People who haven’t worked retail, sales, or customer service don’t realize how staggeringly much of any soft-skills role is figuring out what the fuck someone even wants or needs in the first place because they are so bad at articulating it themselves.

But, to be fair, everyone has their expertise in different areas and things that are common sense to me in my specialized role is completely unknown and novel to people who have entirely different sets of circumstances to deal with on a daily basis.

So yes they’re contextually stupid AND they’re also all too often socially stupid too because they are, via failures of rhetorical conditioning, primed to look down on “the help”. Their extant frustration in the face of unmet needs is, when filtered through an attitude of misguided narcissism, thus transformed into sheer distilled repugnance. The faux “status” posturing of capitalism makes fools of everyone interacting with it.

At the end of the day, the solution comes down to:
taking in the full breadth of the client’s situation,
distilling it down to its actionable components,
mapping out the vector of the conflict wherein needs are going unmet,
generating a set of actions that could each individually OR collectively address the conflict,
convincing them that this actually WILL solve their issue, and then, most importantly, and finally: obtaining their willingness to PAY for it.

it’s a far more involved process than most salaried keyboard punchers will EVER realize…