I was in Minneapolis, MN recently helping a friend stage a graduation party for her son. One of the many tasks I undertook in this process was to head to a huge liquor outlet called Total Wine to get a selection of adult beverages for the party. I had my list and, as I knew I would be buying upwards of a dozen bottles of wine, I wanted to keep them from clanking around in the cart. Like most liquor stores, they have the boxes in which wine and liquor is delivered available to use to carry wine from the store, so I was counting on this store having those. Sure enough, this store had a mountain of boxes stacked high in the area near the registers. I got my cart and went up to one of the checkout clerks and asked if I could have a box. Before he could respond, a store manager that was nearby came over and said “we will pack any bottles in a box for you when you check out.” I responded with, “I am buying quite a few bottles and just want to keep them from clanking in the cart, can I have one box?” The manager stood his ground and, with a bit of irritation in his voice, said, “We provide a box at checkout ….” I turned and walked off. I had heard enough. If he was too dense to understand my simple request for one box to put in the cart, I wasn’t going to waste any more time, so I walked off and started my shopping.
Total Wine is a BIG store, has to be nearly thirty thousand square feet of every possible kind of beer, wine, and liquor. I was looking for a particular brand of Pinot Noir, and the same manager came into the aisle assisting another customer. After he finished with that patron, he came up and said, “Sir, I was just trying to understand how many boxes you needed.” I was clear I needed just one box and told him so, which he promptly went and got for me. Great! Now the wine bottles won’t rattle around in the cart. After checking everything off my list, I went to the checkout area and, by chance, got the same clerk to whom my original box inquiry was directed. I put the bottles on the belt and the box at the end and, after he rang each one up, he put it back into the box. I put the box back into the cart. He even commented this was a much easier process to deal with. I said, “I didn’t think I was making that big of a request by simply asking for one box up front,” to which he responded, “I agree, I didn’t understand what the big deal was.”
Service is such a nuanced thing. Nobody knows what good service means to another. We may have standards and train our customer-facing staff on what providing good service means, but if your service procedure is so rigid it cannot be flexible to accommodate a reasonable service request, it is a poor service standard. When a customer can articulate what good service means to them, you should be looking for ways to accommodate them, not making service harder. I have no idea what the manager of that Total Wine store was thinking, but there is no reason why he couldn’t have just given me a box. At least I was grounded enough not to say out loud what I was thinking at the moment. Especially since I had my World Servants T-Shirt on at the time.