So here I am, sitting in a chic café, in a place that ten years ago wouldn’t have imagined itself capable of a chic café. I wait for my herring roes on toast (so modern in their retro-ness) perusing the menu board, which today has ‘Wookey Hole Cheddar’, Brie de Meaux and (our latest local ‘find’) Binham Blue. So postmodernism is alive and well, at least among the products of this restaurant. (I wonder does anyone actually mature cheddar cheese in Wookey Hole?)

But if restaurant products are remodelling themselves to fit a new reality, what is happening to the service—or indeed to service generally? At this point I believe I feel age-related grumpiness coming on; after all, that is the sort of thing I can remember the ‘old folks’ (probably in their forties at the time) complaining about when I was a lad. On the other hand, I do think the rate of change in service terms is quite noticeable—in the uk at least. I notice this particularly, having just come back after nearly four years in Switzerland.

For example, single-line queueing systems of the sort implied in my title are even more common here now than when I moved abroad. They have one at my local railway station for instance, where I recently experienced a service encounter so bad I wish I could have videoed it as a teaching aid. I had duly queued and been called to the counter when I was informed that on the day I was travelling the line was being repaired and I would have to go one third of the way on a coach. A bad start, but anyway I bought my ticket and paid for it, when the technology started playing up.

The cashier told me she didn’t know whether I had paid or not, and asked me to pay again. Naturally I asked what would happen if I had in fact paid for it, and was told I would be charged twice, but I could check with my bank and perhaps reclaim the money through them. I asked whether I had in fact bought the ticket, which elicited the response:

So you want me to let you want to walk away with these tickets when I don’t know if you’ve paid? That might leave my till short: is that what you want?

At this point I asked to speak to the supervisor and suggested she check with the service company whether my card had in fact been charged. The supervisor rather reluctantly went off to ring the company.

While my companion and I waited the 27 minutes that it took the supervisor to contact the card-service company, we chatted, and at one point the cashier, who was now fretting that her till would show a shortfall and becoming resentful of what she saw as ‘difficult customers’, leaned forward and demanded to know what we were saying. Perhaps to take her mind off us the neighbouring cashier (in a vignette that I would love to have videoed) asked her whether she preferred the pink screen that the ticketing system now showed or the lilac screen they had had before.

Eventually the supervisor came back and reported that the card-service company were unable, due to another technical failure at their end, to say whether my card had been debited or not. I pointed out politely that it was rather unreasonable to expect me to pay twice for what would be a rather unsatisfactory service anyway, but in the end I paid because I had to travel. At no point did anyone apologise to me.

This is of course a parody of bad service and naturally most hospitality operations would dread and abhor this level of ignorance and customer-unfriendliness. Conventional wisdom would probably say that this was a technical problem, handled by technical rather than service people. But that is not good enough. Systems can be made more customer-friendly, both by refining the technology and by ensuring that service personnel are trained to have a human touch (courtesy at least!). Conventional wisdom would probably say that most hospitality operations do not have this kind of queueing system, but of course some do, and McDonaldisation is a real force in the industry, because the drive toward greater productivity will not let up. (But not even McDonald’s have introduced single queuing systems.) Conventional wisdom would probably also say that it is difficult to get a ready supply of good staff. They may be right, but often they will also tell you that it difficult to get proper feedback on service quality.

So is this all that is happening to service in the post-modern age? Well, not exactly. There are still professional waiting staff, and greater diversity with a large influx of young people from Eastern Europe and elsewhere. But on the debit side there is a lot of standardised, systematised service about and single-queuing systems are waiting in the wings. The argument about feedback simply doesn’t stand: for instance, if they had asked me about my experience, I would certainly have told them, as would my, by now fuming, companion …in no uncertain terms!

Nick Johns

Bournemouth University