I am a Millennial, and sometimes I hate us.

Today I was out at a burger bar, eating a stack of burger patties (as we do). Because it was somewhat busy, I was sitting up by the condiment/assembly station, right in the thick of things.

A lady approached the counter. She placed a weird piece of metal on the counter. It almost looked like an earring. It was in her burger, she said. She almost broke a tooth.

“I don’t know how that happened,” the condiments guy said. “I we don’t have any metal like that in the store.”

The grill guy, who runs the place, came over.

“I don’t know how that happened,” he said. “It must have been the people who grind our meat.”

(The people who grind their meat happen to be a well-loved local co-op.)

The lady wasn’t happy. “I didn’t have a good experience here, and I’m going to tell people about it.”

The guys shrugged.

That was it. They didn’t care.

A few months earlier, the same thing happened to me at that restaurant, only this time it WAS their fault. One of their to-go sauce cups somehow got melted into my burger patty.

I had to push them to remake the burger for me. They didn’t offer anything above or beyond, or even really offer an apology.

It was more of the same: “I don’t know how that happened.”

Maybe I have a strange view of customer service. Maybe I’m naive about people trying to get free food from restaurants by claiming things like that. It’s entirely possible.

Simply stating “not my fault” and expecting everyone to move on is not a valid approach to treating customers right. Getting defensive doesn’t solve problems. This approach is 100% the opposite of the idea of extreme ownership.*

I’m less concerned about what happened to me (hey, mistakes happen) but watching what happened to that lady makes me want to support this place a whole lot less. I prefer to support local businesses that themselves support local purveyors of produce and beef and whatever, but I’m entirely willing to take my business elsewhere.

I’ve seen this attitude with other Millennials, that somehow ducking and weaving around responsibility is all it takes to make something right. “It’s not my fault.”

That only works when you’re part of a larger system that can absorb blame into it. When you’re on your own, it IS your fault. Even if you didn’t do the deed, you served the food to the customer.

I hate that Millenials were taught that this is okay, and I hate that we continue to allow it to be our way of being.

“Not it,” we say.

Denying responsibility doesn’t change reality.

In my book, a good response to that lady’s claim–whether or not she was scamming–is “I’m sorry, I don’t know how that got in there. Let me remake your dinner. Would you like a complimentary milkshake while you wait?”

Maybe the lady takes you up on the offer, maybe she doesn’t. These actions put you in a proactive situation, rather than a passive one.

Passive seems to be programmed into our genes.

Like I said, sometimes I hate Millennials.

 

*Disclaimer: I haven’t read the book.