Real customer service

We just got back from 11 days gone to see relatives in the Midwest. As typical with family, there were some great highs and lows. We got back last night with the pervasive sense that it was good to be FROM the Midwest - we are thankful we don't live there. We really missed the mountains.

One of the highlights of the trip was a visit to the fish market. My dad and his wife live near the Mississippi river, and there is this place in Fulton Illinois called Schaffers Fish Market that we have gone to for 126 years, or since I was a kid, which ever is farther back. My brother and I disagreed about whether it was our mom or our grandmother who took us when we were kids, but we both had memories of buying big old slabs of smoked fish and inhaling it all the way home. So to follow family tradition, we took the kids down to the fish place while we were back there.

And I must say that Schaffer's fish market was one of the highest points of my trip. The lady at the counter went way over backwards to let us sample every smoked fish they had. She even pulled a bag of Doritos off the shelf because she insisted that one of the types of fish was heavenly when eaten off a Doritos chip, so she just gave us a bag. We never did eat any lunch that day - we were too full on fish. We ended up buying $8 worth of fish after sampling $20 worth. But she was thrilled to have given us a good experience at the fish market. She kept saying that if you treat people like family, they'll come back. We didn't tell her we were from out of state, but I will be honest - if I get back to the area I'll be visiting Schaffer's again. It was what customer service is supposed to be all about.

I wonder when we decided that customer service was optional? The opposite of the Shaffer's experience was a Wendy's experience. I ordered off the picture menu where they displayed a huge, luscious burger. When it arrived, it was 3/4 of an inch thick - not the meat, the whole stupid sandwich. It was undercooked and made me nauseous immediately. I thought they gave me the wrong thing at first, but it was supposedly the same product as the one in the picture. I was so bothered I almost complained to the manager, but I knew it would be a fruitless proposition.

True customer service means treating the person buying your product with respect and value. I would have bought a smoked shoe from the fish market because of their customer service. And I'll never go back to Wendy's.

As Christians, I wonder why we don't treat the people in our world with the kind of self sacrifice and respect I found at Schaffer's. Shouldn't that be the call on our lives? But instead we offer a form of religion that mandates a certain level of performance and self righteous living that is flat and lifeless. We don't really go out and be salt and light much in the world. We want them to come to us, and in doing so, we have expectations that they look and act and smell and believe in certain ways that are popular.

Real customer service is about the customer, not about us. And so is authentic Christianity.