Handy Business Tip: Randomly Being a Moron Will Drive Your Customers Away

Today, around 3:45pm, the Captain left his suburban office with the intent of arriving back home in the city in time to get his hair cut, work out, and shower before heading out for dinner. As his Mystery Ship cruised down the Mass Pike with its sunroof fully open and his radio tuned to All Things Considered, the sunny afternoon promised a bounty of relaxation and personal-life productivity.

However, [insert here your favorite cliche or other literary device that connotes "it was not to be so" and/or generally changes the tone of the established narrative].

I arrived at Kendall Barbers at approximately 4:32pm. For those that aren't familiar with this particular shop, this is the quaint little venue with the barber pole right next to the Kendall Square Post Office in Camrbidge. (For more information, please see the overly small stock image to the right.) Recently, having decided to graduate from SuperCuts, I've alternated patronizing this shop and my girlfriend's (significantly more expensive) hair stylist, with the idea that this routine achieves some sort of optimal balance of quality, convenience and value.

Well, no sooner had I strolled into the shop when a woman working there announced to me that they were closed. This notion of "being closed" seemed a bit strange to me, since the sign outside the store indicated that they were open from 9am - 5pm, Monday through Friday, and that they were currenly OPEN. Appealing to logic, reason, and the general making-sense-ness of things, I pointed out the fact that the sign ouside said they were open until 5pm, that it was currently 4:33pm, and that (above all else) the door sign that indicated the shop's current OPEN / CLOSED status clearly stated that the shop was presently OPEN. (I could have just as easily argued -- probably quite successfully -- that the hour of 4:33pm generally occurs before 5pm, holding the current calendar date, time zone, and integrity of space-time constant -- and therefore the shop should be open regardless of its stated status, but I felt this was unnecessary.)

At any rate, the woman responded that they did not accept new customers after 4:45, as if this meant something. Now, perhaps I should have considered the fact that she could have invented a time machine over her lunch break, or that her perception of time had been adversely affected by a miniature black hole courtesy of CERN, but at the time it seemed pretty obvious to me that her argument had no merit. However, as I began to point out that it was barely past 4:30, the woman abruptly cut me off and stated simply that they were closed for the day.

Now, in my experience, when businesses post a sign that says they are open until a certain time, they will accept new customers up until that time, since the posted hours serve to inform customers as to when they are welcome much more than they serve to indicate to employees when they can go home. Additionally, if by chance a business forgets to shut its doors and change its OPEN sign to CLOSED when its employees no longer want new customers, they should at least be courteous enough to honor the requests of an unsuspecting customer who happens to wander in and actually expect to receive a service in exchange for monetary considerations. And, finally, regardless of whatever misunderstandings may arise, there's never any reason to respond to a customer's honest inquiries by snapping at them.

So, given today's events, and the fact that this shop really doesn't offer any value-added over the likes of SuperCuts and the other big chains, I see no reason to go back again. Is this an irrational reaction to the trivial act of one employee (who was likely just having a bad day)? Most likely... but what's driving me to abandon this shop is not so much this one act itself, but rather the degree to which the act had to contradict objective reality and notions of common courtesy in order to achieve whatever end the woman had in mind. Among the hundreds of other possible easier courses of action, why choose the one that's least professional, least congenial, and least good for you and your employer in the long run? Is a mere 10-15 minutes of additional work and pretending to be nice to someone really that horrible of an alternative? And if it is, what's wrong with giving a quick and simple explanation that doesn't directly contradict established facts or insult anyone's intelligence?

Eh, whatever. Let's just call it an arbitrary decision on both of our parts and move on.