The Man Who Never Looked Up

I was in one of those enormous shops you find everywhere now, the kind that sells phone cases and garden chairs and saucepans and fairy lights and, somewhere near the back, very probably a kitchen sink. This one was in Southern Italy, but it could have been anywhere. There's a version of it on every high street in the world now, and they all smell faintly of plastic and ambition.

There was one man working the till. His name was on the sign above the door, so I'm fairly sure it was his. I handed him my card. He tapped it against the machine, handed it straight back without looking up, glanced down at the receipt, glanced at me for about half a second, and went straight back to whatever he'd been watching on her phone before I walked up. No hello. No, thank you. Nothing told me a person had just taken my money, only that a hand had.

I wasn't cross about it. I was just thinking.

We've Been Here Before

I've been writing about exactly this, on and off, since 2009. For years, we ran a two-day workshop called Less Bland, More WOW (yes, really, and yes, it worked), where we'd get a room full of people from completely different businesses and spend two days picking apart what it actually feels like to be somebody's customer.

Back in 2018, I wrote a post on here called Smart Phones are Now Harming Your Business and Here's Why, after a CareerBuilder survey of over five thousand workers and hiring managers found that more than half of employers thought phones were the single biggest thing killing productivity at work, and that most staff kept their phone within eye contact all day long, as if it might wander off.

That was 2016 data. We're nearly a decade past it now, and somehow it's worse, not better.

A Word For What She Did

There's a word for what that man did to me, as it turns out. Psychologists call it phubbing, phone plus snubbing, and it describes exactly what you'd guess: choosing the screen over the person standing right in front of you. Current estimates put average smartphone use at something over five hours a day, close to a third of a person's waking life. It used to be the kind of thing you'd notice and feel faintly awkward about. Now it's so ordinary that most of us, myself included, do it without ever registering it as rude.

Here's the bit I can't quite let go of, though. Somebody actually built an experiment around this a few years ago. They had people get snubbed two different ways: once by someone glancing at a phone mid-conversation, once by someone reading a magazine instead. You'd think being ignored is being ignored, whatever the prop happens to be. It isn't. People rated the phone version as far more hurtful and dismissive than the magazine. A magazine doesn't pretend to be anything other than a choice to read, not to talk to you. A phone somehow gets away with feeling like an accident, even when it very much isn't, and we still find it the ruder of the two.

It Doesn't Stay At The Till

It isn't only happening at the till, either. There's newer research on what's now called "boss phubbing," which is exactly what it sounds like: managers who check their phones instead of looking at the people they're meant to be supervising. Wherever they've studied it, the pattern holds up. Staff who get phubbed by their own boss start to switch off, clock out mentally, and stop bringing their best selves to work. It doesn't stay polite and contained to one relationship. It spreads through a business rather like damp spreads through a wall: quietly, and from somewhere you can't always see.

Which brings me back to the man at the till, although not quite in the way you might expect. I don't know him, and I never will. I've no interest in deciding what kind of person he is from thirty seconds at a cash register. But it did make me wonder, in a much wider sense, what happens to somebody who spends all day, every day, behaving like that towards the people in front of them. Not her specifically. Just the question itself. If you're that absent during the one part of your day when someone is actively handing you money, what does presence look like for you anywhere else? With your own children. With whoever you go home to. With yourself, at the end of it.

I don't have an answer. I doubt anyone really does. But it's worth sitting with if you run any kind of customer-facing team, because whatever habits people bring to the till rarely stay there.

“Customer experience was never really about the transaction. It's about the ninety seconds either side of it, and that's exactly where we keep losing.”

Cheryl Gregory, The Customer's Shoes

 

What Changed On Our Side

We don't run Less Bland, More WOW as a two-day workshop any more. Partly because flying a trainer out to a venue for two days was never really where the value sat, and partly because most of the people who need this training don't have a training budget, or an HR department, or two spare days to give to a workshop in the first place.

That's the truth nobody quite says out loud about customer experience training. It tends to get pitched at big companies with big teams and bigger budgets. But the businesses I think about most, the ones that'd genuinely benefit from even a few hours of proper, structured thinking about this, are the small ones. The ones run by somebody who's brilliant at what they sell, whether that's clothes, coffee, or kitchen sinks, who has never had a single day of training in how to make a customer feel like a person rather than a transaction. Nobody ever taught them. They worked it out themselves, usually badly, usually under pressure, usually with a phone in one hand.

“A phone glanced at mid-transaction isn't a small thing. It's a customer told, without a single word, that they were the interruption.”

Cheryl Gregory, The Customer's Shoes

That's the gap we actually want to bridge: the one between knowing your product inside out and knowing how to make somebody feel welcome while they're buying it. It has very little to do with corporate versus small business. It has everything to do with whether anybody ever sat down and taught you this properly, instead of leaving you to pick it up by accident.

So we moved the whole thing online. You can book your team onto the self-paced course and work through it together, at your own desks, in whatever order suits you. Or, if you'd rather have something built specifically around your business and your customers, that's the other half of what we do these days. We're Certified Kajabi Experts, and we build bespoke training programmes from scratch, so the course your team works through is shaped around you, not borrowed from elsewhere.

“We didn't stop teaching this when we stopped running two day workshops. We just stopped making people travel for it.”

Mark Gregory, The Customer's Shoes

Where The Work Starts

None of this makes the phone the villain, by the way. We said that in 2018, and I still think it's true now. The problem was never really the device sitting in somebody's hand. It's the quiet agreement, never written down anywhere, that it's fine to look away the moment things go quiet. Nobody decides that on purpose. It just becomes the norm if nobody in the room ever says otherwise.

So here's the same question we've been asking since 2009, more or less word-for-word. When somebody hands over their money, their time, or their trust to your business, what do they actually get back from the person standing in front of them?

I think about the man at the till sometimes, still. I don't know his name. But there's probably a version of him in your business too, or maybe it's you, on a long day, in a quiet shop, with a phone that's just a touch too good at pulling your attention away. If any of that sounds familiar, that's usually where the conversation needs to start.

Further Reading

• Smart Phones are Now Harming Your Business and Here's Why —  The Customer's Shoes, 2018
• New CareerBuilder Survey Reveals How Much Smartphones Are Sapping Productivity at Work —  CareerBuilder / Harris Poll, 2016
• Boss, Can't You Hear Me? The Impact Mechanism of Supervisor Phone Snubbing on Employee Psychological Withdrawal Behaviour —  Yao & Nie, Healthcare, 2023
• Ignored by the Boss: A Moderated-Mediation Study of Boss Phubbing —  Balkaş et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 2026
• Phubbing and Social Intelligence: Role-Playing Experiment on Bystander Inaccessibility —  PMC, 2021