The Customer Is Always Right

No. No they are not. Not being funny, but our visitors are sometimes the most clueless people in the entire Yonderverse. I wish I was joking when I say I have been sent emails asking why we feed some of our animals meat. BECAUSE THEY NEED MEAT TO LIVE??? Worst of all was when I got a thousand word email telling me to stop buying meat for the animals. I looked on the visitor's data file and noticed they purchased a triple ham sandwich that day. This phrase is an ongoing conflict between zookeepers and customers.

Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is very important at the A To Zoo. Of course it is, we rely on visitors to stay running. We are at the point where we get enough funding from companies and organisations that if we turned private, we could still survive and have enough money to fund everything.

But the fact is, we still need to prioritise customer satisfaction. But only up to a certain point. We get many visitors telling our zookeepers to look after our animals in certain ways, because they believe they know more than our professionals. Some of our zookeepers like to correct them, others hold themselves to a higher moral standing and pretend to accept the visitor's opinions.

These differences in the ways our visitors are treated have caused bitter rivalries between our zookeepers, even forming "gangs" of zookeepers that do everything in their power to avoid working with others, and sabotage the other gang's names. It's funny for me to watch it all from a neutral standpoint, but at a certain point it is tainting our name and it needs to stop.

Naval Bananawing by Mochi

Power

There is an inherent imbalance of power between visitors and zookeepers. We can't punish our zookeepers for standing up for the zoo and their jobs, but our visitors can be kicked out, even banned, for arguing with our zookeepers. Rox, the zoo's curator, stands on the side of zookeepers and encourages them to be honest with visitors and tell them when they are wrong, even if the visitor won't like it.

This rant was brought to you by D.A.V.E..

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