Donald Hendon, a resident of Sunset Greens, writes a monthly column for the Mesquite Local News, “Hendon on Influence.” A retired marketing professor, he is known for coming up with Hendon’s Law. It states that a nation’s standard of living rises up to a certain tipping point where it automatically starts to decline. The reason is service quality, an important topic in the field of marketing.
Paradoxically, the richer a nation is, the lower its standard of service. In nations with high GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita, service employees who perform poorly are not afraid of sanctions because they can easily find other jobs. In poorer nations (lower GDP per capita), service employees are much more motivated to give better service quality to customers because they find difficulty in getting other jobs. They feel lucky to even have a job. Nations where services contribute more than 50 percent to GDP are particularly prone to the effects of Hendon’s Law.
Hendon noticed this paradox early in life. Quality of service at restaurants in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico, the sister city of his home town of Laredo, Texas, was much higher than at restaurants in Laredo. Hendon has spent time in more than 50 nations on business, and he noticed that service quality at retail establishments was, in general, very high in nations such as the Philippines and India and very low in nations such as the US and the UK. Using the SERVQUAL model promulgated by Professors Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry in their 1985 article in the Journal of Marketing, he found a very high correlation between service quality and per capita income in 20 nations.
What do you readers think? What’s your opinion of the quality of service at restaurants, hotels, medical facilities, etc., here in Mesquite? Send your comments to the Mesquite Local News. We’ll publish some of them ....
Many of Hendon's books are available from Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keyw...