1. Friendliness is always important in customer interaction.
2. Chick-fil-A is an example of "friendliness" scaling up to x0,000 employees.
3. No, being nice is not a straightjacket in the making.
Of course, but I'm not talking about mere interpersonal politeness so much as having friendliness be a central component of your branding. Chick-Fil-A, for all its vaunted good cheer, still has all the trappings of a commercial transaction, whereas Lyft tries to downplay that in favor of appearing as merely a facilitator of intra-community interactions. That part, specifically, is the part that I wonder about.