It's Hard To Find Bad Customer Service Nowadays

The day of shooting came. When I stepped into their hotel room, I felt like I'd stepped into an episode of Mission Impossible. One guy was prepping the hidden cameras, another guy was testing secret microphones, and a third man was briefing me on my assignment.

Hard Copy wanted me to go undercover in Minneapolis' Mall of America to get bad customer service CAUGHT ON TAPE. Truth be told, as story ideas go, it sounded like a dud to me. To make matters worse, this was my first assignment as a Hard Copy reporter.

"What if this shoot goes so poorly that Hard Copy never wants to use me again?" was the thought that kept racing through my mind. Honestly, many parts of me wanted to say "no" to the story idea because it felt too risky. But I had a slight problem: I was in the midst of a college lecture tour, and at each talk I'd look at the students from the stage and say, "Chances aren't given, they're taken. To take chances, you have to leave your comfort zone." I couldn't deny my own advice, so there I was walking the mall with a belt pouch that contained a hidden camera.

Gary, the Producer of the segment, was trailing me to shoot a third-person perspective, and was also equipped with a camera. But his wasn't as cleverly concealed ― it was contained in a large black bag nothing short of... well, a woman's purse. Somebody ordered the wrong camera.

Things started very badly. We went into shop after shop, hoping for poor customer service, and were severely disappointed each time. "Damn!" Gary would say as we exited a store, "There's got to be bad customer service in here somewhere." And finally we cracked the code: Good service in small shops, and bad service in large department stores. We hit the department stores.

Things got better with the very first department: Women's Cosmetics. I wanted makeup for myself, but neither the Maybelline woman, the Estere Lauder woman nor the Revlon woman wanted to sell me any. "Why do you want to wear makeup?... You already have very nice skin," said one.

I persisted to proclaim, "I want to look more handsome" ― and just when one lady finally gave in and began to prep for my makeover, Gary got kicked out. Apparently, standing five feet away and constantly aiming his purse at me looked suspicious. I had to leave also, so there went my makeover.

To make matters worse, when we left, we discovered that our cameras hadn't been taping. We had lost the shocked cosmetic counter faces, but we corrected the camera problems and began hitting more department stores. Suddenly we had good "bad service" karma.

It was pretty funny trying to get help in one housewares department. No help was anywhere in sight, so I climbed onto a cross-country skiing exercise machine and started loudly skiing away. Five minutes of this still didn't attract any attention, so I began waving and calling out, "Hello! Hello??"

It was also pretty amusing that in Sears, the guy who used his sporting expertise to help me choose the right basketball, also turned up in the housewares department to help me choose the right toilet seat.

Got a good laugh in the toy store trying to get a yo-yo. Not only did kids working the store not know where the yo-yo's were, but they also recommend that I don't buy them because of their poor quality. That's what I call bad business, good customer service. But the highlight here was pulling the young sales attendant onto the giant musical piano and insisting on a product demo. She was no Tom Hanks, but she did try hard enough to lose a shoe.

A lot of funny things happened over the course of the day, but in the end I'd have to say that we, the Hard Copy crew, were the funniest sight to see. Somebody should have been taping us.

Halfway through the day, Gary's purse camera broke down, so Tom rigged up a camera hidden in a big bulky equipment bag. For some reason, this prompted a change in procedure. Instead of Gary and me going into the stores, it became me, Gary, Tom, Anthony, and Jerry (the sound specialist). Picture this: I'm dressed up in slacks and a dress shirt, yet I have a gray plastic fanny-pack on. I'm trailed by four guys who aren't dressed up ― they're dressed down. At the same time, our behavior is not normal: I approach salespeople while four strange men (whose presence I don't acknowledge) hover a short distance away. Even stranger, especially from the salesperson's perspective, is the fact that Gary would constantly circle the group, with an enormous equipment bag, for an unknown reason. In the words of an R.E.M. song, "There's something going on that's not quite right, uh-huh!"

All in all, we spent from 10:00 AM until 7:00 PM in the Mall. At the very end, we ducked into an empty area and got my introduction and closing words on tape. Then Gary rushed to the airport for a 7:30 flight back to California. We all felt we'd gotten some pretty good stuff on tape, especially for our first outing. And as I rode back to my hotel, I was especially glad that I had stepped out of my comfort zone and taken a chance.