Calling out bad phone behaviour

Recent train journeys to and from Brighton, a morning coffee in Pret A Manger, a spell in the waiting room at my dentist’s and an early evening pint in my local pub all had one thing in common. It was the annoying use of mobile phones for conversations on speakerphone or people viewing videos at high volume.

I’ve previously highlighted my view that mobile devices have negatively impacted places like pubs, where random conversations among customers has been dramatically reduced by the habitual whipping out of the phone whenever anybody has a few seconds of downtime. It’s clearly become the crutch.

For many people in days gone by, it was the lighting of a cigarette that filled the gap when waiting for friends, or for non-smokers such as myself, I can recall it was fiddling around with beer mats. And rather annoyingly for the pub, this often involved me creatively tearing them up. Neither of these activities was particularly productive, but at least they did not induce people into a zombie-like state. Admittedly, I am slightly overlooking the fact that one of these habits can lead to an early death.

Maybe I’ve missed something, but haven’t headphones and ear pods supposedly been the solution to the problem of noisy mobile phone usage in shared spaces? For watching videos and such like, it has absolutely been the answer. As for conversations, yes, you do only get to hear one side of things, but this is acceptable in most cases. Sadly, I’m finding that for a growing number of people having the speakerphone on – at a ridiculous volume – is becoming their default.?

This phenomenon led to a particularly disappointing situation for me at Christmas when a child at the adjacent table in the dining room at The Ritz London was playing a game on a mobile device with the speaker at a level that was extremely intrusive. Having very politely asked the parents to turn it down, the response from the father was the verbal equivalent of two fingers raised vertically.

The hotel offered to move my mother and I on to another table, but this did not seem like the right solution when it was the other party clearly at fault. I suspect he was a bigger customer of The Ritz London than myself, and who knows, maybe he’d just blown ￡20,000 in the casino downstairs before the meal (I live in hope). We chose to leave the dining room altogether, and although my bill was reduced, it seemed that things could have been handled a little better by the hotel.

I am no great fan of rules and legislation. I’ve much more of a preference for the presently unfashionable free-market approach, but maybe hospitality companies need to get more of a grasp on customers’ developing behaviour with mobile phones and other digital devices. I’m not saying it is an easy one, but with my recent experiences and the advent of new technologies like artificial intelligence as well as a new generation of wearable devices looking likely to come into the market soon, then policies on device usage need to be given some thought.

It’s interesting that in 2019, when Sam Smith’s brought in a ban on mobile phone usage in its pubs, it was very much ridiculed by customers and the media as simply the actions of an out-of-touch eccentric owner. Its argument that it wanted to boost “social conversation person-to-person” was fair enough, but an outright ban was undoubtedly a draconian – and foolish – decision. It is simply not workable in an environment where mobiles are ubiquitous, and to be honest, have not been particularly disruptive in public spaces.

That is until now, I feel. I would hate to be seen as an equivalent crank as the owner of Sam Smith’s, but maybe he was on the right path. My recent experiences with speakerphones and high-volume behaviour is becoming the norm for many people, and unless hospitality businesses take some control of their environments by gently initiating some ground rules, then there could be many difficult situations on the horizon.

Glynn Davis, editor of Retail Insider?

This piece was originally published on Propel Info where Glynn Davis writes a regular Friday opinion piece. Retail Insider would like to thank Propel for allowing the reproduction of this column.

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