The Rapid Decline in the Quality of Service In America
Quick rant here. I cant tell if I am cursed or if my anecdotal experiences as of late are indicative of a systemic issue facing America.
In the past 4 months, I had the following customer service experiences:
- Paid ~$5k to get a fence installed in my backyard. Fence guy 1 came out, provided a design, gave a quote, we paid a deposit, and then he gave us an estimate of when the job would be complete. He said give us a max of 2 months, with the final date being Christmas Eve. On Christmas Eve, he shows up, knocks once, and then leaves. He calls us saying he has no idea how to do the work and we weren't home so he couldn't possibly build us a fence. Dude, you and your team designed the mock up and presented us the solution, but now no one in your org knows how to do it? We hire a second company, both of which come at a premium. They provide a new design, and give us a three month window for when the fence will be built. Three months come and they never started work, just took our money and never followed up. We requested a full refund from both and got it, so its not as though they are making some marginal amount of money here. Wtf are they doing?
- Wife ordered ~$1000 worth of furniture off of Wayfair. It came broken. We filed a complaint. They sent another shipment. It was in worse shape than the first one, completely unusable. We canceled our order after receiving a refund.
- Ordered a family friend a $200 bouquet of flowers as she lost a relative. Charged us for the flowers, but they never arrived. No note or apology, again we had to follow up and get our money back after doing the legwork to determine they never arrived
- Ordered doordash to my office. Worker left the food OUTSIDE, like literally on a ledge, sends me the picture as though that is a solid place to leave it.
- Relative ordered the new C8 Corvette. The latch on the convertible breaks in under 400 miles. The car sits in the shop for FOUR months because no one can figure out the issue or fix it.
- We hired movers recently. Very well regarded and they came at a significant premium. They did the worst job humanly imaginable. We paid for all clothes to be boxed, they were already on hangars, the movers couldnt be bothered to hang them up, all the shirts were in a pile on the floor of the box completely wrinkled. ~40% of our artwork was destroyed. They dropped a $1000 piece of equipment and scratched it beyond repair. Then the head mover walked up to me and let me know "just so you know, tips arent included. We typically get $200 EACH, and we prefer cash". Ya, ok buddy.
In hindsight, some of these services (Wayfair, Doordash) are budget options, so they look for large volumes to go through, but others not so much. The fence / florist were premium services.
Am I going crazy? Am I cursed? Or has the service aspect of many of these services dropped in quality beyond any previous historical low?
The second one is the major factor, whenever it's a middle-aged WASP lady waitress or something the service is amazing. If it's some military-aged brown male "refugee" from somewhere like Somalia/India handling my food it may as well as be a donkey serving me
@WallStreetOasis.com Can we ban the users with objectively anti-semitic usernames?
I don’t think it has do to with race, Jewslayer1944. But the quality of the service industry has declined due to economical factors and declining real income.
2008 meant people had to do more with less, and therefore came to expect less for their money. That was reflected onto service providers and now it’s an Ouroboros-esque cycle where you expect less, get less, and expect even less next time.
So people still tightening belts plus enshittification = bad service.
You’re seeing a mix of systemic issues and individual bad actors. Gig-economy services like DoorDash or Wayfair rely on volume, which sometimes sacrifices attention to detail. But even in premium services, staffing challenges, poor training, and overpromises create these failures. It’s frustrating, but unfortunately, not uncommon.
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