Welcome to Service Economy, Sans the Service

My friend looked over the menu at a Ventura restaurant and ordered a half-sandwich and a cup of soup.

“I’ll have to check,” the waitress said.

“You’ll have to check?”

“We don’t have half-sandwich-and-soup on the menu. Just full-sandwich-and-soup. So I’ll have to check.”

A minute later, she returned.

“We don’t do half-sandwiches.”

My friend was surprisingly calm.

He could have pointed out that a cook who can construct a full sandwich almost certainly possesses the know-how to construct a half-sandwich.

He could have icily remarked on the Nobel Prize in mathematics that would come to the restaurant for creating a rectangle that can’t be split in two.

He could even have mentioned that a new Italian place empty at lunchtime might consider boldly venturing beyond the menu and coming up with an instant half-sandwich-and-soup combo just to make a customer happy.

Instead he ordered the full sandwich, glumly. He hasn’t been back and neither have I.

A few years ago, everyone was convinced that a thriving “service economy” was replacing our rusting factories and boarded-up mines. The idea was that foreign children and robots would make all our goods, while we in America would sell, think, talk and consult, offering up big chunks of service like so much salami. But if this is the much-heralded “service economy” . . . well, a guy can gain 20 pounds on full-size sandwiches before he gets any real service around here.

The stories are well known to anyone who has sought to part with his money.

Down the street from Casa Full Sandwich, an easel sign outside a shoe store advertised a big sale. But a sign in the window said something like: “Shoes In Window Not On Sale!”

At a nearby furniture store, my neighbor tried not long ago to buy a couch at closing time--a couch she had fallen in love with after a months-long search.

“Come back tomorrow,” murmured the ultimate low-key salesman, plopped in a lounge chair as he watched golf on TV. “Someone will write you up.”

She didn’t.

To be sure, there are places around that provide great service--supermarkets that offer to help you haul a quart of milk and a can of tuna out to your car, home-style restaurants where the waitresses fuss over you the way nobody ever did at home.

Bob Kocher, a reader in Thousand Oaks, says he has received terrific service at Home Depot, one of the big boxes that so many people hate on principle.

On the other hand, his visit to a picture-frame store didn’t go so well:

“At one counter an employee was interrogating a woman returning a framed picture because the glass had broken--’Did you kick it? Did you drop it on the floor?’ ”

Kocher made the mistake of buying a frame and asking a saleswoman “with a facial expression of complete indifference” for some tissue paper to cushion it in the bag.

“She said they didn’t have any!” he said. “A picture frame store without tissue paper!”

Help--the stuff it’s so hard to find these days--could be on the way.

In Ventura, officials from the city, the Chamber of Commerce, the Convention and Visitors Bureau, and Ventura College plan to hold customer-service classes for hotel, restaurant, and retail employees.

The classes, which are to start within six months, will teach the basics: Greeting customers. Giving clear directions. Getting off the phone with your friend when someone is waiting to pay a bill.

At the end, employees will receive certificates attesting to their training in customer service, said Rochelle Margolin, one of the city officials behind the program. Presumably, the certificates could qualify them for better jobs and higher wages.

Maybe the ones who flunk should get half-certificates.

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.