Despise your customers

The golden rule of french businesses is to despise your customers. At the very least, be rude, be impolite, yell at your visitors, if only to show them who's the boss. Any waiter in a Café knows exactly how to look down on someone with an exasperated expression. The Passion of the clerk suffering from the arrival of customers is beyond earthly words. Ideally, you should feel so unwelcome that you will never come again. That means less work for them. Who cares about business?

Municipal swimming pools apply creative thinking to customer service. Opening hours vary daily, just to fend off the naive. But to take the experienced swimmers aback, they redefined closing time as the time where all employees are off. Consequently, swimmers are expelled hastily 20 minutes beforehand, and — it's true — water heaters are stopped in the showers. Better yet: to make sure people actually leave in time, admittance stops one full hour before closing time. Since pools open in slots of 3 hours, that means 33% less work. And just to make sure even early birds are frustrated, when affluence is too big, the pool closes without warning, with a handmade sign taped to the door. Total customer dissatisfaction. Mission complete.

This is not an isolated case. This very day, at an exhibit in Paris, a whole queue of 80 people had been queing for an exhibit for almost an hour, when a security agent took the dramatic personal initiative of letting them know the exhibit had been cancelled for unknown reasons. Of course that was after they bought the tickets. Like sheep, people scattered without a rant. Which proves the staff was right not to move a finger to inform them. Parisians like to be abused.