Speaking as a man who’s flipped off a diner, I have become very interested in the psychological effects of rudeness and why it turned me crazy.
Flipping off a building is never something to which I aspired as a child, and certainly not something I thought I’d be doing in my late thirties.
The fact that I felt so strongly about the Incident – and considered an inanimate object somehow an enemy – stems once more from surprise.
Think about the terminology we use to describe rude events: ‘I was the victim of rudeness’, for example; ‘It happened to me.’ There is a certain helplessness there, and finding out more about how rudeness works in the bustle of a city – where we’re all a little more helpless than normal – reminded me of a place I knew 20 years ago.
When I first moved to London, a particular restaurant in Chinatown called Wong Kei was nursing a national reputation for incredible rudeness. I read a review of it in the Evening Standard on the train home from work one night.
‘It sounds brilliant,’ I remember thinking. ‘They treat you so badly!’
Surly waiters would shunt you around, barely looking at you, impatiently demanding your order, castigating your choices, banging plates of food down in front of you, giving you your bill before you’d asked for it, literally chasing you down the street if you didn’t leave a big enough tip.
Wong Kei seemed to go against everything the service industry so pompously declared it stood for. It was a novelty. It seemed refreshing. I decided to take a friend and go, because rudeness is fun, and even the name seemed playful, like it was putting on an act, like it was an entertainment somehow.
I lasted approximately eight minutes.
A tiny furious Chinese woman pushed me up some stairs to a vast room, which was empty apart from a table of maybe eight people who sat in near silence.
‘You sit here,’ she said, pushing me towards them, and when I asked if we could possibly sit at a different table, as we weren’t with these guys and didn’t want to gatecrash, she yelled, ‘NO!’
It soon became clear that the eight other people weren’t together either. They were just four separate couples who’d all been made to sit together so at the end of the night the woman wouldn’t have to clean as many tablecloths.
All four couples were now just sitting, awkwardly silent, praying their food would come and this would all be over soon.
I think a bad sign for a restaurant is if you have eight customers sitting in awkward silence praying it will all be over soon.
As it turns out, rudeness wasn’t fun. It was just rude.
Wong Kei closed shortly afterwards. It only reopened when they’d managed to find some friendlier waiters. I found that people stopped talking about it. It had lost what made it unique, its word-of-mouthness gone, just another Chinese restaurant in an area made up entirely of Chinese restaurants. Even today, the new manager wonders whether not being awful to people was the right move. ‘Maybe there was an issue with rude staff twenty years ago,’ he told a newspaper. ‘But I don’t think so any more. I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or not.’16
You can imagine him shaking his head, sadly, as he said that, and then walking off into a more modern, customer-centric Chinatown, staring at the ground.
Some of the restaurant’s reputation must obviously be down to cultural differences. There are obviously differences in global attitudes to rudeness, and we’ll come to them, but maybe it’s why when foreigners think of Britain, it’s not long before they think of a nation of butlers. Quiet, attentive, polite. A friend of mine has been a waiter for many years, and he is good. He takes it very seriously. He says that a good waiter remains unseen, unnoticed, there before you realise you need him and gone when he’s done what he needs to do. Your glass remains invisibly topped up, and the conversation with your friends flows just as freely, because everything a host normally does is taken care of.
The United States is a country famed for its service industry, but what to an American diner is the height of politeness can, to a British person, seem overbearing and, yes, even a little rude.
They are not being polite to you – they are being polite at you.
They dominate, they perform, they interrupt, and though they are only interrupting to check you are having a nice time or ask where you’re from, they are still interrupting. They lean over you to ask if you need things to make a point of you knowing they are actively getting you what you need. You get the feeling that if you had a little piece of broccoli stuck to your mouth, they might simply lick their fingers and thumb it off. Their attention can be tiring and physically and mentally intrusive, and I honestly think this kind of politeness is rude. It is performance politeness. It’s ‘Look how polite I am!’ versus being polite, and it comes at a cost. About 20 per cent of your bill.
But in North America, when someone is genuinely impolite, you really notice it.
Ask Darren Dahl, Professor of Marketing and Behavioural Science at the Sauder School of Business in Vancouver.
‘Now the problem with a hotdog,’ he tells me, wisely, ‘is that it’s not aspirational.’
I find this very rude but decide to keep talking to him. Particularly because a few years ago, in downtown Vancouver, he met his own Madam Hotdog; a woman who worked in the luxury Hermès store and who in the blink of an eye and the shake of a head would become the catalyst for his own subsequent research.
Darren walked into the shop simply to buy some grapefruit aftershave. He didn’t tell me why he wanted grapefruit aftershave, though I guess it’s more aspirational than a hotdog. Behind the counter sat a cold-looking woman in designer clothes, who took one look at Darren, ‘in a ratty T-shirt and ripped jeans’, cast him a withering glance, shook her head and looked away.
In that moment, Darren Dahl felt tiny. Unimportant. Unworthy. Unwelcome.
‘The scowl said, “You can’t afford to be here. This is not for you,”’ says Darren. ‘I wanted to show her that wasn’t the case.’
Darren ended up buying twice as much grapefruit aftershave as he went in for. Darren Dahl left that shop owning more grapefruit aftershave than literally anyone else on Earth. Darren Dahl must have smelled of nothing but grapefruit for years.
But later that day, as he sadly surveyed his hundreds of dollars’ worth of bottles of designer grapefruit aftershave, Darren wondered why on Earth he’d done that.
‘It’s not like when I was in that diner I ended up buying twice as many hotdogs as I wanted,’ I tell him, and he reminds me again of that word: aspiration.
Darren aspired to be someone who wore grapefruit aftershave. And when someone told him he wasn’t, he opened his wallet to win.
But why hadn’t he just left? Gone somewhere else? Or not bought any grapefruit aftershave whatsoever?
He decided to study his own behaviour, and what he found is depressing. We are far more likely to want to buy and use products from the very people who treat us with disrespect just for wanting to buy and use products from them.17
Dahl has called this rejection-into-profit ‘the Pretty Woman’ effect, for obvious reasons. However, this effect won’t work if you’re buying knock-off Armani aftershave from your corner shop. Who cares what that guy thinks?
For rudeness to drive us to spend, we first of all have to aspire to be part of that gang. We have to be impressed by Givenchy or in awe of Armani.
‘The research shows that if it’s something you really want and you don’t have it, you will put up with rudeness. If they’re saying, “you’re not good enough for this”, you’ll say, “yes I am – watch” – and BAM!’
And that ‘BAM!’ is the sound of you ending up with North America’s largest individual supply of citric aftershave.
The mere look of the salesperson plays its part, says Darren. The way they’re dressed. Their make-up. Their hair. For us to spend, they must represent the brand we so desperately want to be accepted into.
But it all sounds so … childish. I put it to Darren that this must go all the way back to the ‘in’ crowd at school. That this is an insecurity; that he was trying to buy her respect that day.
‘Yes,’ he admits. ‘That is part of it.’
Brands are powerful signifiers for our personalities.
As we grow up, we start to truly believe that certain brands represent certain things.
A Mercedes, for example, jet black and shiny, might in childhood have spelled out the idea of success to us. Owning a business, being a success, making money. If we’re cut up on the motorway by someone in a blacked-out, blinged-up Mercedes Benz, we’re more likely to be think this is a rude gesture by someone who doesn’t care about us. It’s emotive. They did what we didn’t manage. We’re nothing to them because they’re successful. They cut us up because on some level we’re a failure.
An American academic named Jack Katz covered exactly this in a celebrated piece called ‘Pissed Off in LA’.18 It touched a nerve with American drivers, and after reading it I thought about it constantly as I drove around the streets of London. Why were people in LA, or London, or Lichtenstein, so nice on their driveways – yet such beasts in their cars? Many people began to realise they had a very different idea of themselves from the reality they showed to strangers. If you asked anyone how long they’d wait before they beeped a car that hadn’t moved off at a green light, they’d probably say ‘five or six seconds’. I tried it the day I read Katz’s piece. The light turned green and I didn’t move. I was beeped in less than two seconds.
I immediately email Katz and politely demand a chat. He says if I’m ever driving around Los Angeles I should look him up.
But back to Darren and his surfeit of cologne.
Luxury brands rely on creating a social distance. They sell a life-style they need us to want. And now we know that Darren’s research shows that if you walk into a shop and your insecurity about whether you should even be in there or not is confirmed, you are far more likely to spend.
You are not, however, likely to go back.
Seventy per cent of us, according to the Wallace Report, think that if someone in a brand-name shop is rude to us, it absolutely affects our opinions of the brand as a whole. Nearly a fifth of people said that the last time someone was rude to them, it was while shopping.
A moment of rudeness can damage a brand. People think negatively about Luxury Inc. as a business if they were once treated rudely by someone wearing Luxury Inc. in a Luxury Inc. store.
I should be clear – I’m not talking about a luxury ink shop here.
And bad customer service is estimated to cost the US alone around $41 billion a year.19 How?
These are our greatest weapons in the fight against rude customer service.
Psychologically, it cuts deep. Even just witnessing store staff being rude to someone else entirely is often enough for us not only to have a lower opinion of that brand and never revisit the shop, but also to start generalising about what the other individual members of staff are probably like as well.21
Just like I did during the Incident, when I made my assumptions about the sad-faced woman shunting meat about in the background. I guessed she was probably rude because her brand ambassador was rude. That sad-faced woman might have been an absolute angel.
But Darren also thinks it’s why an increasing percentage of luxury goods are bought online. Rudeness keeps us at home. It stops us feeling special.
From the everyday experiences we’ve had since school – in-groups, the need for acceptance – through to the respect we demand as adults, we no longer want to have to deal with the rejection of the devil wearing Prada. Or in Darren’s case, Hermès.
As we’ll discover in a few moments, we are constantly engaged in power struggles both minor and major.
And that way rudeness lies.
CASE STUDY: BOTTOMS UP
My wife and I have arranged a babysitter and are at a restaurant, which so far is quite quiet.
‘This is nice,’ she says. ‘We should do this more often.’
‘Definitely,’ I agree, knowing that with two kids there is a just above zero chance we will do this more often.
I move my coat as a man and his family arrive and sit down on the table next to ours. They could have picked anywhere. They chose right next to us. That’s fine. That’s a normal thing to do.
‘The babysitter was okay, wasn’t she?’ I say, a little quieter now we have company. ‘I had to talk to her about her exams while you were getting ready. I always end up talking about their exams. And then I have to say things like “oh, that sounds like a good choice” when they tell me where they’re going to university. For all I know I am doling out terrible advice. Perhaps I am ruining young lives.’
‘Good,’ says my wife.
Then: ‘MICHAEL!!!!’ bellows a man, from across the room, and he stomps towards our table.
I give my wife a look.
‘HOW ARE YOU?’ says the man, shaking hands with the man at the table next to ours. ‘DO YOU HAVE EVERYTHING YOU NEED?’
I dunno why he’s still shouting. He’s inches away from the other guy. And they’re literally holding hands.
‘Yes, absolutely,’ says Michael. ‘Great place, by the way.’
‘Thank you,’ says the man, and he puts his other hand over his heart because that’s the only way to show thanks are sincere.
My wife raises her eyebrows. Guy must be the manager.
‘You remember Kate?’ says Michael, pointing at his wife, and while all this is loudly happening, my wife and I sit silently and chew on our bread, because we don’t want to interrupt this great meeting, and anyway it’ll be over soon.
‘Yeah, been here about six months,’ says the manager, trying to sound bored but knowing it’s impressive, and then he reels off a list of other fancy restaurants he was at beforehand, and then he leans down onto their table and extends his bottom backwards.
This man’s bottom is now just inches from my wife’s face.
All I can see is my wife’s face and this man’s bottom.
‘So,’ says my wife, ‘you know what you’re going to order?’
No! I don’t know what I’m going to order! And doesn’t she realise? Can’t she tell she’s just inches from a strange bottom?
The manager continues to blather on about places he used to work for so long I feel like standing up and shouting ‘Yeah? Well I used to work at Argos in the nineties!’, and then Michael’s wife starts showing off her knowledge and saying things like ‘oh, you must know Tom, then?’ and then they both start passive-aggressively competing about who’s known Tom the longest or worked with him the closest.
I widen my eyes and nod subtly to my wife’s left. She looks. She sees the bottom. She turns back, horrified.
‘It’s a bottom!’ I mouth.
I should say something. After all, we’re paying customers. It’s obvious how loud all this showing off must be for us because there’s hardly anyone else here.
But it’s the manager’s bottom. And if I say anything, not only will I be insulting the manager, but I’ll be ruining this wonderful reunion between Michael, Kate and the owner of the bottom.
‘Well enjoy – I’ll see you after,’ says the manager, finally, and I am so relieved because that means I don’t have to cause a fuss. Surely now, as he leaves, he’ll turn and glance at us and give us an apologetic look – one that says, I’m so sorry for being loud and invading your wife’s personal space with my bottom. And then we’ll become friends and he’ll invite me to become a shareholder.
But no. He turns, barely registers us, and skips off.
‘He didn’t even say sorry,’ I seethe, as Michael and Kate try and make their kids impressed by having met a loud man.
I spot the manager over my wife’s shoulder. He’s talking to a waiter and pointing in our direction. Moments later, the waiter heads towards us. He’s carrying a bottle of wine!
‘Oh!’ I say, delighted.
‘What?’ says my wife.
The waiter walks straight past us and delivers the free wine to the table next to ours.
‘From Mr Smith,’ he says, and Michael and Kate coo over it.
I start to realise why I’m annoyed. It’s not because of the loudness and it’s not because of the bottom. It’s because every time the manager makes these people feel special, he makes us feel unspecial. Like they are the aristocracy, enjoying all the power, and we are the norms. I have no power. I feel like singing that song from Les Mis. We’re special too! WE’RE SPECIAL TOO!
I reach for more bread but we’ve run out.
‘Let them eat cake!’ the manager would probably say.
The waiter tries to uncork the bottle, but it’s a struggle. He places it between his knees and bends to pull.
His bottom is now right next to my wife’s face.
There is zero chance we are doing this more often.