My Pleasure: More than a Catchphrase

My Pleasure: More than a Catchphrase

If you’ve ever visited Chick-Fil-A, you’ve probably heard this phrase:

“My Pleasure.”

The staff are trained relentlessly to respond to any thank you or conclude any quick interaction with the same response. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Most of us are programmed to say, “You’re welcome,” or “no problem,” or something else entirely. I imagine it will take a while to fully rewire my brain and get used to saying, “My Pleasure.”

It is so ingrained into the DNA of those who work at CFA that even employees’ family get in on the action. In fact, my trainer’s five-year-old daughter will respond to any “thank you” immediately with “my pleasure”; like her mom, she enjoys correcting others, so she will catch anyone else in the family saying something else and remind them to say, “my pleasure.”

But, what’s behind this catchphrase? What’s the “why” behind it?

The short answer is that the founder was inspired by an experience the founder had at the Ritz-Carlton and he felt emboldened to bring that level of customer service to his whole corporation. This phrase is now part of one of the central core values of CFA: “second mile” service. You may recognize this phrase from the Sermon on the Mount.

And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.
–Matthew 5:41

This well-known Idea of “going the extra mile” has an interesting origin. Jesus was referring to the practice in the Roman Empire that a Roman soldier could only compel someone in occupied territory to carry his gear for the length of a mile. Jesus, to the shock of anyone in that culture, challenged his followers to voluntarily carry a soldier’s gear a second mile. “The Chosen” in Season Four has Jesus literally do this in the video bellow.

It is really moving to watch how even the Roman soldiers are changed and challenged by such an act of kindness. The same Roman soldiers who belittled and jeered at the Jewish people who began the first mile carrying their gear are eventually flummoxed into wanting to take their gear back from the disciples before they complete the second mile. The most interesting part of this scene is quite the kicker:

Walking an extra mile actually means you walk three extra miles because you likely would have to walk all the way back to where you started to retrieve your own belongings.

In order to “go the extra mile” we often have to do things that aren’t easy or natural to us. I believe Jesus wanted to give direct and simple examples like “walking the extra mile” to help us understand the deeper mindset shift that is necessary to follow His lead as a servant-leader. David Foster Wallace sums up this shift in perspective well:

This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
–David Foster Wallace, “This is Water” speech at Kenyon College

Again, this is not merely about vocabulary or style or matching corporate branding; instead, we are talking about changing our “default setting,” i.e. doing the hard work of rewiring of our brain and adjusting our attitudes in order to become mature, “well-adjusted” people.

Today, it looked like me literally taking out the trash even though my shift was over in a couple of minutes. It would have been easy to just let the next shift do it, but it wouldn’t have been the Boy Scout thing to do: “always leave a place better than you found it.” I am sure some days I won’t think of others and miss opportunities to “go the extra mile,” but today I am thankful for the chance to serve my fellow teammates at CFA and really embody the truths found in the Sermon on the Mount.

So, how about you? How might you go the extra mile in your everyday life?