There is an old saying that you can tell a lot about someone by how they treat waiters. Actually it probably extends to anyone that serves you – bus drivers, bar staff, shop staff.
The thinking is that if a seemingly nice, charming person is rude and patronising to someone serving them, it reveals them to be actually rather arrogant and unkind.
I’ve always found that interesting, and I think it’s a relationship that’s becoming increasingly strained as our society has become atomised – often technology mediates between those two sides, if it hasn’t replaced the serving side altogether.
The result is that the whole relationship merges with technology, and its emphasis on speed and convenience makes us ever less patient.
OK, but a bit off-topic for menswear surely? Yes, except that in our world of high-end clothing I think it’s worth remembering that we have less of this – we’re less mediated by technology and closer to the people that design and make our clothes. We’re fortunate – but we don’t always appreciate it.
When we talk about brands together on PS, they’re often compared by price and by value, and we get into a conversation about what you’re actually paying for – one has a physical shop, the other doesn’t; one has staff that know and understand the product, the other has ones that can do little more than fetch you a size.
Good staff are wonderful and should be valued. They don’t just make the experience more pleasurable, they often give crucial advice on sizing, on shrinkage, on how clothes wear. Yet it’s rare today that people say they want to pay for it.
I’m sometimes shocked by the things people write to our shop support team. Ninety-nine per cent are lovely, polite and appreciative. I’m sure more so than the vast majority of online stores. But the number of people who will order something at 5pm on a Friday, and then send five increasingly angry emails over the weekend, asking why their order hasn’t shipped, never fails to surprise me.
Or they get aggressively rhetorical – to quote one actual email, ‘how are these things being delivered, on the back of a donkey?’ It’s lazy and rude, but the role of service staff has become one where the staff are always expected to say ‘yes sir, no sir’, like a robot, merely letting the customer rant.
Which of course is exactly what you end up with. You end up with online bots, proclaiming to be helpful but understanding nothing. This drives me crazy – I actually punched a wall last week as the EE broadband helpline sent me round in circles with numerical phone options. It’s infuriating, dehumanising even.
The equivalent with clothes is that you’ll find yourself scrolling for hours, trying to work fiddly filters and peering at tiny pictures, rather than walking around a beautiful shop and seeing, feeling and trying beautiful things.
And with the first option your package might be delivered on a Sunday, but down the back of the bins even though it’s raining.
I am certainly not innocent in all this. I find myself reading WhatsApp messages while someone in Pret is asking me how I’d like to pay. I catch myself listening to music in one ear – only removing one headphone – as I explain my coffee order.
I’ve done it with online customer service too. I once ordered a pair of sandals from a mainstream brand, and got hugely, disproportionately angry at someone on the phone when they couldn’t explain how to work the returns system.
In fact, I think the main reason I haven’t done something like that recently is that I’m much more aware of the other side, seeing our customer service emails every day. My wife always said she thought she was more considerate because she worked in Caffe Nero when she was younger. She knows what the service industry is like.
I don’t pretend to have a valid opinion on the state of politeness in society as a whole. I also don’t want the comments section to turn into a list of old-man’s rants about the kids today.
But I do think it’s an interesting angle on how we value clothes, their prices and their value. I think a lot of readers are understandably cynical about designer brands, and that can bleed into how they see pricing generally. But good staff are just as much worth paying for as added cashmere content.
Staff are the bedrock of the menswear industry and only if we value them – including how we treat them – will they remain. Otherwise it’s back to nothing but scrolling and peering and filtering.
Pictured: Some shops with great staff (there are so many on PS). From top: Schostal, Rome; 40 Colori, London; Atelier Bomba, Rome; Wythe, New York; Moulded Shoe, New York; Mes Chaussettes Rouges, Paris
