All of those examples you offer sound like management issues rather than issues with the service people themselves. If I make a dinner reservation, my expectat

All of those examples you offer sound like management issues rather than issues with the service people themselves. If I make a dinner reservation, my expectation is that the restaurant knows what the crowd will be like at that time and has scheduled enough staff to handle it. Similarly, if the plumbing company says the plumber will be here at 8, it is totally reasonable to expect him to be here by 8, or they shouldn't say he'll be here at 8. If there's too much uncertainty in his schedule to give a specific time, the company's scheduler should instead be giving blocks of time. One example of treatment of service workers that actually does reflect their own performance rather than resource allocation / scheduling issues is expecting them to always be doing _something_. I used to work in retail, and if there were no customers in our department, heaven help us if our managers caught us just standing around chit-chatting. We needed to be wiping windows, no matter if we'd just wiped them an hour ago, or tidying stock, no matter if it was already in pristine condition. I see the same thing with restaurant waitstaff. Both management and customers expect to see them always on the move, even if their tables don't necessarily need anything at the moment.