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why i’m discouraged, part 2: the customer is always right

October 28, 2008 – 4:01 pm by rachel

first, a confession:  I’m not actually that discouraged anymore.  Don’t get me wrong, I still have some significant but low-level anxiety and I’m still intellectually upset about all the stuff I was upset about before but i’m not feeling that deep, soul-shaking discouragement that I was before.  which is good but it’s made it hard for me to continue my Discouragement Series.  maybe it was a week in gorgeous new england with old friends and family, maybe it’s just that i’m not built to stay discouraged for long, but i really am feeling much better.  That said…

I used to work as a lead supervisor in the circulation department of a big public library.  Among other things, this meant that the buck usually stopped with me when it came to irate patrons complaining about fines.  Someone starts screaming?  Go get Rachel.  And, actually, i’m pretty well-suited to that work.  Aggro people really don’t bother me.  I have yelled at more clerks and customer service reps than I’d care to admit, so I usually feel like I can relate to the head-space that the Angry Patron is in.

One day, though, a woman came in to complain about the replacement fee she was being charged for the novel that her child tore to shreds.  Now she didn’t deny that the damage was done by her child but she also didn’t feel she should be responsible for paying it because, after all, children do bad things.  We went back and forth, back and forth, and she became increasingly angry and frustrated that I wouldn’t simply waive the charge.  Finally she said:

“I just don’t understand this!  This is terrible customer service.  If this were Land’s End and my kid destroyed a shirt you’d just send me a new one.  How do you expect to succeed if you don’t know the basic idea that the customer is always right?”

Now, listen, I had a hard job.  Also, I was in library school and listening to a lot of conversations about the “commercial model” for public libraries, about the patron as “customer”, and I was mostly keeping my mouth shut.  So…yeah…I might have been a little a bottled up.  But what I said was, calmly but firmly:

“That’s true but the difference here is that you’re not a customer.  You are a citizen of this community.  You have a responsibility to the other citizens in this community.  I have a responsibility to the citizens of this community to hold you responsible for the damage you caused to property that the library holds for the benefit of the community.  That’s the difference.”

Happily for me, something truly remarkable happened.  She said, “you’re right”.  She took out her checkbook and she paid for the novel.  In my memory, she stood a little straighter as she walked out the library but that might be me getting all cinematic on myself.  What I do know is that she always made a point of saying hi to me, of smiling at me, of talking to me, after that day.

And I’m just so discouraged that we seem to have lost the skill of thinking of ourselves as citizens and without that sense of citizenship the less palatable aspects of our culture (greed, superficiality, anti-intellectualism, etc) go unbalanced by our finer qualities.  Maybe it’s because I was raised in a small town, maybe it’s because I had a very compelling civics education but I still actually believe that seeing yourself as responsible to your community and through that, frankly, to your country is, well, noble.

(As an aside, I just saw OSF’s production of “Our Town” and the following line struck me, on this topic:  “Over there — are some Civil War veterans. Iron flags on their graves — New Hampshire boys — had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they’d never seen more than fifty miles of it themselves”. And, yeah, I know patriotism can be a breath away from chauvinism and jingoism and that as I am essentially a pacifist its weird for me to be venerating soldiering…but there you go.)

Citizens have dignity, customers do not.  Citizens are adults, customers are children.  What I love about American culture is, in theory, we’ve got both in good measure.  We’re giddy, shameless, exuberant customers and it makes us great.  But we’re also hard-working, self-sacrificing, barn-raising citizens and it makes us greater.  But, these days, it seems to me (and others), that Americans think of themselves as consumers first and citizens perhaps not at all.

I feel like everyone, all over the place, treats me like a customer.  And that’s awesome at the dry cleaners but I don’t know.  I don’t really want politicians to treat me that way.  I don’t want the media to treat me that way.  Frankly, I’m tired of being treated like a customer, I want to be treated like a citizen.  Even though that would mean I have responsibilities, that I have to work at some things, that I have to sacrifice sometimes for others.  It’s hard to be a citizen on your own, no matter how much you might want it.  Most of us, including me, really benefit from having a community of citizens, preferably with leaders, who inspire and guide us and help keep us honest.

So, yeah, when I hear all the stuff about trying to make our libraries more like businesses and trying to make our patrons more like customers it makes me despair.  Despair because, for one, if we seriously think we can compete with commercial booksellers at their game we’re seriously effing deluded but more importantly, I despair that we would even want to.  What we have to offer is something so much more precious, more valuable than being a free bookstore.  We can offer our patrons a chance to be citizens.  When we think about how we want to “position” ourselves we should think about that patron walking taller on her way out of the library (whether she really did or not).  If we could be instrumental in helping people in our communities regain the dignity of being citizens, we could help change the world.  Honest.