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Scripted "conversations" for employees.   Some customers as "members," and the others "not."   A larger cup of coffee being an "upgrade."   It occurs to me that a blue collar worker would simply laugh in the face of a chain retail store employee using any of these misappropriations as if they were natural and fitting.  That the rest of us don't laugh and the employees are not even likely to be aware of their own fakeness, much less stop it, tells me that modern society has to some extent adopted the corporate practice, even if tacitly.  That is to say, many of us have been mindwashed into accepting fakeness as authentic in the public square.

Meanwhile, inside corporate offices, the language used can bespeak a sickness far worse than mere fakeness. Consider, for example the statement made by the head of finance at Morgan Stanley in September, 2008 when he was looking at Wachovia's bad debt: "That's a shit-sandwich even I can't get my big mouth around."  (Sorkin, Too Big to Fail, p. 450).   Add to this the myriad of military bloodsport references routinely made in stark corporate offices by suits whose actual sport is golf, and the nature of the corporate illness is clear: undealt-with aggression--unrequited anger really--in stint of malignant narcissism.  The linguistic signs and the over-reaching are palpable.

Ordinarily, I would predict that feckless fakeness projected outward from vulgarity is bound to be exposed or collapse one day. However, this is not necessarily so if enough people take the fakeness for genuine and do not know of the underlying pathology behind the store walls at headquarters.  It is perhaps like a wife who has been married to an alcoholic for decades.  Can she be expected to recognize the obvious?  Sadly, the fakeness of corporate retail consumer relations may become the de facto archetype for ordinary human interaction in modern society.  Adopting an employee's manner of fakeness--even a false smile and sales talk under some subterfuge--can give one yet another means of passive aggression. For example, one might use fake expressions and mannerisms as a way of pushing someone away.  Fake kindness can be more insulting than genuine complaint. 

What particularly concerns me is the extent to which people enable the corporate misappropriations and fake emotions in stores and customer relations centers.  Perhaps we really don't get it.  Maybe we need an upgrade in our state of awareness, and in our guts.  In the end, weakness is all too comfortable with fakeness.  If a malady is sufficiently ubiquitous, it can be easier to take it for normal and adapt to it than to challenge it.  Even in such a context, a few free spirits may still be driven by their nature to overcome the fakeness and insist on genuine communication.  Once I heard a customer say matter-of-factly to a Barnes & Noble employee, "No, I'm not a member. I'm a customer."  The employee just looked at her. The authentic communication must have strunned the employee, who had doubtless been mindwashed into believing that fakeness was real.  Where retail fakness is ubiquitous, calling employees out on it is akin to waking someone from the Matrix. Of course, health can only be viewed as sick to the sick. A person accustomed to a dark movie theatre is apt to enter a sunlite lobby in pain.

As another example of utter fakeness designed to manipulate under a subterfuge, consider the ubiquitious, "We apologize for any inconvenience."  Of course, the lack of any real regret can be easily concluded by the failure of any accompanied "money where your mouth is."  If a business, which is an economic entity, refuses to put its money with its apology in the form of willing compensation, the verbal "apology" should mean nothing. In other words, words alone are neutral or invisible where money is the lifebloood.  It is so easy--so utterly convenient--for one who loves money to simply make a verbal statement that does not involve paying out any money.  Yet we are all such suckers for being so easily mollified by the easy corporate-speak.  No one says, "this is a business, so unfortunately there must be a financial component to your apology for me to recognize your apology."   The inevitable answer would be a mere repetition of, "I apologize for any inconvenience" as though it were not a mere repetition (i.e., fakeness again) and thus sufficed.   It is in the nature of weakness--of sickness really--to disagree or refuse by ignoring (i.e,, repeating as though not doing so). The repetition simply adds injury to insult, for there is passive aggressive in it. I suppose this is really what those of us in modern commerical society are missing: the passive aggression in business (and, more specifically, as manifested in customer relations).  Business managers and employees cannot express their anger toward customers, so the emotion comes out via fakeness as "friendliness." It is no wonder the underlying dyanamic is not apparent, for it is using its opposite to express itself.  Customers ought to recognize the self-serving convenience and fakeness, yet this might make the underlying vulgarity transparent.  At least that would be authentic, and perhaps a solution found.