Can you hear me NOW?

Just recently I've noticed, more than ever, that people don't listen, particularly those in customer service positions.  When they're older, I just figure they perhaps can't hear me; when they're young, I figure they don't listen. They aren't paying attention.  Perhaps because I am not on their text screen?

At our local sandwich shop just a while ago, my husband ordered "A #9, white bread, hold the mayo." I said I would have the same.

The young woman then asked me what kind of bread I wanted. I said the same as his, white bread.

"Both of you?"

!!!!!

And then she asked whether we wanted mustard and mayo. "No, hold the mayo," we repeated.

And then she asked, do you want lettuce, etc., on it?  "Does it come with the #9?"

"Yes," she replied.

"Then, yes, we want all that," and I walked away before I reached over the counter and smacked her out of sheer frustration.

Oh, and then she wanted to ask us how our day was going so far, and what plans we had for the weekend.

Oh, I dunno. Stand here and wait for you to figure out the sandwich order?

SAME.  Is that a hard word? 

We have a majority of non-native English speakers in our area, but this was not her issue; she was as white as the bread on which she eventually made the sandwiches.  I believe the bread has a higher IQ, though.

I don't know what has prompted her short attention span, and I guess I don't want to delve into the reasons now because there's not much I can do about it, anyway.

However, it really does strike me that with this "Silver Tsunami" coming towards our youth, astute business people would be well advised to train their customer service staff to PAY ATTENTION.

I think they train these kids to cross sell and upsell -- or try to train them -- but it becomes so much of an automatic thing they say that they never really pay attention to the responses, and so they miss the whole point.

Just before the sandwich shop, I went into my local supermarket branch of my bank.  As I made my deposit, the teller asked me whether I am a homeowner   I replied I am, and she asked me if I am happy with my mortgage rates. I stopped her there and suggested she take a good hard look at my bank portfolio and then decide whether she wanted to continue. She kept trying to sell me a new loan, a first mortgage, to replace a very small HELOC we have.

I was nice about it, but there again, it would make so much difference if you felt that your bank knew you.  Even the regular branch I've gone into, just about weekly, for banking, trust business, stuff like that?  I had the woman who set up our trust account and who has seen me there many many times stop me and ask me for my ID.  All I was trying to do was correct HER misspelling of my first name on the account into which I had just made a good-sized deposit.

Am I the only person, the only boomer, out there, who would like accurate service and would actually patronize such places if I were to find trhem?