I spent 2 hours and 40 minutes at the BMV getting my driver’s license renewed. Seriously. Sitting by stinky people clinging to my #80 tag that I would’ve sold to the highest bidder when it got close to me but no one there could’ve afforded it. You don’t have to be distinct to get business if you’re the BMV. You can be an asshole rude if you want. What they do is simply called processing — no customer experience (ultimate or otherwise) happening there. The highlight? When the clerk yelled, “NEW FAX IN THE LOBBY!” and all the men wearing hats removed them sheepishly thinking she screamed, “NO HATS IN THE LOBBY!”
Oh, but then my experience as a customer got even better when arriving at… you know where… Wal-mart! Standing in line to pay for my selections, some dude was pushing a cart with a choking child that was 2 or 3 years old. His finger at least half-way down the kid’s esophagus, he was screaming, “SPIT IT OUT! SPIT IT OUT!” Softly, I exclaimed, “Wow.” The cashier looked at me with the stink eye and loudly growled, “WHAT!?” And that’s the ONLY thing she said to me. Period. No thank you. No good afternoon. Nada. Zilch. So if you’re an employee of Wal-mart, you can be an asshole rude if you want. Apparently. Because, believe it or not, my experience as a customer got even more interesting…
10 bags of mulch and some edging stones purchased, we pull around to load them up. No Wal-mart person in sight, we count out the 20 edging stones and put them in the back of the truck. Wal-mart dude appears out of nowhere and says, “I HATE this place! I’m the only one back here.” So I hand him my receipt and say something like I’m sure he’d like to check that we’re loading what we paid for and he says… get ready… he actually says, “I don’t care what you load in there. No one here cares what you take.” If I weren’t an honest person, I would’ve asked him to help us load an entire skid of those stones. I’ll betcha’ he would’ve been happy to.
Sadly, this one time at Wal-mart… could just about sum up every single customer experience I’ve ever had there. Maybe the employees of the BMV and Wal-mart aren’t seeing enough of this type of thing…
