What happened to customer service?

“Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don’t upset us, all we ask is that you let us serve it your way.”

If you are of a certain age, you remember that jingle (and I apologize because I am fully aware that you will not be able to stop humming it for the rest of the day).

It was the classic Burger King song, which promised you that the fast food giant was interested in customizing your meal, at least as much as a conglomerate that processed millions of pounds of frozen meat a year could manage.

I always admired the fact that this company, and others like it, made a good pretense of caring about the consumer’s wishes.

We’re Americans, dammit, and that cussed individualism that propelled us to settle the frontier had feeble yet still relevant echoes in a fast food jingle.

I believed in that fallacy of individualism for a long time, and to some extent I still do.

But an event that occurred this past week at a cute little coffee shop in South Philadelphia proved that you can’t really “have it your way” anymore.

Let me set the stage. I wanted what the Italians call a “latte macchiato,” which is essentially a cup of steamed milk with a little dollop of espresso or a “macchia” on top.

So, I went into this coffee shop which has a wonderful reputation with all of these four-star ratings, and asked the barista if I could have the macchiato.

She looked at me and said, “I can give you a single shot latte,” which is what I always get there.

I said “Actually, I don’t want that much espresso. Can’t you just give me a cup of steamed milk and only put half a shot of espresso in, or just a little dollop?”

She stared me down and said, in a strange monotone “I can’t do that. The weakest drink we make is with one shot of espresso. It’s industry standard.”

I insisted that she could just use part of the shot of espresso and throw out the rest. I assured her I would pay for the whole shot.

And she stared me down again and in her best imitation of Millennial Stepford Barista, she once again told me that, “It’s industry standard and I could get in trouble if I do what you ask me.”

Some of you might be saying that this is a rather shallow topic to be discussing this week, and at the surface level you would be right.

Who really cares whether I got the drink that I wanted, especially on a day when Wawa was handing out free java?

But there is a deeper theme here, and my friend Robert pointed it out on Facebook.

He observed that, “Your small story about a cup of coffee reflects on larger issues that are going on in modern society.

Large corporations are no longer providing the type of customer service that we have always depended on. Whatever happened to ‘the customer is always right?’ ”

Whatever did happen to customer service?

What happened to dealing respectfully with the people who don’t need to walk through your door and who are doing you a favor by offering to give you their money?

The other thing that this episode taught me is that we have been taken over by an inflexibility, an inability to empathize with other people and their needs.

In the apocryphal moment in “Five Easy Pieces,” Jack Nicholson asks for a side order of toast.

The waitress refuses to give it to him because those are the “rules.”

He tries several different ways to explain how she can get around the “rules” and bring him the toast.

She orders him out of the diner, and he slams the plates and glasses on the floor in frustration.

I felt a little bit like Jack Nicholson standing in that coffee shop that everyone thinks is so wonderful, trying to explain to Millennial Stepford Barista that all she had to do was give me steamed milk and a dollop of espresso.

The fact that she was programmed not to do it made me inexplicably sad.

Thank God I didn’t ask for toast.