A new Target policy, called the 10-4 policy, requires employees who are within 10 feet of customers to smile, make eye contact, wave, and otherwise be friendly and approachable. Furthermore, if a staff member is within 4 feet of a customer, they must personally greet that customer, smile, and “initiate a warm, helpful interaction.”
I experienced this when I visited a Phillipsburg Target today. The thing is, both smiling and happy clerks I talked to hadn’t yet heard of the 10-4; I asked them about it, and they both pleaded ignorance. They were just smiling and happy folks.
Lucky me.
I personally believe Target is going to have a long battle trying to get their employees to smile and be friendly. Have you seen what it is like in retail stores these days? There are rude and entitled customers ready to throw clothes racks to the floor or get into fisticuffs with another customer over the slightest provocation (forget about working in a fast food place; have you seen those videos of some customer going nutty when they don’t get the correct sauce they ordered?) How about trying to negotiate around people walking through retail stores with dogs on leashes (please don’t get me started on how, in my opinion, people should not be walking into stores—other than maybe Petco—with a dog on a leash, unless it is a service dog) wanting to engage everyone they meet in their wonderful pooch or clogging up the aisle I am trying to walk down with their pet, who really doesn’t want to be standing at the magazine rack of a Barnes and Noble anyway.
And Target wants their staff to smile in the face of all this bad human behavior?
I’m not saying that I have not encountered just as many surly, incompetent, locked-into-their-cell-phone-screen sales help. I do, as we all do, ‘on the daily’ as the kids say. But mandatory smiling? It’s good in theory, but good luck enforcing this policy. I’m just saying, I could see why a clerk at a store making minimum wage wouldn’t feel like smiling if suddenly a store-wide policy is implemented that they should.
And what then? Does Target employ smile police to make sure the employees are enacting the policy?
I love and live for unprompted niceties. I like people just being happy, joking, giving you the time of day with witty comebacks and good feelings as you bounce off their ‘energy’ (another word the kids say today, as in, “I loved his/her energy.” “I really don’t need to be around all that negative energy”…what, did PSEG just have a spill? Energy shemergy!). I’d rather a world where we all got along, or at least, in public, pretended we did. But this just isn’t the way it is.
Luckily, today, I did get around some happy smiling workers at Target, policy or not.
Maybe there is hope yet…
Nah.
