N" Why Should I Be Nice to You?: Coffee Shops and the Politics of Good Service" By Emily Raine, Issue #74, December 2005

In her essay, "Why Should I Be Nice to You: Coffee Shops and the Politics of Good Service," author and former coffee shop barista Emily Raine argues that cafe employees, in an effort to re-assert their individuality, should be rude to their customers. It goes against what we all think of as good customer service, perhaps, but Raine builds her argument by demonizing the coffee shop industry and illustrating how their current business model is only a facade of good customer service. While I appreciate Raine's point-of-view, I wonder if there may be a better way to provide good customer service than what she suggest. Being rude, if that is really what she means, just goes too far.

We've all visited the kind of coffee shop that Raine is writing about in her article. She barely disguises that she is talking about Starbucks and shops of that nature. Raine has worked in other customer service industries -- she likes working in the industry -- but this affinity does not extend to the coffee shop world. The pay was poor, the shifts were scheduled oddly (so as to never add up to full time), and the customers "displayed that unique spleen that emerges in even the most pleasant people before they've had the morning's first coffee." It seems an obvious fact of life that morning customers in a coffee shop might be grumpy. I was left feeling that Raine could have cut them more slack.

The author...

Because of the assembly-line nature of the coffee shop, the barista only has a brief encounter with each customer, maybe just a few seconds at a time. Raine supports this argument with evidence based on how modern coffee shops are laid out. You place your order with one person, receive it from yet another and pay a third. Sometimes even more employees are involved, depending on what you order. Not only does this assembly line system affect the customer's experience, it makes for unhappy employees. Instead of one employee seeing a customer through their entire experience, they become drones, repeating the same miniscule tasks over and over again for their entire shift. In other words, everyone is grumpy. "The one aspect of service work that can be unpredictable -- people -- becomes redundant," Raine writes. Baristas are bored, and stuck within the constraints of "good service" as "defined and enforced from above," and the assembly line nature of coffee shops "preclude[s] much possibility of creating warmth…it interferes with throughput."
The end result is a complete lack of individuality on the part of the barista, which Raine contends is an even worse employment situation than fast food workers. At least fast food workers (those in the cashier positions) fulfill an entire customer's order. Raine thus contends they are not gadgets in a machine. The result, she argues, is that customers are…