Stuffed Shirts and Syntax

Stuffed Shirts and Syntax

I was in Argos in Croydon once and a young black counter assistant asked a queuing man in a car coat “what you got mate?”. Said man in beige proceeded to contemptuously scowl down his glasses, and announced. “I am not your mate I am the customer”. The assistant answered with a look of bewildered hurt “whatever”, pivoted towards the shelf retrieved customers good and wordlessly passed him his Goblin Teasmade or novelty owl mouse scarer or whatever it was. Then after said man had went off in hight dudgeon, turned to me and some other people and said “what was that all about know what I mean”.

I am reminded of this by the behaviour of T.M. Lewin a bespoke shirt retailer. So, exercised where management by the dangerous deployment of a regional accent by a young Salford lass they saw fit as the journalist Barbara Ellen puts it to play Henry Higgins to their young Eliza and sent her off to learn how to speak properly: In a curious desire to show the good and bad of customer communication they sent her , to John Lewis’s canteen where proper posh people shop and the help have to be suitably polite and to McDonald’s where it assumed the young an monosyllabic tend to work. It was probaly thought that after comparing the two she might try and sound a bit more like Hyacinth Bouquet and less like Liam Gallagher. Who knows what the staff in John Lewis sounded like I must listen out the next time for the strangulated Celia Johnson type diction as I am asked “How may I help you sir.. would you like a nice pot of tea and a scone..lovely day for tennis”

It was a massive and comically inept assumption on two fronts. .. Firstly the idea that the use of slang and idiom paves the way to Hell in a handcart, itself borders on the idiotic. Some people believe that when young people use placeholders such as "like" and "innit" they are effectively consigning themselves to be employed in the darkest manual drudgery far from customer contact. Yet for every beige car coated pedant there is a younger person and a less stuffy older one who doesn’t mind as long as people are polite and engaged. if she was neither then that’s an issue. I suspect that wasn’t the issue. The issue of how people write and speak is entirely different of course, but colloquial customer communication with warmth and spontaneity is to be preferred to a phony customer service voice any day.

Those who think they have a right to dictate how young people should speak, should as they say "get real". Accents of which I am the owner of a strong one add variety and warmth, otherwise call centre operators would not put so many jobs into areas like Scotland and Ireland. Slang and idiom should also be accommodated. OK it’s a cliché but language evolves and as long as people can be understood and are polite and try, surely their accent is part of the diversity of engaging with customers.

The assumption that McDonalds which spends fortunes on training and developing its staff would provide a poorer customer service than John Lewis is plainly silly. Anyone who has been in McDonalds recently will know this. The JL partnership has a great reputation for customer service but I know from personal experience that customer engagement is the number one priority of McDonalds. As the fast food chain successfully captures trading down customers it has to offer an excellent product at all levels. What it probably does though is tolerate the fact that young people can be productively polite in a way that outraged crusties from Croydon or bespoke short salesman stuffed with a sense of their own or their customers over-importance. As the young guy from Croydon might say. “Loosen up” man.