Comments on
Commercialism
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All fun in the services department. In German there's the saying Der Kunde ist König
, i.e. the customer is king. And of course as a corollary, what the customer wants the customer gets. Now I've lived in Germany for too long to still believe in this. I have seen department stores where the employees literally hid from the potentially paying customer. I hate them. They shall go bankrupt, particularly Karstadt in on my not-so-hidden agenda, because they have the worst employees and are charging too much. They do offer free credit cards, though, which I applied for. It seems like I could do some damage there and I definitely don't want to pay my bank €20 a year or so for a credit card that I use twice a year.
That aside, there are other, good, examples as well. I used to think friendlyness and helpfulness in salespeople was exclusive to countries other than Germany, the UK, say (people there tend to be extremely friendly but darn incompetent – I could tell the story about the fresh yeast now...). However, recently, some companies seem to be getting their act together. It hurts me to acknowledge that these are mostly chains and I suspect that their cheap employees are also quite incompetent. At one of the large bakery chains, say, people are almost too friendly – going Hello
, Thank you
and Have a nice day
even for the tiniest purchases – quite a feat in the country of Achtung
. Another good experience was when I picked up something for my mom a the Body Shop the other day. I didn't have much time and figured I'd be bad at locating what I needed. The woman there was very helpful, picked the goods from the shelves for me and I was out of there in less than in minute with exactly what I wanted to buy. Perfect.
But not everything seems to shine service-wise elsewhere: Erik Barzeski had to stomach a Pay your bill on time and this kind of stuff won't happen
for what doesn't look like a fault of his – that one sounds a bit like mafia to me, so be careful Erik. Similarly, Pierre Igot received a court please calm down just a second
instead of an apology following a complaint about ad spam.
More fun: The Console Wars uncovering the relation between game console controller and penis size. That was inevitable, I guess. Also, in German provincial politics: Hamburg's moronic right-wing local government killing each other. Embarassing, but fun to watch.
Shop in my amazon stores with music, books and films mentioned on the site: .com, .uk, .de.