> I think that a lot of customer-service personnel want to remain as much in their own headspace as possible while they are forced to stand there dealing with strangers just to pay their bills, and so this behaviour would be imposing on them.

I can only speak to my own experiences in food service, but if everyone thought this way, it would make for a very dull shift imo. quick conversations with customers really helped pass the time for me. particularly entertaining customers would often find extra food in their bag ;)

keep in mind there's a lot of low-wage work out there. some people are desperate and have to take the first position they can get, but a lot of people in directly customer facing roles have chosen that for a reason. they probably could have worked in the kitchen or restocked shelves in a grocery store if they really didn't want to talk to people.

timing and context is important of course. if the line behind you is twenty people deep, it's a bad time to chat. if the place is empty and the person is doing low-priority busywork, they might love to shoot the shit for a few minutes.

> Also, for female baristas, customers flirting with them are one of their biggest complaints, and it is all too easy for any social interaction to be misinterpreted as flirting.

first half of this is true, but you're taking it to a bit of an extreme. flirting with someone who's paid to be nice to you is almost always a bad idea, but an innocent conversation is no big deal.

> I think one only risks being rude by making eye contact and trying to exchange some small conversation outside of simply conveying one’s order

Ok, so dehumanizing is the polite thing to do. Got it.

In seriousness, that is a customer facing profession, and you don't need to enjoy people, but you sure do need to be able to act like you do. And most people would consider a warm, personal interaction the ideal. If it makes a barista uncomfortable, it's probably more likely because it highlights how rude every other customer is.

I think there's a difference between someone who is a regular vs. someone who is just walking in off the street. Every job can get monotonous, so it's nice to see a friendly familiar face and exchange pleasantries.

The key here is recognizing that this is what I like to call a "low-stakes friendship" -- it's closer to the kind of relationship you'd have with a co-worker or a client versus a friend. If you have healthy boundaries, you wouldn't pry too much into a co-worker's life. I'd even say it might be ok to politely ask out a barista you're friendly with on a date, but if they say no drop it and don't ask again.

I think if your customer representative doesn't want to connect with the customer, you should fire them and get a new one.

Contrary to whatever business model motivated that comment, the entire point of the business is to encourage customers to return. Its not the private living room of the barrista where they share their weekend with the counter staff while ignoring the line, the tables needing bussing, the overflowing trash.

The personnel are to attend to the business 100% of the time they are being paid to do so. That includes chatting up the customers, deflecting flirting, asking about preferences and generally making the customer feel at home.

Don't like all that? Get a job hauling trash or digging ditches.

Your response is a curious one, inasmuch as my comment was attempting to show some sympathy for the workers that one interacts with during the day, while your concern apparently is the business’s owners and whether they are extracting maximum value out of their business, the feelings of working-class people be damned. Also, nowhere in my comment was it suggested that customer-service staff can freely “ignore the line, the tables needing bussing, the overflowing trash”. I just personally hope they would at least be free to think their own thoughts while they are doing all that. Customer-service staff are human beings, not automatons.

Just venting. The idea that the business should be set up to convenience the counter staff, is where it went off the rails. That's what I mean to criticize, perhaps with hyperbole.

But be honest, we've all been to the shop where the staff seems to think they're in their own kitchen, chatting up their mates and whoa! somebody wants me to sell them a coffee??

I grew up on a farm. We worked. It wasn't intended to be entertaining, or self-fulfilling, or respectful of the personal choices of the worker. It was pitching hay, spreading manure.

The idea that kind of work is 'wrong' and workers are supposed instead to be supported in a congenial frame of mind with their personal space respected and only kind, polite people to interact with, is a pretty hipster notion. You take the money, you better deliver the performance required.

Seriously? This attitude is what's driving the mental health crisis in this country. People are social animals, not slaves to our jobs. The workplaces that make room for their employees to be people are the ones with low turnover and a more consistent customer experience.

If you want a robot, go out and build a robot. But don't be surprised when your customers go somewhere else a little bit more welcoming.

Hard work? Doing a job even if the customer is not somebody you like? The root of mental health crisis in this country? Geeze.

Pretty soft life, that, if you can get it. But there're lots of jobs require you to sweat, mentally or physically. Nothing wrong with that. People can survive a shift, without total mental breakdown.

I'm generally supportive of so-called 'Millennials' because people are people, the young are not the soft fragile children people like to make them out to be.

Then somebody posts something like that comment, and I can see how the stereotype got made.

Your priorities are messed up my dude.

Work to live, not live to work. We all end up in the dirt either way.

Right. And a right attitude toward work is critical.

If there's any mental health issue, it stems from the cognitive dissonance of believing a counter job should be like chatting with your friends and hanging out with cool people. Instead of dealing with a sometimes-difficult public for the purpose of moving coffee (or whatever). Understand what you're doing, and doing it right, can be very satisfying.

The "right" attitude? Why is your attitude necessarily the right one?

HN is an anomaly in my experience; people outside the tech world mostly hate their jobs and put in juuuust enough effort to not get fired.

Millennials (and younger) have largely abandoned capitalism. The only way to win a game that's stacked against you is to not play. Shit's gonna get real weird in the next couple decades.

Being paid to move coffee, to coffee-deprived people, is where we started. Taking the money and not doing that, is something like fraud.

Make all the meta-argument you like (Capitalism! Stacked!) That's substantially moving the goalposts. Feel free to have that conversation, but its a big left-turn from where we started here.