The Death of Customer Service

One thing that was hard to adjust after living in Japan is the difference in customer service. Sure, hardly anyone in Japan speaks English. And the government has such rigid and complex rules that you feel that you are an extra trapped in an movie directed by Gilliam based on an unpublished short story by Kafka. But most sales clerks trip over themselves to provide customer service, often emitting streams of apologies when even the slightest thing is wrong.

Most gas stations in Japan, for example, have a team that will guide your car into the right spot, fill up the tank, wipe the windshield and windows, check the oil and direct you back on the road. OK, in Japan gas prices are such that you have to make a choice between filling up the tank or eating for two weeks, but compare that to most gas stations here, where you're lucky if the attendant snarls as he passes your change back through the slot in the security cage.

Those who have been near me the last few months have heard my Brick story and I won't get into that here except to mention that everyone I told it to couldn't believe it, and that I had to use my fringe-player status in the media world to get any kind of result. ('Look man, I got paid rather poorly for a couple of articles in The Globe and Mail and have had conversations with producers at RoBTV, so I don't think you know who are you dealing with').

My recent set of headaches have been about home newspaper delivery. I love my newspaper in the morning. And I don't mean the electronic version (though I read those as well) but the actual crumply paper, ink-staining your fingers paper. If I had the time I would read four newspapers a day (I usually read two plus various on-line publications) and most of my weekend would be spent reading newspapers. Four years of marriage and my wife still doesn't understand why I have to read the same story in two different newspapers while watching CNN or CTV newsnet and drinking a pot of coffee.

I had been holding off getting a home delivery for a variety of reasons but a few weeks ago I tried to get the Globe and Mail delivered, the old gray lady of Canadian journalism. That didn't work out very well --- I was told that 'it wasn't worth the delivery-persons time to enter my building and drop it off at my door' so I cancelled the subscription after my third copy was stolen out of the lobby. A neighbour down the hall gets the Toronto Star delivered and another gets the Sun on the weekends, but I found a place near work where I can pick up the Star for free. (Or at least I think it's free -- so far no one has chased after me). So I called the Post, told the situation and was told that apartment door delivery would be no problem.

Next morning it was a problem, because the paper was down in the lobby. And it was an even bigger problem the next day because it wasn't there at all. Before this I had assumed that if someone saw a newspaper rolled up in a plastic bag with someone else's name on it that they wouldn't take it, as it is, uh, what's that called... STEALING! Oh, how wrong I was. After repeated calls to the customer service people at the Post, I was told that if I made a copy of the apartment key I could have the paper dropped off at my door. I did and it took some time to get the delivery person to come and pick up the key. (Apparently, when he said 'I'll be there tomorrow morning at 7:30 to pick up the key' he meant the other tomorrow morning).

And the paper was still in the lobby.

To make it worse the Post has a campaign to hand out free papers and they were all being dropped off in my lobby, with mine on top of it. Daily calls to customer service didn't really get me anywhere until I talked about cancelling the subscription. The last straw was today, when I was told that the key didn't work. A key that I tested myself. This is a week after I handed over the key and I had called every day to complain about not getting the paper. I was told that the distributor would call me and try to resolve this matter.

What the distributor did was call my home number, which was a big mistake because my wife was at home and not in a good mood. Tempers were raised, names were called (I believe my wife asked if the delivery person had some kind of mental problem that prevented him from putting the key into a lock and turning it the right way) and I finally cancelled the whole thing.

What's stupid about this entire mess is that I want to get the paper, I like the paper, but I want to get it delivered to my door. Not a lot to ask of a newspaper home delivery (on my list of other unreasonable demands: waiters who serve my food hot, clerks who give back the correct amount of change) but too much to ask of this delivery person.