Katy Perry’s public image appeals to me, so I was repeatedly disappointed that I didn’t like her songs. Not the one fantasizing about aliens. Not the one fantasizing about high school relationship sex. Not the one about getting too drunk to remember anything about a party. Not the one about a firework. Not one that made me wonder if we could perhaps sing a song about girls in a non-California state for a change.
So I was pleased that I liked Roar, and now I also like Dark Horse. When I liked Roar I thought it was a fluke; liking Dark Horse makes me think she changed between the last album and this one. Which I imagine means there are a whole bunch of people saying they used to love Katy Perry songs but they don’t like ANY of the new ones.
********
I was very sorry to hear that Philip Seymour Hoffman died. It seemed both worse and better that it was apparently drug-related: worse because that means it didn’t have to have happened; better because it means I can do that human-psychology thing where it means it won’t happen to me. I don’t do drugs = Oh good, I won’t die.
********
This is going to sound like such a McDonald’s ad, but our local McDonald’s is doing something so extremely right, I wrote a letter to the manager. What it is is this: they make me feel like I am an important executive and they are my devoted assistant helping me get on with my day. Like, you know those movies where an important executive is striding down the hall and an assistant appears out of nowhere and is immediately jogging alongside handing the executive a coffee and a briefcase and a folder while saying things like “You have a 9:30 with Mr. Jones; remember his wife just left him so don’t ask about her. At 10:30 it’s the fish people; PLEASE be nice to them this time, we need their grant money; I put a framed painting of a trout in your office. You have a lunch date with…” and so on, so that the important executive can continue striding importantly? That is how EVERY SINGLE DRIVE-THROUGH EMPLOYEE AT OUR MCDONALD’S makes me feel, even though I am wearing jeans and a t-shirt and driving a minivan and on my way to Target. They have kept this up for a couple of YEARS now, so it’s not just a particular employee or catching them on a particularly good day: someone is hiring a particular type of staff and/or training them to act a particular way. And “act” is the wrong word, because they don’t seem like they’ve been trained to say certain words, it’s like they MEAN IT. It makes me want to stop there to get a coffee I don’t even need or want, just for the hit of feeling important.
I love you! That’s all. ;)
I love unexpectedly good customer service. It stands out so much these days but is so nice. I mostly love McDonald’s because of the $1 coffee and soda. A perfect treat :)
I wish the manager of your McDonalds would come fix all of ours. It’s pretty much a guarantee that you will NOT get sauce if you asked for it, so we’ve taken to asking at the window again before we drive off. Our McDonalds staff is the complete opposite of yours.
We have one McDonald’s like that around here, but I am curious if you could give us an example dialogue of a single McDonald’s experience. Because… fun.
Oh, yes! Curious and that would be fun. :-)
Whatever it is they’re doing, it’s entirely in HOW they say it / do it. Like, all they’re really doing is coming to the window, handing me my coffee, and saying something like “Have a good day!” (or “There you go—have a great day!”), but something about their attitude, tone, eye contact, briskness—all those things add up to make me feel like they see me as someone important and themselves as someone helping me get on to my important, important day/work. Something about their tone is so helpy and efficient and…like, respectful and genuine and AS IF they are saying “miss” or “ma’am” or “sir,” even though they don’t. And it feels as if they also love their role—that they consider their job important and valuable too, because they are helping someone so important in this important way. It’s hard to describe. It’s as if someone trained them by saying, “Pretend each customer at the drive-through window is the President under-cover, and that the President CANNOT do his/her work unless he/she has this breakfast first. YOU PERSONALLY will make the difference between the President having a good day or a bad day.” At other drive-throughs, I feel like I’m someone purchasing food and they are someone handing it to me politely, so I don’t know HOW this particular place is doing it in a way that feels so different!
Once I got choked while giving my order, and the drive through high-school-guy-clerk said “You pull right around here and I’ll give you a cup of water for that cough while we get the rest of your order ready.” I thought that was above and beyond.
There was a donut shop in the building I used to work in and the nice lady who owned it used to start preparing my tea as soon as she saw me approaching. I frequented that place far more often than I normally would just for a hit of that “sometimes you’ve gotta go where everybody knows your name” feeling.
I want to know more about this magical mcdonalds of wonderful ness!
This reminds me of the Panera near me whose manager is Super Serious about her role. Which is good – but it manifests in not great ways. Like, she wants the food to be cooked properly, so she will tell the cook to redo a grilled cheese if it is too burnt… but she fails to tell the customer why it is taking a million years for her lunch to be ready. Or, she wants to keep her employees focused, but she does so by yelling “turning off the alarm on the oven so you can finish serving a customer is how whole batches of bread get burned”…totally embarassing the employee and disregarding the customer who is *right there* trying to pay.
What I am saying is, customer service is REALLY important, even if you are trying to do all the other things right.
I was so so sad to hear about Phillip Seymour Hoffman. He was one of my very favorite actors. Also, did you know he had three children? I did not, and I feel particularly bad for them. I do wonder, though, how anyone with three children has time for a drug habit??
What Stephanie said. And I love you for selfish reasons. Your posts make me feel that the way I react to a lot of situations in life are normal. Or at least I am not alone in the way I feel. To wit, Phillip Seymour Huffman’s death. In my case it is, oh, my sons are safe then. (My “babies” are 40.)
And the young singers. HA! In my case, I did NOT want to like Rihanna but love two of her songs. Go figure.
Our McDonalds is the same way! I love it, all the employees are so sweet & sincere & professional. Unexpected and awesome.
I totally get the McDonald’s thing. We have one of those here (Kentucky) that I love – it is on the other side of town (where I used to live) and honestly, the service is so much better there, it is worth driving past 2 other McDonald’s to get to it. And I likely shouldn’t say this but EVERY McDonald’s I’ve been to in Tuscaloosa, AL is HORRIBLE. We visit there several times a year, spent most of our summer there (ugh) and the service is so consistently bad every time I feel like I must be on Punk’d. Several times they’ve handed me bags of food that I didn’t order – on top of the food I DID order – insisting it’s all mine. SEVERAL times this has happened. I don’t even know how they make a profit at those locations.
I am sad about Phillip Seymour Hoffman, but also a bit…not angry exactly…but one of the stories I read indicated he had been supposed to pick up his kids that morning and he didn’t show. You have 3 kids and you’re doing heroin? What?
Funny about Katy Perry. I like her a lot – her new songs are different and I haven’t liked them as much, but I still like them enough to let my girls play them on sometimes endless repeat. :)
I wondered that same thing about the drugs. My current theory is that maybe he died the night before but wasn’t found until morning. Heroin seems like an evening activity.
Unfortunately, addiction doesn’t know reason. While it of course is completely inappropriate and unreasonable to be high on heroin with your three kids, to an addict their choices don’t seem unreasonable or they think they function better and in some ways they do as opposed to the withdrawls they feel if they aren’t using. As someone who is married to a recovering opiate addict there were years he was addicted and using unbeknownst to me and around our children. During that time he never missed a day of work, was being promoted, living a completely (seemingly) normal life. It’s heartbreaking, upsetting, and completely scary, but addiction isn’t an after work, weekend activity.
Brave comment, Sarah, and good luck to your husband.
The exchange between Liza Minnelli and James Lipton on “Inside the Actors Studio” when he brought up the topic of addiction was so striking. He said something like, “The obvious question for all of us listening to you is ‘How can someone with so much talent, so many awards, so much adoration, have to abuse alcohol/drugs?'” And she replied with something like, “Well, that’s just it, isn’t it. I’d have to be addicted, to have to.”
I loved Philip Seymour Hoffman. The Savages and Magnolia were two of my favorites of his.
Did you see the Lakewood High lip dub? My sister showed it to me last night and … wow. I have to admit I hadn’t heard Roar before that (yes I live under a rock) – definitely a good introduction to the song.
Katy Perry is coming here this summer. I was going to purchase tickets and I got all the way to the final checkout page (I could get tickets early because I have a certain credit card) and then aborted because I feel the same way you do about her. I am not sure I’ll know all her songs or appreciate them for the price, because my 22 year old daughter said she’d go with me so I was purchasing 2 tickets. Also, I thought if I was going to go, I shouldn’t get the nosebleed seats so it was pricey considering our entertainment budget. BUT, I think every day about how it might have been a mistake. She seems like she’s fun, a good person and probably puts on a great show.
I haven’t listened to the new Katy Perry songs, but now I want to!
I’m pretty bummed about PSH dying. He was SUCH a talent and I always loved his scenes even in movies I didn’t particularly like. It’s hard to believe there won’t be any more.
Hooray for excellent customer service! I’m pretty mad at McD’s right now though and have been considering writing a letter of complaint to corporate, but I haven’t yet (and probably won’t, really). I bought an apple pie a couple days ago for the first time in ages, and saw they’d redesigned the box to say “Mom didn’t have time, so we baked you this apple pie.” Which, AGHHHH. Where is it written that mothers must bake? And ugh, the implication that mothers who don’t bake are not good mothers, but luckily McD’s is there to save the child with pies! Also, why is no one talking about how Dad didn’t bake a pie EITHER?? And on and on.
Gabriel loves both old AND new Katy Perry, so I think she’s just expanding her audience.
I read that PSH had been clean for 23 years when he relapsed. Heroin is such an awful drug. It never lets you go.
I love this post! I’ve never been a huge Katy Perry fan except now I am obsessed with Roar. I don’t know what it is about it that I love so much, but I do. I have found similar high customer service levels in the various Chick-fil-a restaurants around here (Virginia). It’s like the employees genuinely enjoy their jobs and it really comes across in the way they treat their customers. I also feel the same way about the employees at my favorite grocery store (Wegmans). It’s like each person I encounter there wants to make MY day better. I would be interested to hear other people’s favorite companies based on good customer service.
“I put a framed painting of a trout in your office”–HA!!
Totally agreed, re: Philip Seymour Hoffman. Very sad for his three children.
Good customer service will get me every single time. I’d rather wait a little longer and pay a little more than have to deal with bad customer service. For something that is so clearly not rocket science I have to wonder why every single company hasn’t figured it out.
I would bet that the manager of that McDonald’s also treats his staff like they are important people too, and it trickles down. I love experiences like that.
I also read that PSH was sober for 23 years and it sounds like he spoke openly about addiction, which I appreciate instead of pretending it wasn’t an issue.
And my reaction was “What if my children get into the grips of drugs? What a hard battle!” And then went to throw out all the old prescription drugs in the house.
I was so sad about PSH. I actually accused me husband of lying to me because he knows about my weird crush on him. I thought he was such an interesting, talented guy, and could play just about any genre and do it well and add class to the whole film. I will miss him, sincerely.
PS Our McDonalds is basically the opposite of yours. It’s like a local joke at this point- everyone knows you only have a fifty percent chance of getting your order right, even if it’s only a coffee and an iced tea or something. It’s a big part of what’s made it less painful for me to give up McDonalds for meals- it was such a pain to have to go BACK, quite routinely, to get the missing item/items.
As Phancymama said – it most likely has a lot to do with the way the manager treats his employees. He/She makes them feel important and valuable and makes them feel like the job they do is the most important job. That manager needs to be training other managers.
I’ve had similar experiences at certain McDonalds and Starbucks franchises (but only in the drive thru, weirdly). I think it’s a combination of the fact that they want to keep that line moving through quickly, and some manager somewhere putting a big emphasis on friendly customer service, either as a philosophy, or during hiring. It really does feel great.
The fact that you came up w/ a fish example and thought of hanging up a trout painting has be laughing out loud in my office.
I like both the old and new Kary Perry altough good lord, most of the old stuff is not safe to play around kids that can understand the lyrics. Roar is one of my favoirte running songs right now and the best part is my two year old knows all the words and she sings along at top volume while I push her along in the jogging stroller.
Want a Katy Perry related story? My younger sister (who is now a high school special ed teacher) went through a free-spirted period several years ago where she had a series of odd jobs and met lots of interesting people. A couple of years ago I realized that it had been almost a week since I had talked to or seen my sister (she lives nearby and I see her often) which I thought was odd. My mom hadn’t heard from her either and we started to worry. The I get a short email message from my sister (In Bahamas with Katy Perry. Be back this weekend.) I thought she had gone off the deep end. Turns out she really was in the Bahamas with Ms. Perry. My sister had been hanging out with a girl that was one of Katy Perry’s assistants. Katy had a concert/vacation in the Bahamas and told her assitants that that were welcome to bring a friend (all expenses paid). So the assistant friend asked my sister to come with her and little sister got to spend a week in the Bahamas living it up like a pop star.