Are we paying more for poorer service?

You'll get no argument from me that the lack of quality service these days is hard to find. Just last night I had another case of bad customer service. There were three customes and four employees in the same shoestore and I could not get service from anyone. Finally as I was about to give up and leave someone came along to finally help me. If it wasn't for the fact that the shoes I wanted were at a super discount I would have left because of the poor service, but I really needed the shoes.

It is interesting that you say that. Unemployment may be at a low, but certainly employers are not paying significatly higher wages then they were 3 or 4 years ago. With the economy being the way that it is and the cost of the things that we need just to survive going up all of the time there is a certain stress that can be associted with working very hard for very little money. This could cause pople to hate their jobs and offer poorer service. I would also like to note that many employers do not offer the specialized training necessary to serve customers needs. Basically they hir epople and put them through a short orientation and throw them right on the job. Without proper training and knowledge the employee if left to fend for themselves and that may lead them to become frustrated and offer poor service. The response about the call centers above is right on though. People outsource their customer srvice centers to places like these because it is cheaper. They are simply trying to maximize profit at the sake of sacrificing customer service. Still they know that despite poor service they will retain a large majority of their customers.

Well you figure with all of the money these employers are saving on training and on the cost of insurance for these employees that they could at least not raise their prices.

Also, with many of those jobs there is a high turnover! So, in effect the employers don't even want to train them all that well, since they figure the person will only be there for a couple months before they quit anyways!

This is exactly the kind of thing I am talking about. As much money as we pay for cable service every month we should be able to get access to a knowledgeable person a lot easier then we do now. Unfortnately cable companies in addition to raising their rates have also outsourced their call centers overseas in order to schieve higher profits. It is much cheaper to send your call to a call center overseas then it is for them to have peopl ein house to service your needs. This is a classic example or paying lots of money for poor service.