I recently visited a Chick-fil-A for the first time, having first heard of it (like many New Englanders) through its anti-same-sex marriage controversy. I was curious to compare Chick-fil-A’s food
to that of its Nebraska-staple, chicken-serving cousin, Raising Cane’s, after one of my students
wrote an essay about the differences, and it seemed disingenuous that I could
know so much about Chick-fil-A without ever having actually eaten there.
Everything about Chick-fil-A seemed fine—it was clean,
featured a large children’s playplace, and I observed no signs of homophobic
activity. The high-school girl behind
the counter also struck me as not only polite, but genuinely interested in
making conversation that wasn’t rehearsed or perfunctory—another plus, as I’ve
always detested space-filler conversations with waitresses and salespeople that
have no merit of their own. Then the guy in front of me thanked the server for taking his order, and she
immediately replied, “My pleasure.”
Now, the phrase “My pleasure” shouldn’t have seemed out of
the ordinary—in fact, it should have struck me as more authentic than a robotically
repeated “You’re welcome.” When I heard it, though, I remembered a line from my
student’s paper that went something like this:
“I like how Chick-fil-A employees always say “My pleasure,”
which shows how much more polite their workers are.”
The student was writing from his experiences in Nebraska,
while I was then in Nashua, New
Hampshire talking to a different girl behind a
different counter who was using the exact same phrase. I wondered whether the girl would say the
same thing to me, and when it became my turn to order I made a few jokes
(probably about waffle fries) until she handed me my ticket.
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
“My pleasure,” the girl replied.
The phrase, once noticed and observed as something she’d
said to the previous customer, now appeared repetitive, part of a routine in
which I was now a participant. The routine was further enforced when a
different server arrived to bring us our food:
“Thanks for bringing it out,” I told her.
“My pleasure,” the girl said.
The phrase now sounded almost eerie, since for two servers
to have independently adopted the same phrase was too perfect, too neat, and
too in keeping with the spotlessly clean tables and pristine white backgrounds
on the backlit menu. I felt as if I’d
stumbled upon a terrible secret—that every Chick-fil-A employee in every
Chick-fil-A restaurant in every region of the US had been instructed to use the
exact same gracious phrase just as every Chick-fil-A restaurant was to offer
the same menu choices and the same soft drinks and to stock the same sealed
packets of sauce that I was now fiddling with at the table. Having the same menu choices and décor didn’t
bother me, but requiring one’s employees to talk in the same way seemed to
cross a line, seemed to lump the very-human workers we deal with into the same
category as mass-produced food and cushion-backed chairs that could be chosen
by higher-ups in a corporate office. It
was an attempt to control the way workers interacted with customers, to achieve
the effect of politeness through standardized phrasing.
The problem with this model is that it takes initiative away
from the workers and places it in the hands of a corporate office. The workers don’t get to choose how to be
polite with customers; they’re told exactly what to say, so the politeness is
imposed on them. Not only does this
constitute a loss of worker freedom, it strips workers of both the independence
and responsibility that comes from making one’s own choices, a sobering thought,
considering most fast-food employees are still learning essential job skills
that they’ll hope to bring to other positions.
In addition, regardless of how genuinely friendly servers might
seem, the “My pleasure”s uttered by Chick-fil-A employees constitute an act
performed for the customer, thus stripping the phrase of what authenticity it
may have held had the server chosen to say it of her own volition. When this façade becomes apparent, it can’t
be unseen, and the “My pleasure”s don’t seem as polite anymore. Though some may argue that all fast-food
politeness is an act, I argue that at least other chains let their employees
choose how to be polite, rather than enforcing specific scripts for how to do
so, thus allowing for (slightly) more authentic interactions.
As unfortunate as it is, I’ve grown accustomed to how much
of America has become a standardized succession of chain stores, logos, and
brand names that fill out the landscape from Maine to California. This uniformity crosses a line, though, when
it’s imposed on the casual utterances spoken by workers in these places,
opening up new possibilities for corporate models where everything that everyone
says is the same, leaving no room for servers to voice their own thoughts at
all. In a world where fast-food serving
robots haven’t yet been invented, how close can corporations come to total
control by training servers that function like the machines that haven’t yet
made total control possible?
When fast-food robots do become the norm, though, I don’t
know if people will despise them, or if they’ll accept the change as another
facet of reality and move on, maybe even finding relief in an interaction that’s
as forgettable as the digital instructions on an ATM screen. Maybe that's the world we're really moving toward.
