Complaints about small talk with service workers are common on social media, highlighting differing customer preferences. Photo / Getty Images
“Maybe it’s just a midwestern thing, but can we please stop having the cashiers ask intrusive questions to the patrons as they check out?” a US woman pleaded in a viral tweet this month.
The “intrusive” question: “Any big plans for the night?”
Grumbling about small talk with service workers is the bread and butter (in a complimentary basket) of social media. Considered outside the context of likes and retweet buttons, these complaints can sound a bit like 18th-century gentry commiserating about the help. “Uber drivers PLEASE stop trying to make conversation,” groused a rider on Reddit, criticising the driver’s “constant yapping”. Another woman, ordering through Instacart, complained of her shopper’s incompetence in failing to secure her Neapolitan ice cream without engaging her in a back-and-forth. Other commentary is friendlier – across social media, the theory that Trader Joe’s employees are trained to flirt with customers is repeated as fact.
Despite the rise in self-checkout, the quiet creep of robotaxis and the ubiquity of door-to-door delivery services, opportunities for small talk between customers and service workers persist. And while person-to-person interactions are more optional than ever, some things haven’t changed: some customers complain when they encounter small talk, and some customers complain when they don’t.
In a paper in the European Journal of Marketing published in 2022, a group of marketers laid out the argument for this phenomenon: in customer service, you truly cannot please everyone. There are “exchange-oriented” customers, who value efficient service and are impatient with small talk. (“Exchange-oriented customers may be particularly well-suited to being served by virtual assistants or service robots,” the researchers mused.) Then there are “communally oriented” customers, who value connection and positively glow in response to questions like, “Any fun plans for the weekend?” Given this, the researchers suggested, “Service providers should consider customers’ relationship orientation before starting a conversation with small talk.”
For America’s 24.6 million service workers – who make an average of US$33,396 (NZ$56,000) each year, half of the national average income – this means trying to read body language, note eye contact and interpret tone in a matter of seconds, sometimes while working an espresso machine. “I usually start my interactions by saying, ‘Hey how’s it going?’ so they can either engage with that, or they can blow through it,” says Allie Lawrence, a barista and manager at an independently owned coffee shop in Brooklyn. “It’s kind of like you’re having to micro-therapise people before even interacting with them because you’re not sure what the energy is you’re going to get.”
Scotty Ross, who lives in Chandler, Arizona, and drives for Uber, starts with, “How’s your day going?” And then, “I kind of catch the vibe from there,” he says. (When he’s a passenger and doesn’t feel like talking, he gives polite one-word answers. “It feels like one of those ‘Seinfeld’ episode situations,” he says.)
Customers who respond harshly to friendly overtures may not realise that at some businesses, small talk is a requirement for workers, not a personal choice. When Lawrence trains new workers, she suggests a few phrases, like, “Hey, how’s it going?” or, “Good to see you, what can I get started?” At some places, she says, workers can get written up for skipping this step.
“It is kind of our job to give a ‘wow’ experience,” says William, a Trader Joe’s employee in Seattle who asked to withhold his last name to speak freely about his workplace. “Hey, how’s it going?” is William’s only prepared line. “From there, if they seem like they want to talk, I’ll ask more questions. If not, I’ll let it be, I just ring them out and bag them and let them go.”
Shoppers tell him about their ongoing chemotherapy and the death of their beloved cats. This kind of thing didn’t happen when he worked at Costco, William says. During morning shifts at Trader Joe’s, elderly people come in wanting someone to talk to.
But the conversations aren’t always pleasant. Customers have yelled at his co-workers for not engaging in sufficient conversation, he says. According to the American Psychological Association’s 2023 Work in America Survey, nearly a third of respondents who worked in person with customers or patients said they had experienced verbal abuse in the past year, compared with 22% of office workers.
For some service workers, small talk makes business sense. “I would say most riders don’t tip, and they’re more likely to tip if they get into a conversation,” says Ross. When Ross started driving for Uber in 2016, he remembers keeping 80% of each fare. Now, he says Uber gives him only 30 to 50% of what each rider pays. Tips can make the difference, he pointed out, between making around minimum wage in Arizona (before the cost of gas, car maintenance and taxes) and making double that. Lawrence also sees a correlation between conversation and tips. “The more of an experience or a show that I’m able to curate for the customer, potentially that results in higher tips,” she says.
Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski is credited with first describing “a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words”. In 1923, he described these exchanges, which he called “phatic communication,” as “purposeless expressions of preference or aversions, accounts of irrelevant happenings, comments on what is perfectly obvious”. Like, say, exchanging observations about the weather with a stranger before making them an oat milk latte. Malinowski’s definition hints at why small talk can be strangely polarising – it is by design both meaningless and crucial. “It is your turn to say something now, Mr Darcy,” Elizabeth Bennet demands, when her dance partner refuses to make small talk. “I talked about the dance, and you ought to make some kind of remark on the size of the room, or the number of couples.” The European marketers might say that Elizabeth is more “communally oriented” and Darcy is more “exchange-oriented”.
Ella Fuller, a server in Iowa City, says that these exchanges are a part of the job she enjoys. “If there’s a place in between small talk and overshare, I’ve always really liked that part of service,” she said. Fuller works at a bar and cafe and had previous gigs at a barbecue spot and an Italian restaurant. At each of these jobs, she says, she had experiences where instances of small talk devolved into customers making inappropriate comments about her body. At the barbecue spot, she told those customers to knock it off. But at the Italian restaurant, she felt obligated to smile through all customer behaviour. She eventually brought the issue to management and was supported. The idea that the customer is always right, writes researcher Dana Yagil, “implies, for customers as well as for service providers, that customers are entitled to misbehave, while service providers are expected to put up with such misbehaviours”.
A shift, as of late, is that service workers are responding to customers with their own complaints and screeds. On TikTok, nearly 6 million followers tune in to watch actor and longtime server Drew Talbert dramatise restaurant behaviour from a server’s perspective. Bartenders go viral for satirising pushy customers. Lawrence, who does stand-up comedy, makes videos re-enacting interactions with customers who inexplicably demand made-up coffee drinks. Servers have taken to TikTok to imitate the “Gen Z stare”, a reference to the way some young adults stare coldly at servers, as if rebuking them for the question, “Hi, what can I help you with today?”
Finding the right balance of small talk is a customer-facing worker’s struggle. “I don’t know why – I can’t stop myself – I talk too much,” moans Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, comparing himself to more successful colleagues. Ross advises other Uber drivers to let customers do 80% of the talking. “Try not to interrupt them and tell your own stories,” he cautions. “Basically, be an interviewer.” He notices that he gets his best tips when he’s drinking an energy drink and feels cheerful and energised. That service-oriented self isn’t always accessible, and that affects his income. “The first week after my dad died I don’t think I got any tips because I was in a bad mood, but I still needed to make some money,” he says. “You never really know what someone’s going through,” he notes – whether driver or rider.