1) What a corporation believes.
One of the byproducts of the COVID has been a proliferation of the rights that many Americans hold dear. Notably, we have politicians, law enforcement officers, celebrities, coaches, and athletes framing personal choices that have a grave impact on public health as a "right not to be vaccinated." I would argue that more fundamentally, the pandemic has illustrated our strong sense that US citizens have a right to shop. This idea has been rattling around in my head for several years, ever since a Publix opened near us, and promptly put the adjacent Bi-Lo out of business. Publix is a slightly upscale Florida-based supermarket chain. The core of its brand is a reputation for outstanding customer service. In normal times, in practice, this aim translates to cashiers and other employees who are nice to you, greet you and so forth. Once you get used to it, it's nice, if overwhelming at times, to the degree that it's a culture shock to go to a Shaw's or Star up north and have a bagger who does not put in the work, affective labor-wise. The experience begins in the parking lot, where Publix tells shoppers that “Publix believes its shoppers have a right to shop without interference from any source,” and continues with cheery greetings from the clerks rounding up shopping carts.
This notion of customer service as the be-all end-all of the retail experience is a relatively recent phenomenon. Back in 1994, there was an essay in the Baffler that feels oddly prescient in the current moment. Describing customer service as “one of Business’ most entrancing fetishes,” Will Boisvert predicts that “Satisfying such profoundly self-absorbed, narcissistic customers will require a particularly sweaty, degrading sort of emotional work.” Responding to management guru Tom Peters’ In Search of Excellence, Boisvert describes Peters going “slack-jawed with admiration at the Disneyland Marriott when he spots workers washing the leaves of the potted plants in the lobby at 4:45am.” Boisvert concludes that Peters hopes for a neo-feudal “economy, structured around extravagant displays of personal obligation and dependency, where liveried menials stand poised to sop up every drop of coffee that dribbles from their masters’ lips.” This conclusion might have seemed a little overwrought in 2019, but 2021’s endless procession of cheerfully masked servers bringing appetizers and cocktails to boisterous unmasked patrons hits a little too close to the image Boisvert conjures.
One of the heroes of this cult of customer service is Nordstrom, the northwest-based department store chain. The cornerstone of Nordstrom's reputation is a legendary anecdote about a gentleman who returned a set of snow tires to Nordstrom's, which they cheerfully accepted, even though Nordstrom has never sold snow tires (The reality is slightly more complicated, and the Snopes entry is interesting reading, but as they say, “print the legend.”) It is one thing to have a procession of produce workers ask how your day is going, or Publix cashiers ask what kind of dog you have when you buy kibble - it is another to have a clerk at a service desk acquiesce to your alternate reality.
It is not hard to make an argument that bosses hit upon "exceptional customer service" as a way to extract extra surplus value from their laborers. In addition to the labor workers provide, they are obliged to build the brand via their emotional labor. The controversial fast food chain Chick-Fil-A has a current advertising campaign where customers sit on a red sofa and recount the ways that the Chick-Fil-A employee also sitting on the sofa has gone above and beyond, up to and including rescuing regular customers from a flood. These exchanges cost the employer nothing, but it can cost the employee quite a bit – during a pandemic, up to and including their lives.
Unfortunately, the entitlement generated by several decades of this norm of customer service is a big part of our current COVID predicament. The customer who is always right is not the customer who has to wear a mask, even if it puts the lives of cashiers and their families in danger. In response to rising COVID numbers, the City of Clemson imposed a mask mandate for many indoor locations 60 days, beginning on August 20th. In theory, as of Aug 21st, anyone entering the Clemson location of Publix between August 20th and October 20th should have been wearing a mask. As a regular shopper at this location, I can attest that maybe 40% of customers did so. I have learned from employees I know in other contexts that they are expressly forbidden from confronting unmasked customers. What is safe for employees is not good busines for an employer who wants to sustain its reputation as being friendlier than Food Lion. Publix believes that its customers have the right to shop free of interference from any source, including Publix employees concerned for their health during a deadly global pandemic.
2) Hold the pickles, Hold the discussions of structural racism…
I would argue that this national preoccupation with customer service is part of the challenges higher ed faces right now. In spite of the Delta variant, and the breakthrough infections it is causing, in spite of spiraling case rates in many parts of the country, in spite of laws that prohibit mask or vaccine mandates, almost every college and university in the United States has returned to a default of face-to-face instruction for fall 2021. For those of us working in higher ed, there is a bitter irony to this, in that the same administrators pushing this were pushing us for more and more online offerings, because they are cheaper for the university and popular with students. It turns out, evidently, that students may enjoy taking calculus from the comfort of their bedrooms, they wanted the "on campus experience," - a desire often expressed in the idea that "I should not pay (whatever astronomical tuition) to take Zoom classes." So, here we are, face-to-face. Is it safe to be having face-to-face classes now? Does Nordstrom sell snow tires?
In a similar vein, a good deal of the impetus behind the current efforts to "ban CRT" on campus comes from this same notion of college as a customer experience. If you order veal or foie gras at a restaurant, you would reasonably expect that your server not detail the sufferings of the cow or the goose, because you are paying a lot of money, and not paying that money to feel bad. College students are customers, and why should they feel bad? As states continue to defund higher education at a breakneck pace, more and more schools are tuition-dependent, and in an amenities arms race to woo students. In the context of campuses with lazy rivers and climbing walls, who wants to go to a class that is going to bum you out by mentioning who white people continue to benefit from structural racism?
If you look at the language of anti-CRT bills, from Texas or South Carolina, the concern is with feelings more than facts - an irony coming from the "fuck your feelings" crew, but an important detail. Against, say, the differences of interpretation that have led some conservative historians to dismiss the 1619 Project wholesale, much of what we see in these bills is a concern for how a given curriculum might make a white student feel.
Are Nordstrom’s liberal return policies to blame for our abject failure as a nation to contain a pandemic that has killed almost 700,000 of us at this writing? Not entirely. But this fanatical devotion to customer service is a facet of a neoliberal ethos that worships the logic of the market, and that logic is embodied in the form of the customer, in spite of whatever illogical choices they make, even when those choices produce ignorance or disease. Dead or alive, the customer is always right.
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