Pan American Smile

The "Pan American smile", on the other hand, is the voluntary smile involving only the zygomatcus major muscle to show politeness; for example, by a flight attendant on the former airline of the same name. Considered "insincere", this type of smile has also been called the "Professional Smile" by David Foster Wallace in his comedic short story A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (see link for relevant excerpt). The "Pan American smile" is now considered an expected duty by many service managers and customers. For this reason, a sales assistant may well be sanctioned for not showing what is essentially an unnatural level of joy towards a customer. It is hard to trace the history of the "Pan American smile", but it seems to have appeared long ago for it now to be taken for granted by many outside of the service industry....

Types of smiles