Tonight I took my Christmas letter in to Kinkos to be printed. I knew when I headed into the store that this was going to be a rather pricy endeavor, since one side of the letter is a photo collage, which would need to be printed in color ink, not an inexpensive task when one is wanting to print about 90 copies of the thing! So I go in, quickly realize that the copy machines look a lot more intelligent than I am on the Saturday after finals, and go seek help from the man behind the counter. He's on the phone, so I wait patiently for him to finish and explain to him what I wanted done. He looked at me and just asked "do you know how much this is going to cost?" I smile and shrug and say "yeah, but I know that it will be worth it." (Besides, I'm not really Christmas shopping for anyone besides family this year, so I figure this could be my "Christmas fund.") So he goes back and says he'll do the copies for me. I wait patiently for the 10 minutes or so that it takes and then he goes to ring up my order. The total is less than half of what I am expecting to pay so I tell him that there must be a mistake, that figure was way too low. He winks (in a surprisingly non-creppy kind of way) and just says "I gave you a discount, thanks for being so nice." I just looked at him and say "wow, I've worked retail at Christmas before, and I know that December brings out the worst in people but you must have had an awful lot of rude and impatient customers this week." He just rolled his eyes in agreement and said "yeah pretty much everyone doing their Christmas shopping seems to have forgotten the meaning of Christmas joy."
The whole conversation instantly took me back to the year I worked at Aaron Brothers and I remember how many customers I gave "discounts" to--ok so I couldn't exactly figure out how to change the prices on the register, but I do remember cutting an awful lot of mats and glass for free for those who were incredibly patient and nice to us. I also remember almost leaving work in tears several days from having been completely chewed out by some angry customer who thought we were too slow, who didn't think his project was done right, who was upset because he couldn't find something on the shelves or whatever. (I say "he" because it was almost always the men who waited until the very last minute to do their shopping and then were angry at us because it was physically not possible for us to order their custom frame in 2 days--they apparently couldn't read the signs that say it takes 10 days to get anything custom ordered!)
So this Christmas, as everyone is out finishing up shopping, I think it would be wonderful if those of us who know what the real reason behind Christmas is all about could help spread some of that joy and patience when we interact with the customer service people? Looking them in the eye, asking them how their day is going, smiling, thanking them for their help, wishing them a Merry Christmas...things that aren't all that difficult or time consuming to do, but trust me, these are things that go a million miles to making a store clerk's day a little merrier! Happy shopping everyone!
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