#Hospitality #Service This week I returned to town from a client engagement to which I drove. About noon I stopped at a roadside bar featuring homemade barbecue. The barkeep introduced herself asked my name and where I was from. She later introduced me to the owner who also asked my name and told me a brief history of their proud bar ownership. Upon leaving, the bartender and owner bid me well by name and invited me back the next day for a community charity event they were hosting for victims of women’s cancer. I left the bar feeling good about life and a little better about humanity and myself. And I learned something new. In contrast the next day I shopped my local grocery chain that only had customer-self checkout scanners open at the beginning of a peak Saturday shopping period!! No human cashiers. I sought out the manager to ask why only to make a hopeless point. The business news today featured the efforts of a major international restaurant chain to further automate the “customer experience”. There is something inherently humanizing in business service. Reducing serving others to a nameless and faceless transaction weakens ever so slightly the beauty and joy of our humanity.
#Hospitality #Service
