Class war

!!!!---Rant Warning - Proceed at your peril---!!!!

PBW has an interesting entry on her blog today: ten things that annoy her, including grope-hugs, pantyhose and underwired bras. Quite a few people, myself included, have added to the list - it makes fascinating reading - but generally speaking, the items mentioned are avoidable and basically harmless.

The people, on the other hand, are not.

I'm fairly easy going. I try not to pigeonhole people based on first impressions, and I try to be courteous when dealing with anyone I meet. This is partly down to my upbringing - my school motto was Manners Makyth Man - and partly due to my experiences working in retail. The customer is always right and should be treated politely and attentively at all times. To me this was always a no-brainer. My job was to sell things. If I wanted to make the sale, then I had to be nice to the punters, even if I was hungover, hadn't slept in forty-eight hours and really, really wanted to punch them on the nose for being awkward (which, let's face it, most customers are).

Now it may be that as I grow older and more curmudgeonly I see the world differently. It may be that I was wasted in retail (in more ways than one, it being a wine merchants I was working in). But some shop staff today are surly and unhelpful to the point of being rude. And I've seen it in waiting staff at restaurants too. It's almost as if they resent the fact that they are having to serve; as if to be in that position is somehow demeaning, beneath them. Well if you think that, then why are you doing that job? There's plenty more work out there.

I could go all deep and metaphysical and try to tie this all into my earlier rant about binge drinking. A chunk of British society seems to be wandering around with a huge chip on its collective shoulder about what it should be entitled to, and how reality doesn't quite live up to that expectation. Perhaps it's a part of the whole evolution of consumerist society. We're brought up to believe everything the advertisers say is true; we can have the cars and the holidays and the easy living. It's all there on page after glossy page. Only, as soon as we start working, even the most ill-educated can see that the figures don't add up. The dream remains tantalisingly out of reach. And so we become embittered - the world's unfair so don't expect me to co-operate with the system any more than I have to. We binge drink, misbehave and quickly lose all respect for any kind of authority.

Blimey, it's a bit bleak, isn't it.

Well, no. Only a small minority are so stupidly disaffected that they continue to rail against the machine to the point of self-destruction. Most young shop assistants work out sooner or later that they need good manners when dealing with customers; either that or lose their jobs when the shops they work in close down for lack of business.

But it is a growing trend, this rejection of any kind of service culture. As if the entrenched class system is fighting a rearguard action. The old certainties of working, middle and upper class have been largely wiped away, and a lot of people are struggling to reposition themselves by taking on assumed airs and graces.

Perhaps it will always be so; being competitive is human nature after all, so we need some way to measure who is most successful. If it can't be by birth, then why not by looking down on those who serve you? And if you're doing the serving, why should you be respectful and courteous to the customers, when they're just the same as you? You don't doff your cap to the lord of the manor anymore, after all.

Or it could just be that nobody understands the importance of good manners anymore.