What on earth happened to customer service in Australia?
Anyone doubting the impact of the decline in service on community happiness needs only to wander into their local Coles or Woolworths.
It’s early evening at the drive-through at McDonald’s on the Hume Freeway, deep in the heart of Ned Kelly country, and the service is slower than the hunt for Dezi Freeman.
The wait just seems to go on and on. When the snaking line of frustration finally starts moving, I ask the worker behind the window: “How are you going?”
With a sad face, she tells me she has been verbally abused three times and one of her colleagues has just walked off the job. Had enough. There it is, a young woman trying to make her way and getting hammered by customers who can’t deal with the company’s sclerotic service.
She has been let down much more than the customers who were made to wait – another unintended victim of the slow death of service in Australia, a crisis evident across the $430bn retail sector.
The rising consumer anger – while some of it clearly unacceptable – is a manifestation of buyer fatigue caused by the selfish drive by executives to maximise their short and long-term incentives at the expense of the national good.
Twenty or 30 years ago, a drive-through at McDonald’s was over as quickly as a Big Mac was eaten; it’s why millions of (now old and maybe portly) people on the road saw the fast-food outlet as a quick respite while burning through the kilometres, if not the calories, up the Hume. Macca’s was once the global benchmark for efficiency. Now it is becoming a very small example of a much broader issue.
Anyone doubting the impact of this decline in service on community happiness needs only to wander into their local Coles or Woolworths.
It’s a dynamic where staff must feel like human shields in the battle for the retail dollar.
My local has just introduced yet another security blockade to corral the honest people.
It comes in the form of gates at the entrance that stop the consumer from leaving the store even if, like so many of us do, we change our minds without buying anything. Or forgot to get a trolley, which is weirdly outside the new Coles border crossing.
It means once you enter the store, you can leave only on the other side of the shop.
The penalty for leaving through the new gates is a piercing security alarm that wouldn’t be out of place in a prison.
My wife recently made the error of changing her mind and was pursued by a young staff member wanting to know whether she was a thief. She wasn’t.
Service is all but non-existent in the major supermarkets.
They are increasingly bereft of staff and, like sheep, we are funnelled into a pen and made to pack our own shopping under the watchful eye of someone not doing a whole lot other than making sure the 25c paper bags are paid for. Sure.
To get out of my local Coles after the self-checkout also requires navigating a couple of plastic gates that don’t always work. They mostly do. But if they don’t, old mate must come over and let me out, even though I’ve just lined Mr Coles’s pockets with another $100. It’s called paying for a slow exit.
Of course, Coles is right to bleat about the multibillion-dollar theft bill that is raging across the sector.
It’s hardly a surprise, though, given so few staff are on deck and the effect the duopoly is having on prices.
Staff members no longer know what is in aisle three and there doesn’t seem to be any such thing as a price check.
Who really needs to know that eight Gillette razor blades sell for $64 or that steak is so expensive it comes with its own anti-theft device? While Ned Kelly might have approved of robbing the rich, it’s clearly a corrosive response to a retail system that no longer works.
Big petroleum started the death of service in the mid-1970s when owners started to pull bowser boys – as they almost always were – from the driveways and left every Tom, Dick and Harriette to check their own oil and water and pump their own petrol.
Let’s face it, the transition never killed any of us.
Indeed, working at the local Shell was one of my first paid jobs, the only challenge making sure my head wasn’t blown off by the cap from a red-hot radiator.
It’s no surprise now that the supermarkets are into petrol as well and that the system is loaded with bullshit.
“Prices can vary greatly between city and regional towns and areas due to differing competitive and economic characteristics,’’ the Australian Institute of Petroleum says.
“Retail prices and margins in regional areas are also typically higher compared with major capital cities.’’
Except when they are not. Which is all the time.
Retailers relentlessly gouge consumers in inner-city areas, even though the fuel tankers travel short distances. It was $1.67 a litre in parts of country Victoria this week and – wait for it – $2.09 a litre for the cheap stuff, $2.33 a litre for some cars in Melbourne’s inner east.
Same thing in the outer suburbs as in the country; much cheaper.
Inner-city drivers are being robbed by the modern-day Kelly gang.
Of course, there are other factors that feed into this, such as the international price of refined fuel and the exchange rate, but many of these things are not related to the location of where the retailing occurs.
Have you walked into a bank lately? They don’t even bother to help any more or, when they do, it feels like watching Jesus wander across the Sea of Galilee.
Tried to call a power company or deal with an airline call centre? Remember the old Qantas service? Could you understand the call centre worker, a pretty basic requirement of any business’s communication strategy unless the strategy is not to communicate?
There is a reason so many businesses post signs warning customers not to abuse their staff.
Abuse is unacceptable, but it’s being driven in large part by the incompetence of the businesses people are dealing with.
The latest trend, especially in country areas, is for some motels or hotels to do away with the receptionist, so good luck getting any help there.
Where it all becomes transparently manipulative is at some country supermarkets, where it seems there is no shortage of people working behind the check-out.
You see big retail knows what it can get away with and it won’t risk a dollar backlash.
Which makes us city people a bunch of mugs for blindly accepting the sort of shortcuts that no proper business should allow.
We haven’t even touched on government. Who would have thought public transport revenue would collapse when conductors and other support staff were removed from trains, buses and trams? All that’s left is the dark hand of some poor person having to mete out fines to the recalcitrants. Or the council parking inspector doing Clown Hall’s bidding by handing out fines so the revenue flow is strong enough for the elected official’s next junket.
Common sense is the reason Australians are so valued on the battlefield of war, life and business.
Yet so much of the so-called work and business reforms that we are allowing to define our country in 2025 seemed good at the time but no longer actually work.
Service is dead in Australia and it’s time for some accountability before it sends us all barking mad.
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