Our friend Doug Stephens, the world’s top retail futurist, reminds us that one of the issues in bad customer service is due to the social tension between those working behind the counter and those buying in front of it. As economic inequality grows, social tension will likely grow with it.
Over the past 30 years , the economic distance between the lowest paid Americans (many of whom are front line retail workers) and the highest paid, has been widening at an alarming rate. The likelihood that retail workers are serving someone outside their economic bracket is escalating. A mere 20 percent of all consumers now account for at least 40 percent of total retail consumption — a figure expected to increase to 50 percent of consumption by 2015.
At the same time, roughly half of the nation’s front line retail workers earn less than $10 per hour — which raises the question, how can a retail sales associate relate to the consumer who may be spending more on pair of pants than the sales associate themselves will gross that day? The simple truth is that the front line retail worker of today is less like their customer than they have been in more than 100 years.
Henry Ford believed that the future of the United States economy was tied into the ability of his workers to be able to afford his products. Broad income equality, to Ford, was the only way society could function and companies could profit in the long-term. Since U.S. policymakers decided long ago that America would be a mercantile nation rather than a manufacturer, how strange that fewer and fewer people will be able to participate in that retail which makes the lifeblood of the economy.