Hindsight of 2020

I’ll be honest: I’ve been thinking about writing this article for a couple of years now. It seems like every time I get a list of notes together on what I’d like to cover, it stops being relevant. Only it’s never not been relevant, not once. Every time you start to forget about the ever-looming specter of covid-19, all the worst customers start coughing again. So here we are, in 2024, this virus is looking like it’s going to kick back up again, and we’re going to talk about why the CDC should have spoken with a panel of retail workers and managers when dealing with the coronavirus clusterfuck.

There’s a few talking points retail workers have brought up over and over again about the covid-19 pandemic:

• Customers have undeniably gotten worse over the past four years.

• We were done dirty by the CDC guidelines for being expected to enforce their restrictions with no extra resources or compensation.

• Within the span of a few months we went from being “essential” to being essentially dogshit.

• And most importantly, we’d have told the CDC how the general public would react if they had bothered to consult us. We may not have been able to solve all the issues mind you, but we could have given fair warning as to what was coming.

Maybe it’s astute and maybe it’s a delusion of grandeur, but I firmly believe that if retail workers and managers were brought into the fold on what the guidelines would be and how they’d be enforced (or, more accurately, not enforced), then our government would’ve had a chance to get ahead of the stupid, stupid outcry and maybe saved some lives along the way.

Okay, maybe there's a strong possibility of delusions of grandeur.

Anyway, here are the things I feel we could’ve explained to the CDC and avoided some of the more stupider backlash to the covid-19 restrictions.

Everyone is a Snowflake

For those who don’t know (and I genuinely envy the rock you live under), a “snowflake” is internet vernacular for someone who is overly sensitive and easily offended. It comes from the cliché we heard as young children that everyone is unique and special, like how no two snowflakes are identical. As a twin, I always found that offensive by the way.

We seem to be in an endless loop, politically at least, of who is and isn’t a snowflake. Conservatives say liberals are the snowflakes. Liberals say that no, it’s actually conservatives who are the snowflakes. It just goes back and forth, over and over, ad infinitum. But anyone in customer service can tell you that being a snowflake, which is to say one’s belief that they are special and unique and therefore deserving of special and unique treatment, is just the way people are and not specific to any one group of people.

Now this is important to understand from the jump because it will be the foundation of everything else going forward. The biggest mistake you can make when enforcing policy on any one group of people is understanding that the individuals who make up that group will all believe that they can’t be generalized and lumped in with everyone else. 

One issue we run into in customer service is that yes, obviously, there are going to be exceptions to wide, sweeping generalizations, but those are rare. It is however sometimes difficult to parse out who those exceptions actually are from the myriad of people claiming to be that exception because, well, they genuinely believe themselves to be.

Again, snowflakes.

The conundrum we face time and time again in customer service is when to just give the snowflakes what they want so they’ll leave and when to deny them because now they'll expect it all the time.

People will always expect exceptions to the rules, and small exceptions lead to big exceptions. Let’s talk about masks as an example. First they uncovered their noses, then pulled them down to their chin (“But I am wearing a mask!”). After that it fell down around their neck or hanged off an ear. Next they wore it on their elbow (“You didn’t say where I had to wear it!”), then stuck it in their pocket, and finally threw it in the trash (or more accurately, on the floor). The long and short of it is, if you make an exception for one person you have to make it for everyone and if you make a small exception you’re going to be making bigger exceptions very soon.

A great example of this is the growing trend of customers bringing their dogs into retail spaces. The rule stands, for good reason, that service animals are allowed to go wherever their humans can, but those are special circumstances for those who really need it. The snowflake dilemma, however, leads to people who don’t need that exception to believe and insist that they do. Meanwhile, managers found it easier to just give in and let these people have their dogs. After all, it’s easier than fighting with these people seven times a day. Now you can’t go into any store without seeing a dozen people with dogs, most of whom don’t need them, and the public consensus is that pets are allowed everywhere.

Now apply this to covid-19 restrictions. Are there some people who genuinely couldn’t wear masks for medical reasons? Sure, but they were the rare exceptions. Funny thing is though, once an exception was presented, suddenly more and more people claimed to need that exception, whether they legitimately believed they did or not, and shortly after nearly everybody did. It wasn't long before managers decided it wasn't worth fighting over.

Seriously, at my job it didn’t even last a day. I do work in Florida though, so….

Now let's talk about vaccines. Just kidding, we're not gonna, but you can follow the logic for vaccines, social distancing, staying home when sick, avoiding crowds, etc.

I’m not here to say that I have the solution to how to fix human behavior, but we sure as hell would’ve seen this one coming for sure and just maybe enabled an actual strategy to be in place. If nothing else, those of us in customer service are students of human behavior, especially in the ways that behavior is deficient and any strategy would've been better than no strategy.

People Can’t Be Trusted with Their Own Personal Safety, Let Alone the Safety of Others

This is more of a flaw in human nature and not so much about customer service specifically, but people tend to believe that bad things only happen to other people. I always say people in Tampa Bay change lanes on the roadway like they have all their affairs in order and have made peace with god, but the reality is that they don’t even consider that what they’re doing is unsafe to either themselves or the other drivers.

Starting to see a trend with Florida people….

One thing, however, that is specific to communal places, is a perception that everything is perfectly safe and that safety protocols are in place if anything should happen, letting people ignore the idea that they could ever get hurt or worse on our premises.

“Hey, it’s okay if I climb up this twelve-foot high store racking to pull down a display of the thing I want! It’s the store’s responsibility to ensure it could hold the additional weight of a grown-ass man!”

“Yeah, we can sit in the aisle at the movie theater! It’s on the theater to keep itself from being set on fire and causing us to get trampled to death or the people behind us to die in the fire because we blocked their path!”

“Sure, kids, just go run around the parking lot while mommy and daddy shop for a while! Surely people will just drive around you and the employees pushing carts will keep an eye on you!”

It makes me laugh just thinking how upset these people would be at how quickly we’d leave them for dead in any kind of real emergency.

So the struggle here is how to get people to act in the interest of everyone’s safety, including their own. Sadly, the onset of the modern technological age has really stymied Darwinism and given people the illusion of being invincible. This, coupled with a general public that’s mostly inconsiderate of anyone other than themselves and their inner circle, makes it untenable to manage a situation where people need to be concerned with everyone's collective safety.

Also, nobody respects personal space. Never have, never will. The idea of customers ever keeping a six-foot distance is laughably naive.

But I guess it would be fine if we just build company policy around these issues. Oh wait….

Company Policies are Completely Meaningless, Devoid of Meaning, and Mean Absolutely Nothing

One thing retailers love is having long, exhausting lists of terms and services for customers to comply with. Some have to do with safety, some are about maintaining profits, and others are there for the store to operate up to a certain standard.

Take for example a movie theater’s policy of not allowing in outside food or beverage. It’s not illegal for customers to bring their own food in, but movie theaters expect this rule to be enforced for a number of reasons: to preserve their concession sales, to alleviate some of the mess left behind, and to keep out odorous food that may bother other customers. Every theater chain has this rule. That being said, have you ever been to a movie and not seen people with their own food? Do you even see people try to hide it anymore?

That’s because the outside food rule is a company policy. Really the only threat to back up this policy is the threat of losing your food or getting kicked out, but as we discussed above, most people know an argument with an usher or manager is usually enough to have this policy waived to the point where it's totally meaningless.

Some other examples of company policies that are frequently not enforced:

• No returns after a certain amount of time

• Parties of six or more need to call ahead

• Coupons and sale prices actually expire

• The very clearly posted closing time

• MPAA movie ratings

• Twelve items or less at the express lane

• Emergency exits are for emergencies only and not for when you’re in a hurry

• No leaving your children to fend for themselves in a Lord of the Flies like scenario by just dumping them in the toy department and heading over to the wine aisle (usually worded as “minors must be accompanied by a guardian”)

• The fuckin’ pet dog thing

Enforcing these rules always leads to the same question from the customer: “Why?”, and the answer, “Because it’s company policy”, is usually met with derision. It's like “Who is this company? What gives them the right to tell me what to do? They're taking my money, I'll do what I want, fuck you!”. In short, customers know they don’t have to follow company policy, which is what makes them absolutely worthless.

All of the mandates around the covid-19 breakout; masks, social distancing, staying at home, vaccinations; were pretty much unenforceable. This made them not mandates at all, but the CDC’s company policy. And what was the consequence of not following that policy? You guessed it, absolfuckly not a thing. Therefore, they were never going to be followed, and we'd have told them that.

The mass fucking-off of these “mandates” was completely predictable. That is, they would’ve been if we had been consulted.

So why exactly were these mandates unenforceable? Well….

Staff Cannot Reasonably be Expected to Enforce Company Policy if Management Doesn’t Back Them Up

This is a complaint you’ll hear over and over again from customer service workers: Management expects us to enforce company policy but doesn't back us up with the customers.

Now this could be for a number of reasons. Maybe the manager doesn’t want to lose the customer. Perhaps they just don’t care enough about the policy to argue about it. Maybe the manager has a million other demands on their time and you should just cut them some slack, damn. Maybe they're just a dick and trying to rile you up.

At the end of the shift though, not being backed by management has two effects in regards to the policy:

1. The employee will no longer see a point to why they should even bother enforcing the policy and

2. The policy becomes even more meaningless

A manager who bends to the whims of a difficult customer can’t reasonably expect their staff to care about the company policies and it’s an invitation for Karen and Kevin to walk all over us.

I know I’m being rather flippant towards retail managers for the sake of the parallel, but they really are just victims of the same shitshow we all are, and that is the one created by a corporate office who sees “eh, let them figure it out on the sales floor” to be a viable strategy. Corporate has the same philosophy regarding their company policy as the RonCo Rotisserie Grill infomercial: Set it and forget it!

What happened with the covid-19 mandates, which we’ve already established were really just the CDC's company policies, is that the onus of enforcing them fell onto the shoulders of customer service managers and workers, and, like any employee hung out to dry by uncaring management, we were not given any guidance or resources to enforce these policies and we sure as hell weren't backed up by our metaphorical managers.

Based on this logic, the CDC shouldn't have reasonably expected those policies to be enforced or followed. Even just the question of how in the shit we were supposed to enforce this stuff might've led to an enlightening conversation or some decent ideas. But now “These wolves need to learn to eat vegetables and it's your job to make them!” is all we got.

Nature Invented the Perfect Mechanism for Spreading Viruses: Human Beings

Wow, you’ve made it to the conclusion! Congratulations! And also I'm sorry.

People are gross. There’s no denying it, especially if you’ve worked in customer service. Kids are always coughing, any flat surface is a diaper changing table and any receptacle that can hold a poopy diaper will hold a poopy diaper, soda cans and coffee cups are all over the place along with the odd tobacco spit cups, people spray and drip [redacted] all over family restrooms and changing rooms, and there's gum on FUCKING EVERYTHING! Yes, you couldn’t engineer a better method of spreading germs than our valued customers.

So really, it’s the virus’s world now. It chewed us up, diarrhea’d us out, and climbed above us on the food chain and now we have to live with it. Forever.

So what can we do about it now? Probably nothing. Sorry, I didn’t come in here claiming I was going to offer solutions. I mean, the word “hindsight” is literally in the title of the article, not “solution”.

No, I’m only writing this to say that there was a group of people who foresaw a lot of how this was going to go down and might have mitigated some damage if anyone had thought to consult us. But they didn’t, and that will always bother me.

Was it because of the stereotype that we’re all unskilled and uneducated? Is it because people generally don’t see us as people at all? Was it somehow not feasible or even considered to seek advice from those with practical knowledge or training on dealing with the general public? You’d think they’d seek out those with experience in these matters, but as far as I can tell, nobody in the retail industry was ever consulted.

Maybe it really is my own grandiose delusions or just plain old hindsight bias, but this is something I’ve been thinking on over the years since the initial outbreak and I honestly do feel that customer service workers could’ve given the CDC some great insight into what was coming so they could get ahead of the coming clusterfuck before it, as it did, go completely tits-up. After all, one thing we do all know from our jobs is once you see the shitstorm on the horizon you can’t really do anything to stop it, but you can take steps to mitigate just how up everything gets fucked.

So on the next pandemic, CDC, give us a call and we’ll be happy to walk you through this stuff. Or not, your call. It’s fine, we’re used to not being listened to.