Thanks for your wait

‘Thanks for your wait’ is what the sales assistant said to me at the checkout or at least I think that is what she said.  I’m pretty certain she wasn’t referring to the size of my waist or the gravitas that I had brought to the situation.  What a strange thing to say as I don’t recall ever giving her the gift of my wait.  Perhaps she was giving thanks to the fact that I had had to wait.  I don’t think so, clearly she had mixed up her words and what she had meant to say was along the lines of ‘Thank you for waiting’ or ‘I’m sorry that you have had to wait’.

I’m not sure why these short phrases have been introduced when you come to pay for your goods in shops.  Most of the time a simple hello would do but this kind of palliative greeting is becoming more and more common.   It trips off the tongue of the sales assistant in such a way that it cannot be spontaneous, it must have been scripted into their customer relationship training and so now it comes across as insincere.

Having given it some thought there must only be a few reasons why these phrases have slipped into common parlance:

1. The first possibility is that the sales assistant is genuinely sorry that you have had to wait.  They have been doing their best to serve the customers in front of you as courteously and as quickly as possible but the transactions took a bit longer than they had hoped or the volume of business is greater than expected.  They are empathising with you and understanding how they would feel if they had been stuck in the same queue. If this were the case then the apology should sound more heartfelt and engaging.
2. The second possibility is that they or the company thinks that this kind of interaction improves the relationship with their customers in that it puts them at ease, makes them feel wanted and that the sales assistant cares about the trip that they have made to the store that day.  If this were the case then something more relevant would work better, such as ‘Did you manage to find everything that you came in for?’ or ‘Is there anything else that I can help you with?’
3. The third and final possibility for me is that they are apologising for a lack of service. Something has gone wrong with the flow of business and this has resulted in poorer service levels than they would normally offer but saying this to every customer who appears at the till is only going to create or reinforce the impression that something is not right.  Is this something that any business would want to advertise?  Perhaps it would be better to either say nothing at all or at least give a short explanation of what is being done to rectify the problem.

At the end of the day these types of phrases just don’t work, they are palliative, disingenuous and dilute the role of a sales assistant as the face of the store.  Also, they are just bad English and grate on your ear.  Does anyone know the difference between a vowel and a noun these days?  They do nothing to improve customer confidence in the organisation which they have come to visit and businesses should think long and hard before putting them into the sales assistant’s armoury.