Infuriating store policies -- what in Hell were they thinking?

[mdlbear]

Went to Safeway earlier this evening to get some tomato paste. At checkout, the clerk asked me for my last name! After a bit of appalled confusion I refused, picked up my bag, and walked out.

Just outside the door I realized that, no, this really needed to be confronted and went back in. After a brief exchange with the clerk, in which he basically said that it was company policy to thank people by their last name, I got a manager.

Yes, it really is company policy for the checkers to thank customers by their last name (apparently when they were using first names, the female customers thought they were being hit on -- no surprise). I knew that they did that when you used your Safeway card, which is why I had my name taken off the damned thing: I don't like hearing people I've never met mangle my last name.

What I hadn't realized was that if I didn't use my card (I didn't expect a huge discount on two cans of tomato paste), the clerk would ask me for my last name so they could mangle it back at me to 'thank' me. Right -- like this is going to make me want to come back.
<rant>
The whole incident got me surprisingly angry. Tomorrow morning I'll be calling the customer service number the manager gave me, though I don't expect much to come of it.

Am I the only one who doesn't like hearing their name mispronounced by strangers? Who finds it somehow infuriating when sales droids try to be 'friendly'? Who finds a complete stranger demanding my name after making a $2 purchase to be unbelievably intrusive?
</rant>

Comments

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

The store policy is an aspect of what Miss Manners would call faked social intimacy, a business practice that is wrong in two ways. First, it mixes business with social matters, a mistake that the female customers pointed out by complaining about the first-name attempt. Second, it is an attempt to pretend that strangers know each other. There is "the roof constitutes an introduction" rule, but I don't think that convention extends to check-out lines.

An added insult is to the intelligence of the employee. I'd assume that the employee has two extra words in her or his vocabulary: sir and ma'am.

An equivalent idiocy is the first-name-only badge for employees. Or, in my department, the fact that faculty have last names on their mailboxes, and the one male staff member has his last name on his box, but the female staff members have only their first names. Aaaaaaarrrrrrrrgggggghhhh!

And don't get me started on the retirement party I was invited to for several colleagues where we were asked to pay for expenses. I will give myself the assignment over the next few days of writing personal notes to my retiring colleagues instead of going to the party.