Being in retail/customer service gives you the opportunity to see a lot of people. In seeing all of those different people in the same environment and situations you get to see the inherent commonalities in people. The thing that I have found to be one of, if not the most commonly shared things, is that we are poor observers of our surroundings. I’d like to think that is because of our time and place in history and not an actually inherent flaw in humans, more that we are so wildly over stimulated and not designed for so much stimulus. Our phones, social media, the internet, heck even new washers and dryers connect to your phone to send notifications. Everything is always screaming for our attention so we are not able to be present in the moment and place we are existing.
The reason this is especially apparent to me right now, is because we are doing our absolute damndest to try to communicate and guide people through wildly new systems and still a shocking number miss all the cues we give. Now this is not a new thing I have observed here, but the web store has made it easier for people to act without on demand input from us and things like 20 ft bright yellow arrows in the parking lot that have no effect on where or how people drive/park.
This is why certain items in the online store now have names like “Donuts are for weekends only.” No amount of direction or description of the item that includes “Our Donuts are only available for pick up on SATURDAY and SUNDAY” can keep people from ordering them on another day. Nor can a bullet point in the Terms of Service that reads “You may not place orders for donuts on weekdays”, just as a preceding bullet point of “You may not place same day orders” can prevent that. Not even when the check box says “I have read, understood, and agree to the Terms of Service. I didn't just scroll to the bottom and click the box.”
It has led to me having to go in and edit the website nightly to change the pickup days available during checkout. The native mechanism in our online store for gathering a date has no way to restrict when is available to select, and the number of people who would order donuts for a weekday on that same weekday no matter what the words in front of them say is shockingly large.
It’s not that they are inherently bad people trying to break the rules it’s simply that they don’t perceive that which is right in front of them.
It makes me wonder about all the things that I am missing.
For now it means that Donuts are for weekends only.
