The current situation has occurred because it makes economic sense. Parking attendants and sports store attendants don't require many skills (since they have computers, automated cash registers or other staff to call upon), so they're cheap.

Workers in grunt-level jobs will, in the majority of cases (though not all!), do as much work as is necessary to keep their job. It makes economic sense.

Some people ARE naturally friendly or gregarious even at minimum wage and we've all bumped into a few friendly McDonald's servers here and there, but people like these are rare in areas where their pay is low and their costs are high. It makes sense, then, that people earning a pittance in New York City - one of the most expensive places on earth - are going to be, on average, surly and not very Mary Poppins-esque in their behavior.

If the city of New York or the sports store wants customers to get a better service from their employees (which they generally don't), they need to pay more money and give them incentives. As it is, companies tend to give the employees incentive to be MORE unfriendly, whether by incentives to issue more tickets or with store policies that prevent staff helping customers to their full extent.

In the spirit of this site may I suggest that the problem is that business owners see no cost-effective ways of aggregating customer feedback. Clearly some of them don't even care, but even those who do have no way to do it - barrier is too high. This an opportunity for an enterprising hacker out there. Difficulty: involves a lot of working with people. :)

Parking inspectors aren't even supposed to deal with customers. Why should they be trained to "pretend to care"? Sounds like a waste of money to me.