The Spork: Symbol of Bad Customer Experience

For the first time in quite a while, I tried to eat fried chicken with a spork (and ended up eating it with my hands).  The spork was popular for a time, some decades ago and I haven't seen one in ages, and do not miss it at all.   I realize that some people wax poetic about their fond reminiscences of sporking.   For me, it's more in the nature of post-traumatic spork disorder.

For anyone who's not had the displeasure and isn't familiar with the instrument, a spork is a hybrid utensil that combines a spoon that stabs you in the tongue with a fork with tines that are too short to be of much use for anything except breaking into small, easy-to-swallow pieces of jagged plastic.   If it sounds like a particularly stupid idea for an eating utensil, that's because it is exactly that.

But what occurred to me (other than "dammit, I have to eat with a spork") is how perfect the utensil is as the embodiment of the practice of entirely ignoring the customer experience in pursuit of operational efficiency.   The only reason I can think of for a spork to ever have existed is efficiency.   It is cheaper to offer customers one utensil rather than two, and it's easier to stock and manage inventory.   Cheaper for us, more efficient for us, and terrible for the customer.  Two out of three ain't bad.

I don't think that any decent restaurant ever offered its customers a spork - it was the sole providence of factory food mills, quick-service restaurants, public school cafeterias, and other places where quality is compromised.  No reputable flatware manufacturer has ever, to my knowledge, included a spork in its product line - though a quick search of the internet turned up a few as novelty gifts.   And except for fanboys, no-one has ever relished the thought of using one.

It also occurs to me that, while the spork itself is virtually extinct (and it's a species the world is better off without), there many businesses that are still handing out sporks by the dozen in a figurative sense.   Any instance in which the customer is expected to compromise the quality of their experience because the business has found a way to save a little money or effort on its own part is a spork.

So when a restaurant makes customers wait on their own orders at a counter rather than offering table service, or when a grocery shop makes customers bag their own groceries, or when a retailer makes customers ring up their own orders ... then they are handing out sporks.  

It's likely important for designers and process owners to pause to consider, when any project's goal is efficiency for the organization, whether they might be handing our sporks as a result.   Chances are they are doing exactly that.