Have a nice day

Have a nice day! Even wikipedia has an article, albeit only one sentence, on it. Why do people say this? The wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Have_a_nice_day) claims that it's typically said by retail employees to customers, after a sale. I've heard it on a million answering machines. "Hello, I'm not here to take your call. Please leave me a message after the beep and I'll return your call as soon as I can. Have a nice day!"

It's a dry, toneless dismissal.

I guess we've all become retail employees. Even when we wish people a nice day, we really don't care whether they do or they don't. If they do, well and good. If they don't, well life sucks and it definitely sucks to be you. Bye bye is much better even though I've read somewhere that it was also used in the past to lull babies to sleep. Good-bye has been tainted by that TV show The Weakest Link. It sounds like an abrupt dismissal. A dry conclusion which would only serve after a terse unfulfilled encounter, like with the boss you don't like.

So is there a way to end a conversation without sounding plastic and distant. Without sounding dismissive, fatigued, bored and ready to split? I would guess that when a conversation has come to it's natural conclusion, all parties having run out of steam, nothing left to say then perhaps saying nothing is OK. But that wouldn't work. The importance of "have a nice day" is so that you can turn around and walk away, or put the phone down knowing that there'll be no additional sounds from the other end. Bye bye means, "I'm going to go now so you can safely stop talking."

I like "bye." It leaves no indication that I'm wishing you a pleasant after-conversation life. Nothing to say that I care about how the rest of your day proceeds. Nothing good, nothing bad. We're done here, let's move on.

So... have a nice day!