It was terrible before, I'm not sure Covid could have made it any worse.

I don't know if it's directly due to Covid, as the grandparent asserts, but it's pretty indisputable that the quality of customer service has eroded across pretty much every industry sector, at least in the US. This could be due to companies generally being short-staffed, but it does seem like even when you interact with someone the intelligence level (or maybe more charitably, the experience level) of the people you interact with has gone down.

Yeah I can see that. Calling big companies has been terrible forever, but customer service in physical stores has gone downhill. Mostly they all seem short-staffed. Seems like lots of stores let people go, and didn't replace them in favor of self-checkout systems.

Really grinds my gears when you go into a physical store and they say "oh, we don't have that but you can order it on our website!"

Bit of self reflection required about thier likely employment prospects.

I had such a good (in-person) customer service experience last Spring I have to mention it here. Wife and I upgraded our phones. We both subscribe to month-to-month cell services, so we always buy unlocked phones from Apple. The problem is, Apple no longer sells unlocked phones from a physical U.S. Apple store unless you are signed up with a major carrier. The Genius who helped us with our purchase recognized the problem and logged on to the online Apple store and helped us order our new phones from a different, still-close-by Apple store, for pickup the next day. Though we picked up at the store, the order was placed online (by the kind Genius) and we avoided the major cell carrier requirement.