A Rude Awakening
It started with brash dot-comers; now, bad manners are spreading to stores, airports and offices across the country.
Has America forgotten its manners?
Barry Barnett is starting to think so. The health-benefits consultant was delivering a presentation to some new dot-com clients, when one of them suddenly cut him off and barked, “I don’t care.” So is famed restaurant Danny Meyer, who watched with dismay recently as a customer interrupted a waitress to answer his cell phone—a but grabbed her and told her to keep talking. And flight attendant Lori Vitto, who had to intervene when one passenger told another: “ I hope you die.”
It’s “rush, rush, rush,” says Ms. Vitto, a USAirways employee based in Washington. “People have no tolerance or compassion anymore.”
Talk about a rude awakening. While impolite behavior has always been a fact of life, there is mounting evidence that incivility not only is on the rise but has become almost the norm in many parts of the culture. A recent University of North Carolina survey of 775 workers nationwide found that every single person had experienced some type of rude behavior on the job, including insults, curses, nasty emails and denigrating gossip. Restaurant reviewer Zagat Survey LLC found that gripes about service have tripled over the past five years. Meanwhile, air travel has practically become a combat zone, with customer service complaints more than doubling last year alone, according to the U.S Transportation Department.
Some see all this as the dark side of the New Economy. The internet has bred a generation of brash young entrepreneurs that glorifies speed over decorum and innovation over tradition. High-tech gadgets, such as cellular phones, papers and Palm Pilots, have also fostered antisocial tendencies, enabling people to isolate themselves even in public. So have sudden windfalls from the stock market, making some people think they can have whatever they want when they want it.
Some of these people “maybe forget where they came from,” says events planner Robert Isabell, who has observed more of his clients demanding last-minute changes in arrangements long after it is feasible to make them. Hal Reiter, 50, an executive-search firm in New York, adds that young dot-comers often end meetings the by simply getting up and walking out of the room. “I’ve had guys get up without shaking hands, without saying goodbye, with none of the graciousness,” he says.
But the rise in rudeness is by no means just a Silicon Valley phenomenon. The Ohio Farm Bureau recently warned farmers to keep their tractors uptick in aggressive driving behavior. In Michigan, more than half the residents surveyed in a statewide poll last month said they curse daily. Even the South, though still associated with hospitality, “is very much like the rest of the country now, “ says Wyck Knox, chairman of Atlanta law firm Kilpatrick Stockton. Mr. Knox’s particular pet peeve: people who scream into their cell phone in public places, oblivious to the sensibilities of those around them.
It’s the Economy, Stupid
If the public is behaving badly these days, so are many of the workers who serve it. Thanks to an unemployment rate last month hit a 3- year low, many employers are being forced to hire and stay they can find, with little regard for their people skills.
A recent survey of small businesses show that about one=third of such enterprises are having problems filling jobs, according to the National Federation of Independent Business in Washington. Says Jim Weidman, a spokesman for the federation: “A pulse is considered a plus in many cases.”
That’s about all New York lawyer Floyd Abrams found moving when he walked into a grocery store recently to buy a sandwich. The person in charge was sitting several feet away from the counter, eating his own sandwich. “He sort of looked at me like “Who was I to interrupt his life?” says Mr. Abrams, a prominent First Amendment specialist, He tried to buy a banana instead, but the employee at the cash register was reading a magazine and never looked up. “ It was as if I didn’t exist,” says Mr. Abrams, who finally gave up and walked out.
Some people politely defend rudeness. “I am proponent of rudeness that has a benefit,” says Stephen Samuels, a consultant to Excite At Home Corp. and chairman of a start-up company in Westport, Conn, that develops content for television and the Internet. “I would rather be short and to the point and say ‘let’s get on with it’ than caught up with excess politeness.” Among the practices Mr. Samuels endorses: fast-blast emails with no cumbersome “pleases” or “thank yous,” minimalist voice-mall messages, and cutting off people at meetings when they meander.
Others go so far as to disparage courtesy, labeling it not just inefficient better then dishonesty, “ says Harvard University’s Alan Derschowitz, the law professor and criminal-defense lawyer. His gripe: people who come up to him and pay false compliment. “I know I’m very controversial, and I’d rather have people come over and say, ‘I disagree with you,’” Mr. Dershowitz adds, “I don’t like people who are a – kissers.”
Hit-and –Run rudeness
Compounding the incivility at work and in service establishments, many people say they are encountering more hit-and-run rudeness from strangers—on the street, in the movie theater, at the grocery store. One key weapon: cellular phones and other high-tech gadgets, which many people use as a license to get lost in their wired world and ignore real human beings in their path. “They are in a trance”, says Darlene Lutz, am art advisor who works with Madonna, among other clients. At Ms. Lutz favorite local delicatessen recently , a man on a cell phone jumped ahead of her in line; when she objected, he stood his place and scolded her, “you took too long to decide.”
Similarly, several weeks ago John M.Davis, an interior designer in New York, politely asked the man sitting behind him at the movies to stop talking during the film,- but the man told him to “shut up” and kept talking. “It’s become a continual thing in the movies,” says Mr. Davis. “People think they are sitting in their living rooms.”
To be sure, America has never exactly been world-renowned for politesse. After all, there are few more widely shared stereotypes in Europe than that of the rude American tourist, loudmouthed and quick to complain. But culture watchers say such behavior tends to be particularly prevalent when the economy is strong—and this, of course, is the longest-running boom in U.S. history. The theme of the past decade, says Judith Martin, the syndicated columnist known as Miss Manners, might be “you shouldn’t restrict anything you say on the grounds of consideration for other people.”
Even outside the dot-com world, height-ended competition and years of declining corporate loyalty seem to be undermining some age-old business practices. Some lawyers, for example, say they are seeing more instances of everything from not returning phone calls to lying in negotiations. People are “looking for a competitive edge or fearful of losing whatever status they think they have,” says New York and Washington securities lawyer Harvey Pitt. He says the rudest incident he has encountered lately was when a supposed friend tried, unsuccessfully, to discourage a company from hiring him.
Road Outrage
But, no matter how prevalent rudeness gets, most people still find themselves stunned by it. Alison Ainsworth, a premed student at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, is still smarting from an encounter earlier this month with another driver. Driving a 15-foot rental truck down a narrow street, she realized she couldn’t make it past a van coming from the opposite direction. She politely asked the driver of the van if he would back up, explaining that she was unfamiliar with the truck and that there were three cars begind her and no one behind him. Despite five minutes of further pleading, the man refused, insisting Mss. Ainsworth should be the one to move. At wit’s end, she finally asked the drivers behind her to back up and then backed up herself. “I can understand road rage at rush hour, but this was a small street on a Saturday morning,” she says. “I honestly don’t understand it.”
Fed up with such incidents, some people are fighting back, lecturing their children and employees about the importance of manners and even hiring etiquette consultants in some cases. Rosanne Thomas, an etiquette consultant in Boston who works with companies, says her business has increased tenfold during the past five years. Her mission: to polish the style of twenty and thirty something employees who are technical whizzes but social disasters. “These young people know their jobs very well but they don’t have the basic—how to introduce themselves, how to wield their forks and knives, how not to offend people,” Ms. Thomas says.
Etiquette Training
Ellyn McColgen, president of the tax-exempt services division of Fidelity Investments in Boston, says she was horrified when she attended a buffet lunch in a few years ago and watched young Fidelity employees rush to the front of the line to get their food first. AT a cocktail party, the staffers ignored the clients they were supposed to schmooze. Table manners were also poor. “You should just watch people shovel food into their mouths,” Ms. McColgen says. As a result, she called in Ms. Thomas, who has since trained several hundred Fidelity staffers in basic table manners and conversation skills.
But instilling better manners on a more widespread basis won’t be easy. For one thing, politeness increasingly “is perceived as a weakness” in our society, says P.M. Forni, a professor and specialist in civility at John Hopkins University in Baltimore. For another thing, some forms of rudeness seem so inexplicable as to be almost unremediable.
That’s certainly the feeling of Ms. Vitto, the USAirways flight attendant, who three months ago watched in shock as a fight nearly broke out, quite literally, over peanuts. A passenger, overhearing that pretzels rather than nuts would be served due to the allergy of a man sitting near him, started railing at the traveler at issue. “The guy went ballistic,” says Ms. Vitto. “I was just blown away.” She moved the allergic man to another seat.
A Rude Awakening
It started with brash dot-comers; now, bad manners are spreading to stores, airports and offices across the country.
Has America forgotten its manners?
Barry Barnett is starting to think so. The health-benefits consultant was delivering a presentation to some new dot-com clients, when one of them suddenly cut him off and barked, “I don’t care.” So is famed restaurant Danny Meyer, who watched with dismay recently as a customer interrupted a waitress to answer his cell phone—a but grabbed her and told her to keep talking. And flight attendant Lori Vitto, who had to intervene when one passenger told another: “ I hope you die.”
It’s “rush, rush, rush,” says Ms. Vitto, a USAirways employee based in Washington. “People have no tolerance or compassion anymore.”
Talk about a rude awakening. While impolite behavior has always been a fact of life, there is mounting evidence that incivility not only is on the rise but has become almost the norm in many parts of the culture. A recent University of North Carolina survey of 775 workers nationwide found that every single person had experienced some type of rude behavior on the job, including insults, curses, nasty emails and denigrating gossip. Restaurant reviewer Zagat Survey LLC found that gripes about service have tripled over the past five years. Meanwhile, air travel has practically become a combat zone, with customer service complaints more than doubling last year alone, according to the U.S Transportation Department.
Some see all this as the dark side of the New Economy. The internet has bred a generation of brash young entrepreneurs that glorifies speed over decorum and innovation over tradition. High-tech gadgets, such as cellular phones, papers and Palm Pilots, have also fostered antisocial tendencies, enabling people to isolate themselves even in public. So have sudden windfalls from the stock market, making some people think they can have whatever they want when they want it.
Some of these people “maybe forget where they came from,” says events planner Robert Isabell, who has observed more of his clients demanding last-minute changes in arrangements long after it is feasible to make them. Hal Reiter, 50, an executive-search firm in New York, adds that young dot-comers often end meetings the by simply getting up and walking out of the room. “I’ve had guys get up without shaking hands, without saying goodbye, with none of the graciousness,” he says.
But the rise in rudeness is by no means just a Silicon Valley phenomenon. The Ohio Farm Bureau recently warned farmers to keep their tractors uptick in aggressive driving behavior. In Michigan, more than half the residents surveyed in a statewide poll last month said they curse daily. Even the South, though still associated with hospitality, “is very much like the rest of the country now, “ says Wyck Knox, chairman of Atlanta law firm Kilpatrick Stockton. Mr. Knox’s particular pet peeve: people who scream into their cell phone in public places, oblivious to the sensibilities of those around them.
It’s the Economy, Stupid
If the public is behaving badly these days, so are many of the workers who serve it. Thanks to an unemployment rate last month hit a 3- year low, many employers are being forced to hire and stay they can find, with little regard for their people skills.
A recent survey of small businesses show that about one=third of such enterprises are having problems filling jobs, according to the National Federation of Independent Business in Washington. Says Jim Weidman, a spokesman for the federation: “A pulse is considered a plus in many cases.”
That’s about all New York lawyer Floyd Abrams found moving when he walked into a grocery store recently to buy a sandwich. The person in charge was sitting several feet away from the counter, eating his own sandwich. “He sort of looked at me like “Who was I to interrupt his life?” says Mr. Abrams, a prominent First Amendment specialist, He tried to buy a banana instead, but the employee at the cash register was reading a magazine and never looked up. “ It was as if I didn’t exist,” says Mr. Abrams, who finally gave up and walked out.
Some people politely defend rudeness. “I am proponent of rudeness that has a benefit,” says Stephen Samuels, a consultant to Excite At Home Corp. and chairman of a start-up company in Westport, Conn, that develops content for television and the Internet. “I would rather be short and to the point and say ‘let’s get on with it’ than caught up with excess politeness.” Among the practices Mr. Samuels endorses: fast-blast emails with no cumbersome “pleases” or “thank yous,” minimalist voice-mall messages, and cutting off people at meetings when they meander.
Others go so far as to disparage courtesy, labeling it not just inefficient better then dishonesty, “ says Harvard University’s Alan Derschowitz, the law professor and criminal-defense lawyer. His gripe: people who come up to him and pay false compliment. “I know I’m very controversial, and I’d rather have people come over and say, ‘I disagree with you,’” Mr. Dershowitz adds, “I don’t like people who are a – kissers.”
Hit-and –Run rudeness
Compounding the incivility at work and in service establishments, many people say they are encountering more hit-and-run rudeness from strangers—on the street, in the movie theater, at the grocery store. One key weapon: cellular phones and other high-tech gadgets, which many people use as a license to get lost in their wired world and ignore real human beings in their path. “They are in a trance”, says Darlene Lutz, am art advisor who works with Madonna, among other clients. At Ms. Lutz favorite local delicatessen recently , a man on a cell phone jumped ahead of her in line; when she objected, he stood his place and scolded her, “you took too long to decide.”
Similarly, several weeks ago John M.Davis, an interior designer in New York, politely asked the man sitting behind him at the movies to stop talking during the film,- but the man told him to “shut up” and kept talking. “It’s become a continual thing in the movies,” says Mr. Davis. “People think they are sitting in their living rooms.”
To be sure, America has never exactly been world-renowned for politesse. After all, there are few more widely shared stereotypes in Europe than that of the rude American tourist, loudmouthed and quick to complain. But culture watchers say such behavior tends to be particularly prevalent when the economy is strong—and this, of course, is the longest-running boom in U.S. history. The theme of the past decade, says Judith Martin, the syndicated columnist known as Miss Manners, might be “you shouldn’t restrict anything you say on the grounds of consideration for other people.”
Even outside the dot-com world, height-ended competition and years of declining corporate loyalty seem to be undermining some age-old business practices. Some lawyers, for example, say they are seeing more instances of everything from not returning phone calls to lying in negotiations. People are “looking for a competitive edge or fearful of losing whatever status they think they have,” says New York and Washington securities lawyer Harvey Pitt. He says the rudest incident he has encountered lately was when a supposed friend tried, unsuccessfully, to discourage a company from hiring him.
Road Outrage
But, no matter how prevalent rudeness gets, most people still find themselves stunned by it. Alison Ainsworth, a premed student at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, is still smarting from an encounter earlier this month with another driver. Driving a 15-foot rental truck down a narrow street, she realized she couldn’t make it past a van coming from the opposite direction. She politely asked the driver of the van if he would back up, explaining that she was unfamiliar with the truck and that there were three cars begind her and no one behind him. Despite five minutes of further pleading, the man refused, insisting Mss. Ainsworth should be the one to move. At wit’s end, she finally asked the drivers behind her to back up and then backed up herself. “I can understand road rage at rush hour, but this was a small street on a Saturday morning,” she says. “I honestly don’t understand it.”
Fed up with such incidents, some people are fighting back, lecturing their children and employees about the importance of manners and even hiring etiquette consultants in some cases. Rosanne Thomas, an etiquette consultant in Boston who works with companies, says her business has increased tenfold during the past five years. Her mission: to polish the style of twenty and thirty something employees who are technical whizzes but social disasters. “These young people know their jobs very well but they don’t have the basic—how to introduce themselves, how to wield their forks and knives, how not to offend people,” Ms. Thomas says.
Etiquette Training
Ellyn McColgen, president of the tax-exempt services division of Fidelity Investments in Boston, says she was horrified when she attended a buffet lunch in a few years ago and watched young Fidelity employees rush to the front of the line to get their food first. AT a cocktail party, the staffers ignored the clients they were supposed to schmooze. Table manners were also poor. “You should just watch people shovel food into their mouths,” Ms. McColgen says. As a result, she called in Ms. Thomas, who has since trained several hundred Fidelity staffers in basic table manners and conversation skills.
But instilling better manners on a more widespread basis won’t be easy. For one thing, politeness increasingly “is perceived as a weakness” in our society, says P.M. Forni, a professor and specialist in civility at John Hopkins University in Baltimore. For another thing, some forms of rudeness seem so inexplicable as to be almost unremediable.
That’s certainly the feeling of Ms. Vitto, the USAirways flight attendant, who three months ago watched in shock as a fight nearly broke out, quite literally, over peanuts. A passenger, overhearing that pretzels rather than nuts would be served due to the allergy of a man sitting near him, started railing at the traveler at issue. “The guy went ballistic,” says Ms. Vitto. “I was just blown away.” She moved the allergic man to another seat.
