It’s a Rude, Rude, Rude World : Hard times and a lack of optimism seem to be chipping away at basic good manners.

Ahhh. Finally, a commercial that really reflects the times in which we live.

It’s a radio spot about the virtues of carrying the American Express card, and it features a visionary Beverly Hills chef who makes a magnificent meatloaf. The chef is asked if he’s offended when customers at his tony restaurant slather his culinary creation with catsup.

Offended? Why, this guy probably wouldn’t mind if diners sandwiched his delicacy in Wonder Bread.

“I’ve always thought that the customer should have what he wants,” the chef says, “and the way he wants it.” Perfect. Isn’t this, after all, what service is all about? Especially in these recessionary times, when employees are doing everything they can to keep customers happy and coming back? When, fearful of losing their jobs, they are even more friendly and courteous? When business owners have adopted a bygone era’s credo: The customer is always right?

Uh, not exactly.

“If anything, I think people have just gotten ruder,” says Cristy Warner, manager of Network Personnel, a placement agency in Ventura.

“You go into stores and they act like they’re doing you a favor by waiting on you. You ask for help finding something, and it’s like you’re bothering them. And people are so nasty on the phone.

“I called an attorney with a big law firm in Los Angeles about a personal matter, and she picks up the phone and goes, ‘Yeah?’ I was so mad I said, ‘You obviously aren’t interested in my business’ and hung up.”

Warner isn’t the only consumer who thinks Miss Manners could fill volumes with all the rudeness, crudeness and just plain incivility going on in a lot of businesses these days.

In a highly unscientific poll, conducted recently on a downtown Ventura street corner, passersby were asked to rate the service they have been getting during the recession.

Is there more courtesy? More helpfulness? More of a feeling that their business is genuinely desired and appreciated?

The answer to all three, almost without exception, was a resounding “No.”

Snooty salespeople, cavalier clerks, snippy business owners and surly waiters were only a few of the examples customers came up with.

“They stand there talking with people and have no interest in helping you. They look like they’re bored and annoyed to have to work there,” said Maxwell Fuerth, a retired private investigator who frequently travels north with his wife to escape the summer heat in the San Fernando Valley.

“But Ventura is a lot better than the Valley,” Fuerth added. “There, it’s like New York.”

Siobhan McNair, a 26-year-old waitress whose husband owns a shop in the Buenaventura Mall, said she views customers as “our bread and butter” and does everything she can to make sure they walk away happy. But that attitude, she believes, is becoming the exception to the rule.

“Customer service is really becoming a lost art,” she said. “I went to a store here and tried on a pair of expensive shoes that were too big, and the salesgirl said, ‘So, you gonna buy them or what?’

“You either get that kind of attitude, or people who act like you’re wasting their time if you ask them something. Unless you’re dressed like you have a lot of money, they don’t pay any attention to you.”

Particularly irksome to many older customers are the younger, often teen-age or twentysomething employees who appear to be on the job in body only. Their biggest job perk, their demeanor suggests, is the company phone.

“I waited 20 minutes in line for a cup of cappuccino, while this girl talked on the phone about what her plans were for that night,” said one fortysomething Ventura man who recently relocated from the East Coast. “Then, when she got to me, she acted as if we had some relationship going. She wanted to engage me in a conversation.”

Customers, it should be noted, aren’t the only ones with stories of ill manners to tell. To hear some merchants and employees, it’s usually the people walking into their stores who cast the first stone.

“I’ll tell you why some people get treated rudely,” said Michelle Farnell, owner of a women’s fine clothing store in downtown Ventura. “It’s because the recession has made a lot of customers more rude, and they bring it on themselves.”

Farnell said she has watched women bring babies into her store who proceed to pull clothes off the rack. She has seen women drop garments on the floor and walk over them. She has seen her salesclerks walk up to customers and ask politely if they can help with something, only to be treated as if they had a disease.

“They act like you have to put up with it,” Farnell said. “I’ve actually had people say, ‘Surely you must realize you’re a small business and this is a recession.’ They try to intimidate you.”

Restaurant employees say they have witnessed a similar attitude among customers.

One local restaurant owner, who asked not to be identified, said many customers are more impatient and demanding than in the past. They snap their fingers or complain more readily about trivial matters. Nonetheless, he said, at a time when businesses are going belly-up faster than a carnival goldfish, he counsels his employees to treat each person “as if that is the only customer we will have.”

“When things are this bad,” he said, “being rude in return is a luxury we can’t afford right now.”

Candace Presser, a 17-year-old Calabasas restaurant hostess who was shopping at her favorite Ventura clothing store, said remaining polite and courteous when faced with sometimes abusive customers isn’t always easy.

“It’s hard to keep a smile on your face when people boss you around,” she said. “There’s a difference between service and being a servant.”

Candace did admit that many older customers are right in their perception that some younger employees should learn to be more service-oriented. Many of her teen-age friends work in malls, she said, and are sometimes inattentive to customers.

But she also believes that the rudest people at her restaurant aren’t young--and they don’t work there.

“I’m not saying this about all of them, but a lot of older people come in grumpy, like they’re looking for a reason to take it out on you,” she said. “We want them to have a nice time, but it wouldn’t kill them to be nicer.”

Could it be that the recession has just made everyone--customers and business people alike--more rude?

Dr. Roderic Gorney, a psychiatrist with UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, certainly thinks so.

“I think everyone in society is affected,” Gorney said. “Civility is much less characteristic between exchanges now.”

Gorney believes one of the major contributing factors may be a diminishing sense of hope that there will be economic improvement any time soon.

“People are taught all through their lives--and by experience--to restrain negative, hostile feelings . . . on the basis that it won’t be good for (them) tomorrow,” he said. “If you think tomorrow will be better, that thinking works.

“But if you believe things will get worse, that the future isn’t worth much anyway, it’s very difficult to persuade yourself that you ought to restrain yourself.”

That has been the case for one Simi Valley man, who said he has been trying to find a new job for several months because he is unhappy with the one he has. The feeling that he has nowhere to go and must put up with a boss he doesn’t like has made him shorter tempered in his dealings with the public.

“My wife feels the same way,” he said. “It’s hard to feel grateful for a job you hate.”

That sense of powerlessness can cut deep, said Dr. Mark Goulston, a West Los Angeles psychiatrist.

As more and more businesses go bankrupt, lay off employees, pull up stakes and move to other states or countries, Goulston said people’s fear of being left high, dry and jobless will grow.

“There has been a demoralization, where one almost feels naive to be loyal to a company, to care,” he said. “The feeling is: Why care when no one cares about you? There is an underlying anxiety that there is nothing permanent, that there is no guaranteed future.”

That, of course, leads to a question that speaks to the idea of a self-fulfilling prophesy: If more people are rude because they are afraid of losing their jobs, are more people losing their jobs because they are rude?

Linda Dever, alternate manager of the Ventura County Employment Development Department, said she hasn’t seen any indication of an increase in job firings for bad manners. On the other hand, she noted, being unemployed doesn’t make people any more polite.

People who come to the department looking for a job are often ill-mannered, she said, which is something that employment development staff members try to keep in perspective.

“We’re not going to hold it against them and think they’re always short-tempered,” she said. “It’s just the bad times talking.”