On a few occasions in this forum, the VFTB has aired loudly, sarcastically, and angrily, his discontent with self-checkouts in the many businesses who offer the opportunity of having their employees supervise customers doing the work they should be doing, while they stand, often times with their cell phones in hand.

One of the businesses on the list of doing less and less, while they pay their employees for catching up with their e mails, their texting, or playing whatever phone games with which they are using to occupy all the free time they have in their daily job(?), is a Big Box store located on Fairmount Avenue, where customer service is just a figment of someone in charge of the store’s operations and imagination. The VFTB had thought they had seen it all, but he was so wrong when he visited the store a short time ago, as he and Mrs. VFTB amazingly approached the one checkout aisle that had someone actually checking out customers. The excitement and jubilation proved to be short lived though.

As Mr. and Mrs. VFTB placed their bags on the rolling conveyor belt, we saw the checkout employee, just put them on the spot where the groceries landed after being scanned. As he scanned more and more items, they started piling up where the grocery bags were also sitting. The checkout person made no attempt to bag the groceries, at all, leading us to believe there was now a no-bag policy, at least from this cashier, so in the interest of saving time and not making multiple customers have to wait longer to get through the one live checkout aisle, Mr. VFTB began bagging his own groceries and loading the bags in his cart. As he was doing this, and as he walked to the door to exit the store, and as he pushed his cart through the parking lot to his car, he was thinking out loud about the absurdity of the situation. Needless to say, he was not a happy camper.

As he (the VFTB) has asked numerous times before, how do businesses justify people working in a customer service department of that business, and post signs all over their store promoting about how important customer service is to the company’s mission statement and goal, yet offer less and less service to those customers? How hypocritical is that mission statement when the customers are providing their own self service, without pay of course, and/or without seeing any discount on the items purchased by them, as the employees of the business are getting paid for doing less and less? The VFTB won’t ever believe that his father was wrong when he frequently reminded us while we grew up, that “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Businesses who operate as the one spoken about in this narrative, have certainly stretched the definition, and boundaries, of customer service and what that actually is and means.

It is mind-boggling that customer service has deteriorated as much as it has, and the rubble pile of the unkept promises of businesses has grown and grown, with, from the eyes of this columnist, no possibility in sight of it getting much better as time goes on.

One of my all-time favorite television shows of the early 2000s was The West Wing. One often used question asked by President Bartlet to his personal secretary, Mrs. Dolores Landingham, was “What’s next, Mrs. Landingham?” In looking at the progression of destruction and eventual disappearance of customer service, the VFTB wants to know, “What’s next?” Will customers be forced to drive to where the delivery trucks are and load them? Will they then be forced to drive back to the individual stores, and have to unload them? Will they then have to stock the shelves of the stores, before having the privilege of then putting whatever items they need from their shopping lists in their carts, and, then checking their items out themselves, and then top that off by being allowed to bag their own items themselves as well?

Where and when will it all end? I’m not sure it ever will, so I guess I will have to think about the referring to the same philosophy as I use when I’m watching television and don’t like what’s on a certain channel, I just use my remote to change the channel, or if I find nothing to my liking, I can always turn my television off.

Guess I’ve got some serious thinking to do.