Updated: March 23, 2023
Imagine yourself placing your order at a fast food counter. Another customer interrupts you to declare a ketchup emergency.
“Can I get some ketchup?!” the customer blurts.
They flew in from nowhere. The ketchup customer wedges themselves into the scene and physically crowds the counter space, demanding the cashier’s attention.
How does the cashier address this rude interruption?
The cashier stops taking your order and turns to help the other person. Your order is put on hold until the burning ketchup fire is extinguished.
Why does this happen?
Why do cashiers let other customers interrupt?
The cashier and the ketchup were both rude to you in this scenario. It likely wasn’t on purpose. Both experienced tunnel vision.
The ketchup person didn’t brush you aside on purpose. They didn’t interrupt in a deliberate, “make way for the great ketchup king” kind of way.
They were focused on ketchup. The customer had just sat down with their delicious meal when they discovered a ketchup shortage. This created a sense of urgency in their brain. Tunnel vision led them straight to the cashier.
Crowding into your space caught the cashier’s attention. It was involuntary and instinctive. What the cashier did wrong was follow that instinct and serve the ketchup person rather than shift their focus back to you.
The reason that happens is tied to how people pay attention.
How do people pay attention?
Our brains can focus our attention through two primary ways: top-down and bottom-up.
Top-down attention involves consciously focusing. It could be a task, conversation, or thought. The cashier was using top-down attention to focus on you and take your order.
Bottom-up attention comes from external stimuli. This could be a loud noise, something catching your eye, or something touching you. The ketchup customer triggered the cashiers bottom-up attention.
Bottom-up attention overrides top-down attention.
This is a human instinct that helps us recognize danger. Imagine a bear came barging up to the counter instead of the ketchup customer. You wouldn’t expect the cashier to keep taking your order. It’s a bear!
The thing that makes us stop what we’re doing and focus on the bear is the same thing that makes us stop what we’re doing and focus on the ketchup person.
Ol’ ketchup captured the cashier’s attention through bottom-up stimuli. They talked in a loud, frantic tone. Ketchup made themselves seen by physically crowding the space near the cash register. It's human instinct for the cashier to momentarily stop paying attention to you and notice the ketchup person.
How can cashiers serve interrupting customers?
You can help your own team avoid this problem. The solution is to establish clear customer service priorities.
What the cashier does depends on whether or not they have a clear sense of priority. If the current customer is the top priority, then the cashier will utilize top-down attention to politely ask the ketchup person to wait and refocus on taking your order.
This skill takes effort and practice. A cashier, eager to please, will instinctively try to help the ketchup person. You will need to reinforce the customer service priority several times before it sticks.
People naturally follow their bottom-up attention unless there’s a specific intent.
Additional Resources
I’ve written a few other blog posts about how our brain pays attention.
Chapter 7 in my book, Getting Service Right, is also devoted to this topic.
The book explores hidden obstacles that make it hard to provide great service. The goal is to solve the mystery of why employees struggle with service.
One mystery took me ten years to solve. A fast food cashier told me, “I hate people like you,” because I didn’t have any loose change.
Download chapter one to read the story.
