In my experience, there has been a wide-spread (across the retail and service economy) decline in how customer service personnel treat customers, and it seems like it might actually be deeper than that (extending throughout young people's attitudes towards their jobs).
Quite right, I'm sure. But the part that I'm more interested about is why it feels like the floor got so much lower? I don't know that the average interaction in public (in any context, not just flying) is any or substantially worse, but it seems like the variation to the downside got more extreme.
Young people feel (either really or they have been convinced) that employers don't care about them, pay them slave wages, and will generally abuse them so they feel the same way in return -- no loyalty, no care other than getting the next paycheck.
If you live that way, it may feel good in the short term but in the long term you just screw yourself over. Everything to you becomes transactional, and you miss out on benefits of being loyal to people who would reward loyalty. And you will never feel you are “owed” anything by anyone because you never did anything to warrant payback. Far less people will be good to you if you aren’t good to them.
I wish young people knew this, but they will find out too late in life.
The employer/employee relationship is basically by definition transactional.
SOME employers do reward hard work and going above-and-beyond, but it's becoming more and more rare.
The simple fact is, giving raises and promoting top performers is not good for shareholder value.
> benefits of being loyal to people who would reward loyalty
The company I work at just laid off ~100 people. One was from my team and was a great worker that took on additional responsibilities and worked extra hours to get things done. Still got let go. How's that for rewarding loyalty?
> In my experience, there has been a wide-spread (across the retail and service economy) decline in how customer service personnel treat customers
This hasn't been my experience at all. And to be quite frank, whenever I see someone claim this, my cynical misanthropic brain assumes that's what's ACTUALLY happening is that customers are asking for exceptions beyond policy that customer service personnel can't give them and then claim they're getting poor service or that the customer service rep was rude for telling them "no" on something.
I worked retail and fast food for over 10 years. People suck. And while I got out of that industry 13 years ago, I know that people have only gotten worse. People demand the world and then complain about poor service when they don't get it.
Some people suck so much that the average works out to "suck".
It doesn't help that it's a weighted average. The people who don't suck tend to require fairly little time. (In fact, many of them may well suck, too, but you don't have time to notice.) The people who suck a lot always require a lot of your time.
As a teenager, I worked at a big box store that figured out how to monetize this: The department I worked in had a blank on the pricing form marked "Hand Placement Fee" that our company trainer taught us to call the "PIA Charge"
We were instructed to upcharge customers for being jerks, and use our own judgement to determine the fee.
