“Are you a member of the store?” A salesperson at a Barnes & Nobles’ café department once asked me the question as I was preparing to pay for the coffee drink I had just ordered. Apparently, customers who had registered for a discount card were considered “members of the store.” The same thing happened to me at a Borders store before that chain went bankrupt. There, the salesperson refused to take my “No, I am not a member” for an answer—as per company policy.
Let's be clear here: retail stores have customers, not members. Shopping in a Walmart store especially is not at all like belonging to a country club. To put it bluntly, arrogance is the unavoidable bad odor that fills the air when a bottom-feeder retail presumes to have "guests" and "membors." Once an assistant manager of a Target store insisted that customers are guests even after I had pointed out that people do not have guests over to buy something. Ignoring or refuting a customer's reply adds not only further insult, but belies the original claim, for it is an oxymoron for a host or hostess to be rude to guests.
Moreover, it is presumptuous for a retail company’s employees (including managers) to act (i.e. lie) as if they really believe that stores naturally have members or guests. Clubs have members, and people who have guests over do not typically treat them to a sale, as in, "Come on over for dinner, but you have to buy something from me first." The retail employee does not think providing dinner is necessary, but is nevertheless orienting to the selling. If a business is open to the public, it does not make sense to refer to the general public as members or invited guests. The self-serving nature of the pretense or outright lie is too saccurine for my taste. In the domain of religion, such managerial employees would doubtless want a convenient religion that boils down to me, me, me. Only a people-pleaser could serve for long as the cleric in such congregations.
Lastly, a rather slick elitism is implicit in explicitly distinguishing members from non-members, as in “are you a member?” Even in calling some customers "guests" and others "members" projects an "outsider/insider" dichotomy that is overdrawn (and may even involve passive aggression as well as power-aggrandizement). Is it really in a store's financial interest to make some of its customers feel second class? Imagine a Walmart cashier asking you, "Are you a member?" as if anyone would want to be one! You might break out in uncontrollable laughter. "How utterly arrogant for a bottom-feeder retailer even to assume that membership rightly applies there.
Lastly, a rather slick elitism is implicit in explicitly distinguishing members from non-members, as in “are you a member?” Even in calling some customers "guests" and others "members" projects an "outsider/insider" dichotomy that is overdrawn (and may even involve passive aggression as well as power-aggrandizement). Is it really in a store's financial interest to make some of its customers feel second class? Imagine a Walmart cashier asking you, "Are you a member?" as if anyone would want to be one! You might break out in uncontrollable laughter. "How utterly arrogant for a bottom-feeder retailer even to assume that membership rightly applies there.
Moreover, any culture highlighted by “members,” "guests," and “upgrades” being somehow pertaining to retail business may suffer from a more general societal trend that is not transparent. Too often, moderns pretend that vacuous retail phrases have substance--treating emptiness as though it were substance. Just because someone, even a manager, asserts that something is real does not make it so. Ultimately, if customers do not object to the arrogant and erroneous use of the words, member and guest, then the insufferable retail mentality that is fine with such vacuous misnomers is enabled. Pretty soon, the sordid practice could become ubiquitous not only in the business sector, but across society if it is highly commercialized as is the case in the United States relative to the European Union.
When an employee in a store or at it's customer service call-bank says, “I’m sorry for your inconvenience,” or even uses the word "unfortunately" in such an emotionless tone that the speaker could not possibly feel bad about the customer's bad experience, absolutely no credence is to go with that stock (marketing) reply. It is really to say, "Even though you had a bad experience or have a complaint, we at the store want you to think that we acknowledge some responsibility or obligation due to the store's part." In fact, "we want you to go on buying things here as if the problem were so minor it could not warrant an apology with recompensense." In actuality, an apology without any compensation, monetarily or in terms of merchandise, is not only empty, but also quite insulting, for it is a subtle means of cheating the customer, or "guest." Do retailers really think their customers are so stupid as to think that everything is made right again by an easy apology? Even the authors of customer-service books admit that such apologies are so ubiquitous in business that they count for next to nothing. Who could possibly take such unemotional, easy "apology sans renumeration as a real apology, rather than as a pre-arranged talking point that can even feel as a slap. Authentic apologies would be backed up by some economic sacrifice, rather than a coupon-enticement to buy again as if the matter had been resolved to the customer's real satisfaction). Rarely does a customer demand compensation as a prerequisite for accepting the apology, and also for any coming back to the store. A business is an economic entity; one must treat it as such and transact in economic terms. By a business's own reckoning, "Sorry for any inconvenience" without any economic cost to the business can only be of a distant, hypothetical value unless most of the customers are suckers.
More on this topic is in On the Arrogance of False Entitlement: A Nietzschean Critique of Business Ethics and Management, which is available at Amazon.
