Actually, I've experienced something similar when moving from India to the US. In India, you just walk into a store, and say I need x, y, z and get out of the store unless you know the owner of the store personally (in which case, the transaction differs completely and you don't get to the point before chatting about the weather, how the respective families are doing and complaining about the roads/traffic or some such thing).
Compare that to the US, where a coffee shop like Dunkin' handles like a thousand people every day during rush hour and people still mechanically say, "Hi, How are you doing? What can I get for you today?" and it's inevitably met with "Good, how are you? and I'll get x, y, z..".
I'll admit to finding that transaction incredibly dishonest when I came here first, to the point that I was actually complaining about it to people. I mean, does the person at the counter really care as to how I was doing? I'm used to it now, it's almost become an instinct, but still cringe a bit when I catch myself doing it involuntarily.
I was a barista at Starbucks and I meant every word of my greetings. The 5 seconds you make eye contact with someone and say hi to them are vital for gathering your senses, and starting this interaction a new. If you didn't say "hi, how are you", asshole clients would rub off on you and you would smear that bad vibe on all subsequent clients. However, when you greet someone, and they greet you back warmly, crap-vibes get washed away and you get good energies.
I used to look forward to my favorite clients; it's like stones in a puddle, you jump from one to the next to get to where you're going. Same with good people, they help you go through the day. So start the day positively, greet everyone cheerfully, serve loyally and enjoy yourself; the 8 hours pass QUICKLY.
I worked some pretty bad jobs when I was a kid, similar to his experience at Starbucks, he's totally right about the nice people really getting you through your day.
This is probably the best explanation of the effectiveness of the customary greeting extended even to strangers in US. It may sound mechanical but it does serves an important purpose.
Great observation! It's really up to us to imbue those apparently automatic gestures with some meaning. And maybe it shows when we do. I can see how sincerely greeting a customer could help "reset" the mood back to positive.
It seems to me that French culture finds a pretty happy medium between the two extremes: you aren't expected to engage in a "full" conversation asking how the other's day is, but a simple "bonjour monsieur/madame" and "merci monsieur/madame, au revoir" is more than sufficient.
To me this is the optimal point between being sincere and being socially cordial with a stranger, especially one whose shop you have just entered to do business.
I also like German - an interaction with someone at a store is littered with danke and bitte, but if you ask someone how they are, you actually mean it.
I've found that some other answers work just fine and show that the interaction is not always "dishonest". For instance, I've had good success with saying something along the lines of "ugh, running late, but it's my own fault, so I'll manage. I'll have an x, y, z..." That has gotten some especially fast service now and then, right when it helped me most. So I don't find it bad to risk spending that extra two seconds to be honest and communicate what I need from someone in a round-about, friendly way.
Then again, maybe it is cultural, I'm from the southern US. Being open and friendly just seems like a better way to spend life.
I think that it really may have to do with being from the South, because those standard greetings IMO seem more honestly given. I've gone back and forth between Chicago and the South throughout my life, and in the South, those little formalities seem to have a significant chance of developing into actual short conversations, sometimes even to the point of slowing down the purchase/interaction (of course depending on how busy everybody is, if there's any big news that everybody is familiar with or thinking about currently, etc.)
My theory has always been that it has something to do with the generally well armed/violent nature of the South combined with its sometimes sparse population and resources. You're not likely to meet a ton of new people, some are going to be jumpy/dangerous around you as a new person, and resources (cultural, financial) are so tough to find information about, that it's both important and cheap to spend an extra minute on everybody.
Of course, that's going to be different throughout the South. The protocol is so tight in the sleepy little satellite hamlet/country road (of a slightly less sleepy hamlet) where my grandparents live that you're pretty much expected to wave and smile at every car that passes by, and if you're passing by people who are outdoors when you're driving by, you're expected to wave and smile back. This is not because you all know each other, just how people act there.
Overt signals of non-hostility can be useful, in that they can help jump-start the (continuing) process of establishing trustworthiness.
Legend has it that the military salute originated as a raising of visors on knights' helmets, both for identification and to signal non-hostile intent.
I'm English. I live in the US. I actually like the American "how are you?" ritual; it can simply act as a ritual, but it can also convey genuine welcome, or you can go "off script" as necessary.
Contrast to the older English "how do you do" pairing, which is so much a non-question that it doesn't even deserve a question mark.
In my small town, I'd venture that most how-are-you questions are genuine.
>I mean, does the person at the counter really care as to how I was doing?
Why not?
Why is it so remarkable that strangers can care about one another?
I go out of my way to smile and treat people warmly. I value other people, it spreads good emotions, it makes me happy, and yes I do care. If a Starbucks barista responded to my question, "How are you?" by saying he's doing poorly I would be happy to listen to his story and offer myself in some kind of emotional-service capacity.
Cynical people always assume no one else cares about them despite evidence to the contrary. In my opinion this is the "false consensus bias" at work. You assume others are like you, and since you don't care about others, you assume they must not care about you. This is certainly not true in many parts of the world. People do care.
>If a Starbucks barista responded to my question, "How are you?" by saying he's doing poorly I would be happy to listen to his story and offer myself in some kind of emotional-service capacity.
The issue with this is that the relationship is one sided. You cannot be negative to customers as an employee in a professional setting, that is a big no-no as far as customer service goes. Most customer service people have it pounded into them to "leave home life, at home", while inviting on any negativity that "how are you doing" may bring from the customer. You are also under time constraints which you and the customer are usually aware of. If someone really wants to go into the terribly surgery they're recovering from or that they lost their job the other day, you have to cut them short to move on to other customers. No one wants to hear the lonely old mans stories while he holds up the entire line. You will get dinged as an employee for not servicing enough customers if you let this get out of hand.
Additionally "how are you doing?" rarely will get a completely honest answer. It is a ritual for most people. People don't go into the deep personal crises they're having with a barista, cashier or bank teller. Nor does the company they work for really care. You personally may have compassion for the person but even if you heard the actual tragedy in someones life(which some people do go into), you have very little power to affect the situation. I guess you can say "well hope that works out for you", but that doesn't really solve the problem. Worse is when the company you work for is at fault for the problem & the company wants to wash their hands of it while putting all the pressure on you to "smooth things over" with the customer.
I think it's nice to try and be positive, but I also like to be realistic. My beef usually is more with companies who really don't give a shit about the customer, but burden their employees to represent the business as though it really does, meanwhile usually treating the employee like crap as well.
Actually, I honestly think the bias is on your side this time. You're assuming that you're nice and therefore everyone else is nice like you.
I've actually walked into an enterprise (the car rental company) and found one of their cards lying around that details how to start a conversation with a customer.
It goes along the lines of:
<Enthusiastic Greeting>
<Enquire about abc / def / ghi>
and some more non-sense like that that I forget.
Plus, you can judge by someone's tone if they really are being honest or if it's just that they've been doing it so many times, it's become fairly mechanical. In cases like that I think a simple 'Hi', works much better anyway.
But the the thing I was going for with that post was, cultural differences can sometimes throw you off quite a bit, like the original article says.
I think the card that provides "guidelines" for employees is a great way to re-emphasize the point for employees.
It is a genuine struggle for any organization be it small or big is to make your customer facing people greet customers cheerfully. And I think it is never enough to drive home this point and if having a card helps, so be it.
What matters to me as a customer, is somebody cheerful attending to my request at that moment and not someone who just wants to get you out of the way and do something better.
Completely disagree! How can a polite "How are you?" seem dishonest to you? And how's that worse than an indifferent person on the counter who's not smiling? I'm also an Indian (been in US for 7 years now) and sometimes a smile from a stranger still makes my day.
How can a polite "How are you?" seem dishonest to you?
When you've heard it from 50 cashiers over a week and 99% of them were perfunctory "I have to say these words in case a secret shopper marks me down" efforts, you can get a little cynical.
I appreciate genuine feeling in those short exchanges. If someone can't be genuine, I wish they wouldn't bother saying the words.
I would dispute that there's actually any dishonesty going on there. What's missing is the intent to deceive; everybody knows that the greetings are obligatory, and the people saying them may or may not mean them. Consider what would happen if you replaced the greetings with some other arbitrary phrases:
Cashier: Hello. Where is your dog?
Shopper: My dog is on the moon.
Cashier: The gravy orb hovers once again over London.
Shopper: I wish to purchase a kilogram of ground beef.
Cashier: As it is spoken, so let it be.
This conversation has clear falsehoods in it, but nobody expects them to be true, nobody is deceived, and the dishonesty is paper-thin. (Also, writing that dialogue was a lot of fun.)
I once responded to a "hi how are you" with a one-sentence reply of how I actually was rather than the usual "I'm good". It took the guy by surprise to the extent he stopped with a quizzical look and said "you were ready for that, weren't you?". It's possible to greet someone warmly without an empty question being involved.
I know this isn't Reddit, but "The gravy orb hovers once again over London" put such a smile on my face that I'm forced to upvote you for bringing a tiny bit of joy to my day.
I'd appreciate a simple cheerful "hi!" much more than the usual "hihowareyou", which translates from American as "hello, please return my standard greeting with a standard response." It always makes me cringe.
A lot of those exchanges might be disingenuous but they also provide opportunities for short bursts of friendly contact between strangers. If the default were purely transactional then being friendly with a clerk/barista/etc... would be more difficult/awkward.
A major function of the "phatics" of "Hello" and "How are you doing" is to calibrate to a person's speech. Saying "Hi, How are you?" before saying anything important much reduces the odds you'll have to repeat yourself. There are papers on this.
Compare that to the US, where a coffee shop like Dunkin' handles like a thousand people every day during rush hour and people still mechanically say, "Hi, How are you doing? What can I get for you today?" and it's inevitably met with "Good, how are you? and I'll get x, y, z..".
I'll admit to finding that transaction incredibly dishonest when I came here first, to the point that I was actually complaining about it to people. I mean, does the person at the counter really care as to how I was doing? I'm used to it now, it's almost become an instinct, but still cringe a bit when I catch myself doing it involuntarily.
Old habits, etc. I guess.