Same in Canada. I worry that we’ve become too comfortable and will need to be reminded why it’s important to care.
In the defence of people who don’t care right now, our culture is not conducive to caring whereas it seems it was more so in the past. There was more social and family cohesion. There were more readily available evidence and reasons to care on a day to day basis. Things appear objectively different for most people now.
On top of that there is increasing wealth disparity which people are confronted with on a hyper-frequent basis. Just take a peak at instagram and you’re reminded that you’re just a serf with every ad and every few posts.
In the 'good old days' a person could work their way up in a company from the sales floor into a leadership role. The company would encourage this to create a pipeline of experienced managers with first-hand knowledge of customer needs.
That era is long dead. Companies don't care about their customers, they care about maximizing shareholder value above all else. That means doing things like slashing staff to the point where 2 people have to run the entire store. How are they supposed to provide good customer service in a situation like that?
They’re not able to or supposed to, so it’s completely understandable why many people stop caring. I definitely don’t place the responsibility of caring on the people working closest to the customer. They need to be given the training, tools, compensation, and flexibility to have a life in order for that to be realistic. They really aren’t, though. Without that, the immediate responsibility is on corporations and governments to establish baselines which allow workers to have jobs that aren’t totally soul crushing and thankless.
Jobs like that shouldn’t exist at all in my opinion. They’re the result of regulatory failure as far as I can tell.
I feel you're onto something, and like others on the thread, I've got too many anecdotal observations of service providers blatantly being in-your-face apathetic in the US vs, say, Japan where even if forced by convention, people do need to at least appear to really care. Is there formal research on this phenomenon?
In the defence of people who don’t care right now, our culture is not conducive to caring whereas it seems it was more so in the past. There was more social and family cohesion. There were more readily available evidence and reasons to care on a day to day basis. Things appear objectively different for most people now.
On top of that there is increasing wealth disparity which people are confronted with on a hyper-frequent basis. Just take a peak at instagram and you’re reminded that you’re just a serf with every ad and every few posts.