The other night I took myself over to a favorite neighborhood restaurant for one of my favorite indulgences: a pizza Margherita with the addition of a crisp and pungent made-in-house bacon. I suppose purists would scoff at putting bacon on a Margherita, but that’s the way I like it, and it’s my dinner, so we all know what the purists can do with their purist proclamations.
I generally eat quite early and so I’m typically one of the only customers in the place, although more folks start trickling in while I’m there. This particular evening my friendly young waiter—oh, he looked like he needed a bath but that’s true of most San Franciscans, in my opinion the worst-groomed, worst-dressed, and least hygienic people in North America—took care of my orders with dispatch. I started out on an intriguing local draft beer (too hop-pish for my taste but drinkable nonetheless) and then munched my way through a good salad.
My pizza didn’t look like a Margherita. No tomatoes. All white-ish, bacon poking through, and what looked like small mushrooms. Hmmm … I thought … well, let’s give it a try. It was perfectly OK, but definitely not a Margherita. Eventually my waiter came by (the pizza was served by somebody from the kitchen) and asked me how things were going. I had already eaten about a third of the pizza by that time. I joked something along the lines of “you seem to have changed the recipe for a Margherita; I’ve had this quite a few times before but this is new to me.” He looked startled, went over to check my order on the computer screen, and came back to report that they had messed up the order and given me a mushroom pizza, with a Gruyère base and herbal accents along with the added bacon.
I decided not to make a fuss about it. The pizza was perfectly decent (although I have to confess that I’m not a big fan of bianco-style pizzas with Gruyère or some other white-cheese base) and so I just laughed and said it was OK.
That was my choice; I was well within my rights to ask them to take it back and give me the Margherita I had ordered. I could have even been shirty about it. But I chose to be gracious instead. I finished my mushroom-and-Gruyère pizza; not something I would order again, nor would have ordered voluntarily. But it was a well-prepared dish from an excellent local restaurant.
The upshot: the restaurant took the pizza off my bill, so I wound up paying for my beer and the salad only. I thought that was gracious of them and thanked my waiter for the courtesy. He thanked me for being so nice about the mistake. I refrained from recommending a hot shower, shampoo, and a visit to the laundromat.
Courtesy was the order of the day from both sides of the exchange; no attitude from me, no defensiveness from them. That’s business as usual for me, given I firmly believe that friendliness and courtesy is a two-way street, no matter what the venue.
During my recent week-long trip to Carmel, I experienced numerous retail encounters, both in stores and restaurants. My guest made a point of commenting on how pleasant I always was to people, how I got them to talk to me, however briefly, and how I always tried to make even simple interactions pleasant. And he’s absolutely right about that: I typically go out of my way to be nice to register clerks, waiters, servers, and the like. 99% of the time they warm up quickly and are only too happy to chat for a moment. Maybe it helps their day along a bit—retail jobs are boring by definition—but more to the point, it brings civility to a mind-numbingly impersonal situation.
My efforts aren’t always successful. Establishments with a hipster vibe are mostly immune to friendly courtesy, for example: the clerks exude disdainful attitudes. The same is true of student-oriented venues, such as the shops and cafés around the UC Berkeley campus. Many of the employees are Cal students who lack social skills. And Berkeley is a notoriously unfriendly town, even more so than San Francisco, where routine indifference is enshrined as a retail principle.
But it needn’t be that way. The flagship downtown Macy’s store in San Francisco was long a bastion of snide clerks who dripped with disdain. Then a Nordstrom opened nearby. Suddenly Macy’s was competing with a retailer that prides itself on attentive and friendly customer service. Twittiness vanished like the morning dew. Macy’s remains ridiculously understaffed, to be sure—I could stage a major heart attack in the middle of the men’s department and I doubt anybody would notice—but if you can find a clerk to help you, the service is likely to be polite, attentive, and even friendly.
The Amazon steamroller has caused the few remaining brick-and-mortar bookstores to adopt a far more civil demeanor. The days of surly twit clerks at Brentano’s have receded into history, and good riddance. Every record store that folded did away with yet another bunch of grimy smart-asses. Oh, Amoeba Records continues to set the standard for employee sullenness, the corporate powers-that-be having apparently concluded that Amoeba’s eclecticism can’t be reduplicated online, thus truculence may flourish unchecked. That most of the Amoeba employees are minimum-wage stoners doesn’t help any. Nor that the bulk of the clientele is young and accustomed to being treated with indifference. Amoeba has an intriguing and constantly updated stock, which renders it enticing, but it is one of the very few places in which I never attempt even the slightest frisson of friendliness. Pearls before swine and all that.