Come to Spain then, most people don't care and there's no effort to hide that. Stuff like this happens often:

- having to chase a store clerk while he flees and tries to hide because his chatting with his friend on the cell is obviously more important.

- "Oh could you also please bring ..." replied with a "why didn't you say that before?" at say a restaurant.

I used to be annoyed by fake attention in the North Americas, but after a couple years back here, gawd how I miss fake. They may not really care about me, but they care about trying to make the experience pleasant for the customer.

I live in the US Midwest. Yes, it is true that if someone asks you casually "How are you?" they are not expecting your life story, and the waiter's question about "how's the food so far?" is generally not an invitation to give a three paragraph review of the food. But it is legitimately a time to ask for refills, and a clerk's question is legitimately a time to tell them about the bathroom being dirty or something. It may not be a close personal connection and you may not invite them to your son's graduation party, but it isn't quite the null, empty question this essay portrays, either. It's better than being ignored.

Fun hack: "How are you?", "What's up?", "Hey", etc., are all fungible. It is perfectly acceptable to answer "What's up?" with "Hey" or a question in return. Fun.

Taken to extremes by the colloquial English greeting of "alright?" where the answer is "alright" and the formal introduction of "how do you do?" which is responded to with "how do you do?" with no change of inflection.

as someone from eastern europe, I'm always happy visiting countries/places where people are nice to customers by default, and I don't care if it's fake. I don't like being an accidental victim of pms when comming to buy a pack of cigs.