Enforced cheerfulness $FAIL

[firecat]

I was in Walgreen's just now, and the cashier was wearing a button front and center on her uniform that said "Is my smile a 9?"

I assume that she had to wear it. I was tempted to ask, but I didn't want to waste her time because there was a long line. It made me furious on her behalf. If your policy is that employees should act friendly, I suppose there's nothing I can do about that, but I really don't like requiring employees to wear buttons that invite the customer to police their behavior (behavior that has nothing to do with whether they're doing the work of cashiering correctly).

Comments

[elf]

I can deal with "mandatory friendly" policies, for some values of "friendly." Friendly means polite & helpful, right? However, that's not the same as "mandatory smiling and talking to the customers as if they're good buddies."

My friends don't always smile. Especially when they're tired and busy, and very happy to help me but don't have the energy to be gleeful in my direction. Strangers being gleeful in my direction are not friendly; they're usually creepy. And a public note that says "PLEASE CRITIQUE MY FRIENDLINESS" says very clearly, "MY EMPLOYER IS SO SHITTY THEY CANNOT COUNT ON ANYONE WORKING HERE ACTUALLY ENJOYING THEIR JOBS SO THEY HAVE TO MANDATE THAT WE PRETEND LIKE WE DO."

Employees who work retail in places they love tend to be plenty friendly. The ones working in the local cookie shops who know they serve the most awesome cookies are proud to be a part of that. The ones who work in the tiny-weird-import shops are just as enchanted as the customers by the stuff they sell. The ones who work in Pagan shops are *thrilled* to talk about the books, the candles, the statues, tarot card preferences--they're excited to find someone else who shares some interests with them. The gamers who staff the game shops... well.

It's only in stores that pay minimum wage or close to it, and overwork their employees, and demand they put up with stupid pointless rules, and cheat them out of benefits with arcane accounting tricks, that have to *require* them to act friendly to customers. And since they can't actually measure "friendliness," they tend to come up with "the extrovert tv-hero version of friendly," defined by a huge grin.

[supergee]

I smile because smiling feels good. And because I'm not graded on it.

[branewurms]

Ewwww. That is just gross.

[shehasathree]

Ugh.

[st_aurafina]

Ugh, I can understand an expectation of professional behaviour - not friendly, but professionally polite - but putting it on a badge for customers to see is just humiliating.

[azurelunatic]

... Ugh. :(

[graymalkin13.livejournal.com]

I'm sure they made her wear it. That kind of thing makes me angry too. Working for a store like that sucks in so many ways.

When I was in college, I spent a summer working a cash register at K-Mart. We didn't have to wear demeaning buttons (because they hadn't thought of it yet), but among other things, we had to stand up straight at all times -- we weren't allowed to lean against the partition while we waited for a customer to show up -- and there was a supervisor pacing up and down the row of cashiers, making sure we were all being proper automatons at all times. I can't remember if there were specific instructions to be "friendly" -- since it was the 70s, they probably hadn't thought of that yet either.

[pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com]

Yuck. In addition to the general phenomenon of strangers commanding random women on the street to smile, this makes me picture rating people's dental work, which I imagine you would not get a whole lot of on Walgreen's-cashier wages (not that I know what kind of dental plan they do or don't have and how many employees are eligible).

[mama-hogswatch.livejournal.com]

I do perceive it as part of my job to pretend to be cheerful when I'm dealing with the public.

I do it when I teach, too.

Yes, it's draining as hell, but for the most part I find the financial rewards worth being an actor. In part, I feel like I'm kinda being paid to pretend to like people, but I guess I don't feel like it's wrong.