Why is purchase pleasure? (Part 2)
Unlike our last encounter with why purchase is so pleasurable, what follows is something delightful that doesn’t exist directly in the purchase, but which is lashed to it. And even delightful may be a misleading term. In a way, I hope to show that what follows is akin to a human necessity, but which, in our current configuration, is largely only accessible through purchase. I am talking, of course, about customer service.
The Joy of Customer Service
Having been both on the giving end and receiving end of superb customer service, I know its deep pleasures, and I have often bought a cup of coffee in part because I wanted to enter into the peculiar scripted relationship of customer and servant.
A scripted relationship, one where each participant knows the cues and makes the right moves, alleviates. It provides the basic social sustenance that one needs without requiring effort or thought. It lets you get something right every time, which can’t be said about other interactions. Even a friendship can frighten for no reason. You text a friend, and though they cordially text you back the next morning, the hours have passed, and doubt has set in. This is not true when purchasing a cup of coffee. You can talk about the weather. If the barista rings up your order wrong, you can assure them it was “no trouble” with ease. Giving an unusually large tip has no unexpected repercussions.
There’s a stereotype of old people calling customer service lines or 911 in part to just relieve their loneliness—and customer service as a ward against loneliness is borne out in these two sets of statistics by Meals on Wheels. With our loneliness epidemic, the easy customer service relationship has a medical benefit. I have felt lonely, and customer service has often assuaged this loneliness, and for older Americans it may be the only social engagement available.
Customer service scratches a human itch, but great service is a unique pleasure that guides us to what we need when greeted by the vast, redundant variety of goods available under capitalism.
My Fjallraven jacket exemplifies. When I moved to Wisconsin from California, I did not know how I would deal with the cold. The sales associate at Fjallraven whisked me away, and did the thing that defines excellent customer service: she listened, and she recommended. So many times when we walk into a store we don’t know enough to make a good decision. A sales associate of great talent must have a deep knowledge of the products, the ability to communicate this knowledge, and most importantly the ability to translate the needs of the customer into the right purchase. With an engaged customer service representative, the problem transforms from one of limited information, where the consumer is blind and lost, to one where light is shed and information flows freely between two actors: the consumer who knows their needs, and the associate who knows the products.
Great customer service lets you make a more informed purchase. But, there is another level, unique to only the most excellent of customer service experiences.
Truly excellent customer service hones the desires of the customer, and allows the customer to learn more about themselves and their needs. The customer rarely is right, and good customer service is a guided meditation to specify the consumer’s needs.
I had never lived through winter, which means that I had only a very nascent desire, that of surviving my first winter comfortably. But Fjallraven does not sell that. They sell jackets, and when it came to jackets, my desired features were muddled at best. I did not, for example, know the distinction between down and synthetics, nor did I know that jackets come in two cuts, long and short. My wonderful sales associate had to figure out my desires for me. And she did—she listened to a newbie in all things wintry and determined that, for my comfort, I likely most desired a shorter jacket, and since I also didn’t have an autumnal wardrobe yet, being new to fall as well, I ought to get a parka that could be converted based on the weather between either a light or a heavy jacket. Finally, synthetic was the way to go, since down jackets would require regular application of wax to prevent water from dampening the feathers, and, as a busy healthcare worker, I likely would never find the time to bring in my jacket for waxing.
And she was right! That jacket took me through three autumns, two winters. She took a desire which was not even worthy of the word, something so notional as to barely rise to the definition of a whim, and concretized it into a product.
Whenever I wear the jacket, I think about that sales associate. She handled me with care for an hour, and she defined my needs in a way I would never have articulated. It was magical customer service, and that magic remains on the jacket to this day, as sentimental and schmaltzy as that may sound.
I have had other such experiences, though they are rare: I have only had one great haircut, but with this barber I finally felt like I looked like some newly defined version of myself, a definition she had helped specify. I cannot, now, maybe because so many of the things I buy come from Amazon whose recommending algorithms cannot hear the way that a person can, think of another similar example. Just the coat. Just the haircut.
Retail therapy maybe is a little less of a misnomer than I once thought—certainly, buying to feel better is something that we should be deeply, deeply suspect of, but, the magic of good customer service, I can tell you, has a lot in common with a therapist. That’s the stereotype around hair stylists after all. And at Epic Systems, those in the customer service division often joke that we play therapist more so than provide tech support, for we had to listen and understand needs of an entire hospital system, and the subtle dynamics that keep hospital systems from seeing their own needs and desires.
Like with sating the basic human need for interaction, customer service can provide therapeutic guidance. Both therapy and companionship are, in my mind, services that should be publicly provisioned (and Meals on Wheels and free hotlines do indeed provision these). The fact that customer service provides them in the most cost effective manor should show how we have yoked expenditure agnostic of product to things that necessarily give us joy—purchase becomes pleasure because it’s handcuffed to pleasure.
For me, customer service bolsters the joy of a cup of coffee by making it a full human interaction, making it worth the $2.75. For others, customer service is the only way to push back loneliness, to have another human being help them on their journey of self-discovery, and $2.75 and a warm cup of coffee is the surcharge for that experience.