Yes, we have no service

A tour agent once lamented that customer service in Saipan is sometimes lousy. Actually, she used a much more graphic term than “lousy,” but you get the point.

Not to be one-upped by a woman who can cuss like a Drill Sergeant, we quickly embarked on an exchange of “lousy” customer service stories. Everyone in the group had an entertaining story or two. Mine went like this:

I once swung by an office supply store to pick up some notebook paper. Not exactly a complicated mission. And since I was the only customer in the store, the errand promised to be a quick one.

I walked through the aisles in my usual random fashion, but failed to unearth any notebook paper. The store’s only clerk, a completely inert, bovine gal of about 21, was ensconced behind the cash register doing something to her fingernails. Her eyes followed me around the store. Her jaws worked on a massive wad of chewing gum. She seemed to regard me with a mild distaste.

I finally imposed on the gal and asked her if they carried any notebook paper.

“Uh. Notebook paper?” she asked.

So I described to the woman what notebook paper is. She sucked on the wad of gum for a minute and contemplated her cuticles. Then a faint (very faint) glimmer of thought seemed to flash in her dull eyes. “We don’t have it,” she proclaimed.

Not like it mattered, but since I was already there I asked, “do you know when you’ll be getting any in?”

Chew chew chew.

“We don’t carry it anymore,” said she.

“Why not?” I asked.

Chew chew chew.

“Every time we had it,” she said, “we’d sell out of it. Since it is so hard to keep in stock, I don’t order it anymore.”

Chew chew chew.

Such was my tale. What I find most interesting is that the clerk’s logic seemed so obvious, so iron clad, so natural to her. This has some interesting ramifications for management theory. The owner of the store, presumably, is in business to maximize profits. The clerk, however, has every incentive to minimize her expenditure of energy (I might add she was very successful on this count). The two–the owner and the clerk–therefore have completely opposing interests.

In many businesses, of course, the lowest paid employees are precisely the ones who interface with the single most element of the business: the customer. The genius of Sam Walton (of WalMart fame) and of the Nordstrom department stores was their success in getting sales clerks to pull for the overall corporate goals. These two screamingly successful retail outlets serve opposite ends of the economic food chain, but they’ve both focused on a common goal: customer service.

After all, even if the clerk has the gum, the customers have all the financial teeth, eh?

Ed Stephens, Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. “Ed4Saipan@yahoo.com”