Service? What service?

Yesterday, a younger colleague confessed to me that he really dislikes helping customers. He doesn't like the interaction, he doesn't like talking to people, doesn't like the challenge of anyone either vague or difficult.

Younger Nick might have reacted angrily or dismissively. I have been in the retail side of food service for the better part of the last eleven years, with FOH work before that. You want difficult for customers? Try being a host at Bubba Gump Shrimp Company on Pier 39 in San Francisco. It's the middle of summer, the weather is perfect, the view is beautiful from only half the windows, and all of the iconic sea lions that tourists expect to be stinking up the place have fucked right off to the Farallon Islands to have giant orgies and make lots of baby sea lions that will feed the expectant population of Great White Sharks. Have a blast "entertaining" the tourists at that place, in front of faux memorabilia that might or might not fit Tom Hanks were he to pop his smiling face into the joint. Real fun.

Try working in Dean & Deluca when a certain beautiful host of a certain popular cooking

competition show wants an incredibly exact flavour from a cheese but has no idea what kind of cheese would yield it, and you have to sort through samples of nine different things and churn out adjectives about taste and texture like some sort of culinary thesaurus until finally, heroically, the two of you land on the perfect little wedge of paprika-rubbed Portuguese cow's cheese. Try hand-slicing sheets upon sheets of lox so thin that you can read War and Peace through them, which will be rejected by her geriatric majesty Ms. Upper East Side if they are any thicker. Easy times.

You either got it, or you ain't, and boys: I've got it. And if you ain't, you still put your head down and power through because it's your damn job and you are being paid money to do it.

But that is not me any more. Believe me, the salt and vinegar still courses through my veins, but the longer I have occupied roles of being a Head Cheesemonger, the more I have realised that it is my absolute duty to educate and elevate, not denigrate newer members of the curd world or my own team. What's the point? Make somebody who loves cheese and wants to learn more about it leave the industry? A fat bunch of good that does any of us!

No, this right here was a honking, flashing example of a teachable moment. So I put it to him this way, and I will put it to anyone else who feels that way thus:

It does not necessarily matter whether you enjoy helping customers or not. I personally love the interaction, and really feed upon the challenge of finding the absolutely right cheese for everyone who walks through my shop door. Nobody wants to have an upsetting time finding something tasty, especially when it's a food they might be intimidated by like artisanal cheese, so my deepest desire is to send every customer home happy and excited to eat what they bought. HOWEVER, that's me, not you, and you don't enjoy that kind of interaction. So let me spell out maybe the most important thing here: you are not doing this job for yourself. You are doing this job for the people, animals, and farms behind every cheese in our shop. What we are here to do every single shift, from 9am when the shop opens to 5pm when the shop closes, is tell their stories. Behind every cheese, there is a story. We get to speak about the connection between cheese and land, cheese and history, cheese and human being. It is our duty as cheesemongers to communicate the heart, emotion, labour, love, and tradition that went into every cheese we sell. A really great boss of mine (Charlotte Kamin, for those of you interested) once wrote something that I will paraphrase to say that a cheesemonger is the last link of the chain between farm and customers. That's our responsibility -- we're the last chance for that story to be told before Sir Bromley Gribblesworth chows down on his hunk of a Territorial cheese he remembers fondly from his youth. So if you can't give good customer service for the customer's sake, don't. Give it for the cheesemaker's sake, so that the customer will come back and buy a slice of their hard day's work again.

That seemed to make sense to him.