THE ONLY THING CONSISTENT ABOUT CUSTOMER SERVICE IS IT'S INCONSISTENCY

Going out and doing business anywhere, you need to always have your "shields" up. Pardon the "Star Trek" reference. If you go into any retail business and your guard is down, buyer beware, you will somehow - someway get screwed. I can guarantee that. Sad but true.

There is always something wrong with the service, employees, the product, the store, the restaurant, the food, the waitress, the clerk - something and/or someone. Customer service - any customer service - is rare these days. In fact when you get it, you're amazed, astonished, need to Tweet or Facebook about it and walk around with a smile on your face, usually temporary until you go to your next stop.

Have you had just one day when everything was in stock, on sale, just what you wanted, the clerk or salesperson knew the answers to all your questions, everything functioned properly, it was just the right size, just the flavor you wanted, the dish came and looked just like the picture on the menu or when you checked out everything went though just like the commercial promised? Did someone help you so amazingly that you were sorry you had to leave to deal with someone else elsewhere?

When I walk out the front door of my home, I make sure I have my consumer armor on. I have to mentally and emotionally deal with what is surely about to be the stupidist moments of my day. For when I leave my home and get into my car and drive to the grocery or hardware store, bank, barber or beauty shop, restaurant or anywhere else that services the public, if I don't every second think about what I'm doing, the mallot of dreadful customer service will most assuredly hit me right over the head. I then feel completely stupid, but I remember I should have expected it.

Why just today, right before I wrote this blog piece, it happened. I was not only NOT surprised, shields up - armor on. I was ready for it and, agin, expecting it. I went into Home Depot to replace a quart can of custom paint for one of my bathrooms. Simple enough, right? I brought it up to the paint counter and interfaced with one of the "paint" people. Of course, they were out of quart cans for that brand of paint. How the heck can such a large store run out of small paint cans. Maybe they should run down the road and find an Ace Hardware and buy some.

Part of customer service in 2013 is that most everything is "out" just about everywhere. What used to be the model - the North American logistics system (recall "JIT" - just in time inventory management) everyone around the world looked up to - is gone. Inventory control is as dead an art as doing math on an abacus.

My mother used to tell me when I was growing up - you should see "vats" it like in Russia - sometimes she would substitute Africa or even China. I didn't have a clue what she was talking about until I actually went to those places and saw for myself the empty spaces on the shelves. Just like a WalMart or Lowe's now in this country.

The paint person and I made a "deal" where she would give me a gallon of the paint I wanted for the quart price. That was $11.98 which I thought was already too high, but then I was not about to wait until the Fortune 500 mega-box so-called discounted hardware billion dollar warehouse chain store managed to get some more quart cans in from wherever it comes from. She wrote a large note on the top of the can for the cashier instructing him to charge me the quart, not the gallon, price. Already I knew there was trouble ahead, because the typical 18-24 year old employee can neither read properly or think beyond what keyboard choices are available to them. Thank goodness, most transaction are done with plastic not requiring the Dead Sea Scrolls practice of "making" change.

Remember, I am self-trained to expect the expected stupidity when proceeding to the next step. Again, shields up! Straighten up my armor. I purposely kept my mouth shut. I get the usual mumbo jumbo jive from the cashier about did I find everything OK? Yeah, yeah. "That will be $34.95", he says. $34.95??? That my friends is one expensive quart can of biege bathroom paint. Some "discount" store. I'm hysterical inside my head. I ask, "Why so expensive?" I could have been really mean and say "Can't you read?".  But then, as I said, this is the norm not the exception - bad customer service.

The poor cashier looked positively confused. His brain wiring was clearly overheating. All this customer service inspired technology at his fingertips and he's been - actually the system has been - foiled by a hand written note from the paint person. She single handedly has brought down millions of dollars of advertising and marketing about how great Home Depot is - their prices, availability and the ease of going in one of their stores and going out with a smile - and saving money. It's all smoke and mirrors folks - bottom line, pure B.S.

I ask the young man, who reminded me of the "Raj" character on the CBS show "Big Bang Theory", d-i-d  y- o-u  r-e-a-d  t-h-e  n-o-t-e? Now comes the part of the transaction where he must try and refocus his 1984 George Orwellian store brainwashing (training) away from the BARCODE to the actual note. He then, and this is like a wood chipper that is fed a steel pipe, has to (OMG) make a decision as to how to void out the higher price and substitute the newer lower one. Oh the horror of it all AND people are waiting in line.

You get my point. What happened in this instance happens to you and me just about everywhere and everyday. It is unavoidable. Go to my last blog post about the USPS and there's another perfect example. Where does the fault lie? At the foundation our present education system deserves plenty of blame and higher up in the chain it is just poor management by managers and supervisors who are clueless about logistics and customer service and what business is really all about - us.

What to do about it? I'm afraid it's pretty much a lost cause. You must point your business to those places that do understand what customer service is and offer a superior product. Hopefully you won't have to pay much more for what you want. And, avoid those establishments that annoy you. In the case of a Home Depot or Applebee's or the USPS - the post office - you can go elsewhere to Lowe's, Chili's or Fedex, but chances are that the stupid stick of lousy inconsistent customer service has made it over there as well.

Personally just knowing - sadly - that customer service is dead in America - that the only thing consistent about customer service is it's inconsistency - about the only thing I can do is have some fun with it. Good luck with that.