For Harry Hapless, it was a rough day in the service economy. His car, a Fiasco 400, started sputtering on the highway, so Harry pulled into a gas station for help. "Sorry, no mechanics, only gas!" shouted the attendant. "How can you call this a service station?" yelled Harry. He went to the bank to get some emergency cash for a tow truck, only to find the automatic teller machine out of order, again. "Real nice service!" he muttered. Then Harry decided to use a credit card to buy a tool kit at the Cheapo discount store, but he couldn't find anyone to wait on him. "Service! Anyone, please! Help me!" was his cry.
It had been a trying day indeed, Harry thought as he rode a bus home, but at least he could look forward to a trip to Florida the following week with his wife Harriet. That is, until Flyway Air called: "Sorry, Mr. Hapless. Due to our merger with Byway Air, your Florida flight has been canceled." Harry got so angry he was going to call the Federal Aviation Administration / immediately. But just then his phone went dead -- no doubt because the Bell System had been split up, he imagined. Well, that was the last straw. A few minutes later a wild-eyed Harry burst into the newsroom of his local newspaper. "I've got a story for you!" he cried. "There is no more service in America!"
More and more consumers are beginning to feel almost as frustrated as Harry Hapless. Personal service has become a maddeningly rare commodity in the American marketplace. Flight attendants, salesclerks and bank tellers all seem to have become too scarce and too busy to give consumers much attention. Many other service workers are underpaid, untrained and unmotivated for their jobs, to the chagrin of customers who look to them for help. The concept of personal service is a difficult quantity to measure precisely, to be sure; the U.S. Government keeps no Courtesy Index or Helpfulness Indicator among its economic statistics. But customers know service when they miss it, and now they want it back. Says Thomas Peters, a management consultant and co-author of In Search of Excellence: "In general, service in America stinks."
Economic upheaval is to blame. First came the great inflation of the 1970s, which forced businesses to slash service to keep prices from skyrocketing. Then came deregulation, which fostered more price wars and further cutbacks. Meanwhile, service workers became increasingly difficult to hire because of labor shortages in many areas. At the same time, managers found that they could cut costs by replacing human workers with computers and self-service schemes. It all makes perfect bookkeeping sense for businesses, but the trend has left consumers without enough human faces to turn to for guidance in spending their billions of dollars on services. Americans tolerated, and even welcomed, self-service during an era of rising prices, but now a backlash is beginning. Result: some companies are scrambling to make amends, and "quality of service" is on its way to becoming the next business buzz phrase.