@Michael Z, I see a parallel in experience you described with other thread topics here at SF. Big system offers good prices and convenience of a sort, but the human dimension at the customer level is generally low in knowledge and low in ability or motivation to help.
This is something I wrote in a thread about Amazon. It was my two-bits about "service" from Amazon versus what we experience in my community from a locally owned hardware store. So I'll paste it in here
...
Quoting: I think the issues relate to more systemic things. Living like my wife & I do, on a small acreage, means we do a lot of physical-level stuff for ourselves. This involves equipment, and all sorts of hardware things (often, but, not always small ones). We often want those things right away, and the convenience must be
local. I use the example of a hardware store, because of how important it is here. The couple who run our local hardware store
know stuff. My wife can talk food-preservation or kitchen technicalities with the woman there, and I can discuss maintenance, building, even welding technicalities with the man. A huge system like Amazon can't replace this... but because of product overlap, Amazon could conceivably undermine the existence of such a local business.
If you sell auto parts, I'd think it would be important that you know something about motor vehicles. Retail has been devolving to where "customer service" means being able to find entries on a screen, part of a computer system that handles an inventory data base. When the local auto-parts retail staff, or hardware retail staff, wind up being as ignorant and unhelpful to
the individual customer as someone responsible for moving cardboard boxes around in a huge Amazon warehouse/dispatch operation ā it doesn't connect, and it's no good.
