> Feigning feelings at work — what psychologists call “emotional labor” — can be as mentally and physically taxing as any other type of workplace stress, but few workers or employers recognize the threat
Tell that to a bricklayer. I've worked crappy service jobs and I've nailed shingles to roofs in 100+F degree heat. I'll take the fake smile job any day of the week.
> “I would come home from a day of barista-ing and my face would hurt. I thought I was just being whiny.”
One of those times when one should stick with one's initial thought.
One of those times when one should stick with one's initial thought.
Everyone should have to work a retail job to get a sense of what a broad selection of the public is like. Everyone (who is physically able) should have to work in manual labor to get a sense of what hard work is like. Say, 6 months of each. You’d probably get a lot less whining, and people might not be such pricks to cashiers. Ideally a third period would be spent as a nurse or EMT, but that would be prohibitive in terms of training and break too many people.
Agree completely. Also, (relevant to HN) everyone who writes software or designs computer products should spend some time doing tech customer support. I'm sure we'd end up with better products.
> everyone who writes software or designs computer products should spend some time doing tech customer support.
As someone who's done both, oh yes please, come into "the trenches" and see how customer-facing support, even at the enterprise level, is done and what demands and limitations we face. I have a story on this.
I used to work support for a large technology company in the big company software division. Our support tools were pretty limited. We could get logs, we could try to make sense of them, we could ask our peers, and, In Case Of Emergency Break Glass, we could send an inquiry to the developers. This one developer for this one component kept getting upset with us about "how hard could it be" and all that.
The problem was, the logs for that component were obtuse. They'd just say "ERR852019" or something like that and we couldn't have access to the source code or symbols to go look it up ourselves and our entreaties for a list of ERR codes was met with "we'll do it when we get to it." Finally, that group hired somebody new and a manager somewhere had the bright idea to send the new guy down to us (support was in a different area, many states away, as these things usually are) to see if the new guy could "straighten us out."
We unloaded on him. Poor sod. But, he went away with a vision. He realized the staggering amount of time, effort, and, yes, money being spent on us sitting around getting yelled at by the customers with no real way to help them other than poking the program with a stick and seeing what happened.
He championed our cause to that development team and, later, as he moved through the company, made support a priority, if not a focus. Logs stopped just saying "[DATE] [TIME] ERR91" and included full error messages and file paths and even abbreviated stack traces. Senior people on the support teams got access to source code so we could find the error strings and figure out what the program was doing. We even got mini tools we could use to tweak the program to get better logging or maybe even fix the problem for the customer instead of making the (overloaded) development team do it. And the big payoff? We bothered the development people less with "this is making a funny noise" and brought them quality bugs with, in some cases, proposed fixes that saved them time.
Oh, and people from the development team started coming down to sit with us "in the trenches" once a year or so.
I worked for a small family run car advertising magazine. The company had two departments, the sales/photography staff who sold ads to car dealers and collected info about each car and the graphics staff who put together the advertising from the car info and photos. There was always a lot of grousing between the two camps that one side did things that the other side couldn't understand and made their jobs harder.
The owner devised a plan where each of the employees had to work for a few shifts with the other group to see what their jobs entailed. It made for a better understanding between them and gave each side an idea that the other jobs weren't exactly easy. Made for a better working relationship between the two groups.
That’s truly brilliant. It reminds me of the Wright Brothers, who would swap sides in arguments to represent the formerly opposing side, as a rhetorical exercise.
I've actually never had a job in which clients couldn't call you at any time to explain that they previously belived that they wanted x, but now want y, with y sometimes being impossible. The worst part is that gradually you learn to anticipate when this is going to happen and preemptively design stuff so that it's easier to change on random whims.
Are rude clients in service jobs a worse emotional load than people that think that specs are just vague suggestions?
It is not a competition to see who can suffer worst and longest, and all those who cannot win should be happy with their lot.
Generally, it's a good idea to aim for improving quality of life for everyone, overall, not reducing things such that everyone is merely slightly less miserable than the worst possible misery.
I've worked at physically demanding jobs (loading trucks at UPS) and at emotionally demanding jobs (call centers). In each case for 2-3 years, so I have a decent amount of experience with both. Neither is particularly fun, but I would take the physical work every time. For me at least physical tiredness or discomfort is much easier to adapt to than the kind of soul crushing emotional exhaustion that you get from doing doing those jobs every day.
Not if the talent of interacting with many and also difficult customers is based on genuine compassion and a sense of personal integrity. And I like to think you get more bang for the buck if you can keep their personal integrity intact, regardless of industry or profession. Sure people pushing Oracle (et al) may be grimly smirking as they carry their money and their ulcers to the bank, while others skip to the ice cream parlor, or just a park bench, with a laugh emanating from their belly.
Yeah, and I think the reason is simply that 'public facing service job' is seen as the 'default' career for someone who doesn't have a particular skillset or what not.
So a ton of not particularly outgoing/not extroverted/no particularly 'people orientated' individuals who'd objectively be better off working in absolutely anything else are stuck doing service jobs they're not at all well suited for.
Unfortunately, there's not really an easy fix to this. In theory the best solution would probably be to get 'service' work treated like any other career path (a viable field that people go into because they're passionate about that sort of work and have the right mindset for it) and make it less 'if you've got no relevant skills, Walmart/Starbucks/whoever is hiring'. But that's probably not happening, since this sort of work is seen as something anyone can do and hence valued so low it's basically a 'last resort' job.
This all boils down to your attitude toward your job. In my generation most first jobs were in the service industry. Later we all migrated to jobs suited to our talents.
I am an introvert - and interacting with strangers is painful for an introvert. I got over it. Working with strangers helped me overcome my shyness and later gave me tools to empathize with customers. When I ultimately became a software engineer, this empathy helped. When I was a manager I noticed that the best engineers initially worked with customers in some capacity.
It's a great experience, for sure, but I think the point is the toll feigned cheerfulness can take over the long term. What's just a memorable formative experience to one person is another's entire livelihood for years.
The extroverts that I meet seem to have little insight into the feelings of the people they are energetically talking in the direction of, and desire little truthfulness in their conversations. It's all surface-level small talk. I can do it for a short time but every one of those conversations kills me a little inside.
There has to be a golden middle - I neither like German-style poker-face, almost angry looking baristas nor American-style fake-as-hell smiles when being served at Starbucks. Korean style service is very close to the golden middle - very kind and helpful service with a touch of a little smile.
German-style would be rude, actively hostile, malicious even. Funny how American and German customer service cultures are at the two ends of the spectrum, both unpleasant to deal with though.
You are right, as a German myself. I wouldn't.
I guess if you are used to American customer service and manners in general, German directness may seem very rude and I wont deny, 'good' service can be hard to find in Germany. But when Germans complain about that, most don't really mean Service with a smile, but rather competent, to the point service without to much sales pitch or grumbling. I would think fake smiles would be looked at very suspicious over here.
I guess in the end its a matter of taste, if you prefer your bad service personnel to be hiding between shelving to avoid customers or serving you a fake smile while staring through you and wishing they were dead.
I like David Mitchell said it best on the BBC series QI. He said people who do their job well shouldn't also have to be nice too it OK to "not give a shit". He respects people who work terrible jobs and act miserable it's only right.
A few months ago I was working on an employment lawsuit in silicon valley and a prospective juror said about his employer, "I've been told I have a bad attitude and I agree because they ask too much of you."
I worked a total of 2 years at 2 different Starbucks locations and they were continuously pushing us to be cheerful, chatty and even tried to get us to suggest pastry pairings for people's orders, which rarely went over well unless people actually wanted it. It's something I never bought in to and found the hardest part of the job by far. I was never a jerk, and I always cared authentically about the work I was doing but I'm just not naturally social enough to make chit-chat about the weather and gas prices 100 times a day without dying a little bit inside.
This is why I never lasted long in retail. The idea that every customer wants to be approached with a 'can I help you' just goes against my natural instincts. I always figured nobody really wanted that and a polite hello was all that was needed to break the ice.
If customers walked out without buying it never worried me because I'd seen enough come back later to know that 'not being pushy' was actually something people actually seemed to like?
I always sold more than anyone else btw and had my regulars who would sometimes just call in to say hello. My colleagues could never understand how that happened, especially since I am not a naturally outgoing person.
Expecting anyone to be bubbly and chipper in a customer facing role, even part of the time, is asking too much. I’ve seen and managed people where it comes naturally and I’m always in awe of that level of energy.
That said, you can separate emotion from the equation and still provide an outstanding level of service by focusing heavily on polite speech, manner, and tone. Forget the individual and treat them as the prototypical customer.
Some businesses try forcing their employees into casual banter or engaging emotionally (see Starbucks and the let’s talk about race). I’ve never seen that garbage at high end hotels, restaurants, or other businesses where service is critical to their success.
Yep. Anyone who's ever travelled to Japan can attest to the professionalism that people at all levels perform at. From the high-schooler at Lawson's to the octogenarian at the car-park. While "pride" might be too string a word, people were mindful of their job and its inherent obligations.
To date, the best job I have ever had, not in terms of pay but in terms of fulfillment and happiness in doing the work, was working as a barista in a neighborhood (non-chain) coffee shop. I really enjoyed sizing up each customer, trying to figure out what would brighten their morning and get them in the mood to tackle their day, all while executing a non-trivial dance of logistics to prepare the drinks properly and quickly, with a bit of finesse.
We were on a transit corridor so there was a big morning rush. You'd get to know the regulars to the point where you could queue up their drinks to be ready by the time they got to the register, get a good flow going. There's all kinds of people: bubbly chatters, grumpy don't-talk-to-me-until-coffee folks, etc. and it was really fun and rewarding to try to get each of them to leave with a smile. You couldn't always do it, of course, but for me I hope to retire to e.g. Shasta someday and open a little coffee shop and bookstore.
All that to say this: one of the reasons why I am excited about the automation econo-pacalypse and the rise of what we're calling "Universal Basic Income" is that it will relax the need for people to "earn a living" doing something they don't genuinely enjoy. A general relaxation of the "profit motive" will permit optimization along other, more congenial dimensions.
I don't know that it's safe to assume unconditional basic income is inevitable. There's not much precedent. But there's centuries of precedent for caste systems and serfdom. Although, I do share your enthusiasm for the idea.
> I don't know that it's safe to assume unconditional basic income is inevitable.
Oh, I don't. I was reading Lovelock's "The Revenge of Gaia" this morning and now the only thing I think is inevitable is climate shift to a hot house mode. We'll be lucky if 0.1% of humanity threads that needle. It's not inevitable, but I don't think we'll change course rapidly enough to make it.
The problem is that they're not faking a smile to make themselves feel better, they're being forced into faking a smile in an idiotic attempt to further line the pockets of their employers.
Also I think that faking a smile thing only works every now and then, not 1000x a day, every time another consumer wanders into your store.
If they really want to make them smile, employers should try making the conditions so good that the workers actually want to smile. Actually, no, god forbid! That might cost more...
Also, as a consumer, I really hate the fake smile, "how's your day?" kind of garbage. I just want to buy my items in peace, and if I need help, I'll ask for it thank you very much. As an introvert it really deters me from going into your stores.
Living as a US expat-in Argentina has painfully proven the other extreme, where the staff does not work for tips, and where firing them for anything ( even stealing ) will get you the owner a heavy lawsuit where you will lose 99% of the time ( due to corruption )
So they basically have ZERO incentive to do any work and therefore their default face = "Cara de culo".
Intersestingly enough, as millions of new Venezuelans have immigrated, they have now become the most sought after service-industry workers, simply because they always smile, work hard, and very happy to have a job. Hopefully these market forces will have some nice overall affects on the whole.
> firing them for anything ( even stealing ) will get you the owner a heavy lawsuit where you will lose 99% of the time ( due to corruption )
That seems weird. How does corruption end up favoring the fired workers? Usually isn't it the business owners that have the resources to bribe or provide favors for corrupt officials to get their way? What do the fired workers have to offer to influence a corrupt official?
I have not come to understand the mindset behind what seems to be a new trend: Having multiple employees shout a greeting to every customer who walks in.
Does management really think this improves sales, service, or encourages repeat customers? Fake sincerity has to be exhausting for the staff (for the level repetition if no other reason), but I don’t expect most customers believe it’s genuine.
Edit: I notice this mostly in food and coffee shops. Others its a loss prevention approach in retail makes sense. But it seems uncommon to steal a sandwich made to order.
Where I work the security guards greet you as you walk through the gate. I've always thought this was a mechanism for making sure the guards were paying attention. If someone comes in you have to look at the screen that shows their name (and image) and then look at the person to greet them. You are forced, in other words, to do a basic visual check of the image on screen versus the person walking through the gate.
An article I read yesterday mentioned that Japanese train workers will point and speak whenever they are doing something. This technique helps workers communicate and think about what they're doing and reduces mistakes.
Greeting customers as they enter may have similar effects. It makes sure someone notices the customer and acknowledges they are new. It lets the customer know they've been recognized as a new arrival. Acting like you're in a good mood may also help you feel that way too.
I noticed this happening at several grocery stores and some big box stores. With the grocery stores, 4 out of 5 times, the clerk will say something along the lines of "Oh I was looking for something like this" or "Oh that looks good, what are you using it for?"
One check out person, who seemed fairly new, ask me where I found a cleaning sponge... this was just a regular green sponge with blue on the other side for pots and pans. Ever since that time, their chit chat often seems forced.
I'm reminded of a passage about the "Professional Smile" from a David Foster Wallace essay:
You know this smile, the strenuous contraction of circumoral fascia w/ incomplete zygomatic involvement –the smile that doesn’t quite reach the smiler’s eyes and that signifies nothing more than a calculatedattempt to advance the smiler’s own interests by pretending to like the smilee….Am I the only consumer inwhom high doses of such a smile produce despair?...
And yet, the Professional Smile’s absence now also causes despair. Anybody who’s ever bought a pack of gumin a Mahattan cigar store, or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or triedto obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows full well the soul-crushing effect of a service workers’ scowl, i.e. the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile. And theProfessional Smile has by now skewed even my resentment at the dreaded Professional Scowl. I walk away fromthe Manhattan tobacconist resenting not the countermans’s character or absence of goodwill but his lack ofprofessionalism in denying me the Smile. What a fucking mess.
So eloquently described my own feelings! The professional smile is vastly more common in the San Francisco than Sydney. Often I’ve felt like telling waiters in Sydney: “You know I’m paying right? You’re not doing me a favour!” However at the same time I’ve felt myself in SF thinking: “I’m not your friend, I don’t want to tell you how my day was.”
When I'm on the receiving end of scripted checkout conversations or "American style" extreme joy at my purchase of a £2 coffee I hate it. The restaurant that too brightly upsells us is the restaurant we never revisit.
I'd like just normal interactions with a range of people and to be able to leave thinking any conversation was real rather than an essential term of their contract of employment. No surprise that the best conversations and experiences are in small shops not chains with mandated policies.
When I first visited the US in the 90s the difference was quite marked, and it was quite a relief to get home. Now we've imported the approach wholesale. Course it's still perfectly possible for staff to smile, greet you in the corporate mandated manner whilst keeping 99% of their attention elsewhere and being diligently inefficient.
Even more unnerving than the fake smile and general aggressiveness of retail workers / waiters to chat you up is when the pizza delivery guy tries to get personal by using your real name, as if we were at the pub sharing some jokes over a pint.
62 comments
[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 36.5 ms ] threadTell that to a bricklayer. I've worked crappy service jobs and I've nailed shingles to roofs in 100+F degree heat. I'll take the fake smile job any day of the week.
> “I would come home from a day of barista-ing and my face would hurt. I thought I was just being whiny.”
One of those times when one should stick with one's initial thought.
Everyone should have to work a retail job to get a sense of what a broad selection of the public is like. Everyone (who is physically able) should have to work in manual labor to get a sense of what hard work is like. Say, 6 months of each. You’d probably get a lot less whining, and people might not be such pricks to cashiers. Ideally a third period would be spent as a nurse or EMT, but that would be prohibitive in terms of training and break too many people.
As someone who's done both, oh yes please, come into "the trenches" and see how customer-facing support, even at the enterprise level, is done and what demands and limitations we face. I have a story on this.
I used to work support for a large technology company in the big company software division. Our support tools were pretty limited. We could get logs, we could try to make sense of them, we could ask our peers, and, In Case Of Emergency Break Glass, we could send an inquiry to the developers. This one developer for this one component kept getting upset with us about "how hard could it be" and all that.
The problem was, the logs for that component were obtuse. They'd just say "ERR852019" or something like that and we couldn't have access to the source code or symbols to go look it up ourselves and our entreaties for a list of ERR codes was met with "we'll do it when we get to it." Finally, that group hired somebody new and a manager somewhere had the bright idea to send the new guy down to us (support was in a different area, many states away, as these things usually are) to see if the new guy could "straighten us out."
We unloaded on him. Poor sod. But, he went away with a vision. He realized the staggering amount of time, effort, and, yes, money being spent on us sitting around getting yelled at by the customers with no real way to help them other than poking the program with a stick and seeing what happened.
He championed our cause to that development team and, later, as he moved through the company, made support a priority, if not a focus. Logs stopped just saying "[DATE] [TIME] ERR91" and included full error messages and file paths and even abbreviated stack traces. Senior people on the support teams got access to source code so we could find the error strings and figure out what the program was doing. We even got mini tools we could use to tweak the program to get better logging or maybe even fix the problem for the customer instead of making the (overloaded) development team do it. And the big payoff? We bothered the development people less with "this is making a funny noise" and brought them quality bugs with, in some cases, proposed fixes that saved them time.
Oh, and people from the development team started coming down to sit with us "in the trenches" once a year or so.
The owner devised a plan where each of the employees had to work for a few shifts with the other group to see what their jobs entailed. It made for a better understanding between them and gave each side an idea that the other jobs weren't exactly easy. Made for a better working relationship between the two groups.
Are rude clients in service jobs a worse emotional load than people that think that specs are just vague suggestions?
Generally, it's a good idea to aim for improving quality of life for everyone, overall, not reducing things such that everyone is merely slightly less miserable than the worst possible misery.
- been at the help desk
- waited tables
- worked in concrete repair (noisy and often really cold or really hit or really wet)
- worked at a go-cart center (smiling to customers)
- showeled tons and tons of grass and manure in smaller farm buildings where tractors where not an option.
The thing that broke me was the smiling part in the gocart center. It took 6 months or so before I cried whenever I was alone.
Full disclosure: the job was stressful in other ways too.
So a ton of not particularly outgoing/not extroverted/no particularly 'people orientated' individuals who'd objectively be better off working in absolutely anything else are stuck doing service jobs they're not at all well suited for.
Unfortunately, there's not really an easy fix to this. In theory the best solution would probably be to get 'service' work treated like any other career path (a viable field that people go into because they're passionate about that sort of work and have the right mindset for it) and make it less 'if you've got no relevant skills, Walmart/Starbucks/whoever is hiring'. But that's probably not happening, since this sort of work is seen as something anyone can do and hence valued so low it's basically a 'last resort' job.
I am an introvert - and interacting with strangers is painful for an introvert. I got over it. Working with strangers helped me overcome my shyness and later gave me tools to empathize with customers. When I ultimately became a software engineer, this empathy helped. When I was a manager I noticed that the best engineers initially worked with customers in some capacity.
As an introvert, I agree completely.
The extroverts that I meet seem to have little insight into the feelings of the people they are energetically talking in the direction of, and desire little truthfulness in their conversations. It's all surface-level small talk. I can do it for a short time but every one of those conversations kills me a little inside.
To support them, give 5-star Yelp/Google reviews, as well as your business.
I guess in the end its a matter of taste, if you prefer your bad service personnel to be hiding between shelving to avoid customers or serving you a fake smile while staring through you and wishing they were dead.
> The service workers I met were mostly pleasant.
No. Simply nope. Perhaps you visited only for couple of days during the summertime?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LiDTKEF1ek
If customers walked out without buying it never worried me because I'd seen enough come back later to know that 'not being pushy' was actually something people actually seemed to like?
I always sold more than anyone else btw and had my regulars who would sometimes just call in to say hello. My colleagues could never understand how that happened, especially since I am not a naturally outgoing person.
That said, you can separate emotion from the equation and still provide an outstanding level of service by focusing heavily on polite speech, manner, and tone. Forget the individual and treat them as the prototypical customer.
Some businesses try forcing their employees into casual banter or engaging emotionally (see Starbucks and the let’s talk about race). I’ve never seen that garbage at high end hotels, restaurants, or other businesses where service is critical to their success.
What you describe and what your parenthetical refers to are not the same thing.
We were on a transit corridor so there was a big morning rush. You'd get to know the regulars to the point where you could queue up their drinks to be ready by the time they got to the register, get a good flow going. There's all kinds of people: bubbly chatters, grumpy don't-talk-to-me-until-coffee folks, etc. and it was really fun and rewarding to try to get each of them to leave with a smile. You couldn't always do it, of course, but for me I hope to retire to e.g. Shasta someday and open a little coffee shop and bookstore.
All that to say this: one of the reasons why I am excited about the automation econo-pacalypse and the rise of what we're calling "Universal Basic Income" is that it will relax the need for people to "earn a living" doing something they don't genuinely enjoy. A general relaxation of the "profit motive" will permit optimization along other, more congenial dimensions.
Oh, I don't. I was reading Lovelock's "The Revenge of Gaia" this morning and now the only thing I think is inevitable is climate shift to a hot house mode. We'll be lucky if 0.1% of humanity threads that needle. It's not inevitable, but I don't think we'll change course rapidly enough to make it.
Also I think that faking a smile thing only works every now and then, not 1000x a day, every time another consumer wanders into your store.
If they really want to make them smile, employers should try making the conditions so good that the workers actually want to smile. Actually, no, god forbid! That might cost more...
Also, as a consumer, I really hate the fake smile, "how's your day?" kind of garbage. I just want to buy my items in peace, and if I need help, I'll ask for it thank you very much. As an introvert it really deters me from going into your stores.
So they basically have ZERO incentive to do any work and therefore their default face = "Cara de culo".
Intersestingly enough, as millions of new Venezuelans have immigrated, they have now become the most sought after service-industry workers, simply because they always smile, work hard, and very happy to have a job. Hopefully these market forces will have some nice overall affects on the whole.
That seems weird. How does corruption end up favoring the fired workers? Usually isn't it the business owners that have the resources to bribe or provide favors for corrupt officials to get their way? What do the fired workers have to offer to influence a corrupt official?
Does management really think this improves sales, service, or encourages repeat customers? Fake sincerity has to be exhausting for the staff (for the level repetition if no other reason), but I don’t expect most customers believe it’s genuine.
Edit: I notice this mostly in food and coffee shops. Others its a loss prevention approach in retail makes sense. But it seems uncommon to steal a sandwich made to order.
An article I read yesterday mentioned that Japanese train workers will point and speak whenever they are doing something. This technique helps workers communicate and think about what they're doing and reduces mistakes.
Greeting customers as they enter may have similar effects. It makes sure someone notices the customer and acknowledges they are new. It lets the customer know they've been recognized as a new arrival. Acting like you're in a good mood may also help you feel that way too.
One check out person, who seemed fairly new, ask me where I found a cleaning sponge... this was just a regular green sponge with blue on the other side for pots and pans. Ever since that time, their chit chat often seems forced.
You know this smile, the strenuous contraction of circumoral fascia w/ incomplete zygomatic involvement – the smile that doesn’t quite reach the smiler’s eyes and that signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler’s own interests by pretending to like the smilee….Am I the only consumer in whom high doses of such a smile produce despair?...
And yet, the Professional Smile’s absence now also causes despair. Anybody who’s ever bought a pack of gum in a Mahattan cigar store, or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows full well the soul-crushing effect of a service workers’ scowl, i.e. the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile. And the Professional Smile has by now skewed even my resentment at the dreaded Professional Scowl. I walk away from the Manhattan tobacconist resenting not the countermans’s character or absence of goodwill but his lack of professionalism in denying me the Smile. What a fucking mess.
I'd like just normal interactions with a range of people and to be able to leave thinking any conversation was real rather than an essential term of their contract of employment. No surprise that the best conversations and experiences are in small shops not chains with mandated policies.
When I first visited the US in the 90s the difference was quite marked, and it was quite a relief to get home. Now we've imported the approach wholesale. Course it's still perfectly possible for staff to smile, greet you in the corporate mandated manner whilst keeping 99% of their attention elsewhere and being diligently inefficient.
No dark side here, only discipline and the recognition of opportunity for advancement to better things.