends to be much better than in most of the local businesses, whether independent or chain. And brick and mortar stores wonder why they’re losing customers. It’s not just about the prices. Customer service matters. I’ll pay extra not to be treated as a problem, potential thief, or idiot. I’ll pay extra to actually find what I’m looking for.