We Could Always Motivate Our Employees By Treating Them With Respect And Paying Them Well. Nah

Every once in a great while I get disconsolate about these here Intertunnels. A contest to see who can be the stupidest gets old fast. Nothing much seems genuine. I have every expectation that this video is genuine, don’t get me wrong; but the Intertunnel’s interest in it will not be because it’s good. It’s because it’s very, very, bad.

When you worship the gods of bad and stupid, this sort of thing is what emerges from the tail end of pop culture’s alimentary canal.  Either you’re savvy, and understand that your employees won’t respond to anything serious if it’s presented in a serious way, or you’re a dullard, and think you’re hip because you’re immune to just how lame-o you appear. Either way, you’re not Dale Carnegie.

Or maybe you are. Fish don’t get to swim in the water they desire. They must swim in the water they’re in, or perish. I imagine that it’s deuced difficult to make a living these days selling trinkets to the natives anywhere in the US. There is, literally, not one item in that store that I’d keep if it was given to me. Purchasing anything is out of the question. The owner of the store has to figure out how to get his employees on board with his scheme to sell this dreck or they’ll all starve. His scheme is being pleasant to the customers. That’s it. Nothing fancy. The video will be hooted at much farther and wider than when it was conceptualized, that’s for sure, but the point was made, moronically, perhaps, but no one that watches it would be struck by the idea that there were unpleasant people anywhere near it. Many nice people don’t summer in Cannes, and dress in couture. I said nice people, not Nice people.

If you had produced the best customer service video ever made, flashy and full of sober and sage advice to the retail worker, you’d get maybe five thousand hits on YouTube. I guarantee this one will get five million. Therein lies a lesson. My only problem is I have no idea what that lesson might be.