Let’s stop sugarcoating it — customer service in America is in the gutter. Walk into a retail store and you’re lucky if someone even looks up from their phone. Step into a fast‑food joint and half the crew acts like you ruined their day just by showing up. The basics — eye contact, a greeting, a little effort — used to be automatic. Now they feel like relics from another era.

So yeah, the question writes itself: Whatever happened to superior Customer Service in this country?

I’ve been serving customers my whole life, and the first lesson didn’t come from a corporate handbook. It came from a beat‑up lemonade stand I ran as a kid. I learned fast that people respond to how you treat them. A smile mattered. Being decent mattered. Effort mattered. That simple truth carried me through forty years in retail and leadership.

Today, it feels like we’ve forgotten all of it.

Young workers grew up talking through screens — texts, abbreviations, emojis. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not the same as reading a customer’s face or hearing frustration in their voice. And managers are stuck trying to build great service with a workforce that communicates in a completely different language than the customers they’re serving.

Here’s the part nobody wants to admit: Customer Service isn’t a slogan. It’s not a poster in the break room. It’s not a “program.” It has to be the company’s DNA.

Everyone serves the customer — not just the cashier. The truck unloader, the buyer, accounting, IT, even the person emptying the trash. If any one of them drops the ball, the customer feels it. That’s the truth corporate America keeps pretending isn’t true.

The old four P’s — Product, Price, Promotion, Place — still matter. But after decades in business, I learned there’s a fifth P that matters more: People. You can copy products, match prices, duplicate promotions, and replicate locations. But you can’t steal a culture built around people who actually give a damn.

Even Disney — the gold standard — struggles now. The magic used to feel effortless. Today it feels thinner. Not gone, just harder to maintain. And if Disney can’t keep the shine perfectly polished, what chance does everyone else have?

So let’s go back to that lemonade stand.

I learned something simple that corporate America keeps forgetting: People respond to incentives.

If you want great Customer Service, you have to pay for it. Not pizza parties. Not stars on nametags. Not point systems nobody cares about after a month. Real money. A line item on the paycheck tied directly to customer feedback.

Salespeople have commissions. Executives have bonuses. Managers have incentives. Why shouldn’t the people who deal with customers every day?

The kid selling lemonade figured it out decades ago:

If you want sales, pay for sales. If you want productivity, pay for productivity. If you want great Customer Service, maybe it’s time we start paying for that too.