Dear Aunty Em: Customers


‘No names to be mentioned, but why is society – in particular retail customers – more demanding now than, say, 10 years ago?’
– People Suck

Dear People Suck,

There was a wonderful time when people drank instant coffee and sat down to watch one of the four TV channels available. They drank cask wine and ate lamb chops, mashed potatoes and chokoes slathered in margarine.

Everyone thought this was pretty good until cable television showed up, and then the internet, and with it the unlimited world of shopping, information and entertainment.

Suddenly everything got a lot more complicated; wine came in varieties other than ‘red’ and ‘white’, coffee had an origin other than the Nescafe factory and kale became a thing. KALE! A vegetable so foul that even poor people avoided it.

In the past 10 years, our world has gotten a lot faster and fancier. Lamb is grilled in Moroccan spices, tossed with Persian fetta and strewn atop quinoa … and that’s on a Monday night.

That’s why customers have become even bigger assholes. They expect things quickly, they expect them to be exactly what they want, and they want it cheaper than the Chinese manufacturers on eBay.

The problem is that the internet ain’t going away. My advice is to communicate with customers via online chat and only in emojis so that they too can feel the pain of dealing with the internet.



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