Catshanghai

I had a triple whammy of bad customer service yesterday afternoon.

Maybe, I shouldn’t be such a spoiled child for expecting anything more. I also understand that shop workers are probably paid less than 2000 RMB a month and they have been brought up in a different culture that has not trained them to use their initiative to provide anything beyond the literal fulfilment of basic, explicit instructions. Here is a brief recap of irritating episodes:

Episode 1 – Gome Electronic Store in Xizang Lu
On asking the girl at the information desk for help on the whereabouts of earphones, she diffidently pointed me in the vague direction of an unoccupied Ipod reseller. After asking six more people and wasting twenty minutes, I was presented with a couple of overpriced Philips earphones, which I chose not to buy.

Episode 2  – Trustmart Electronics Counter in Lujiabang Lu
I asked for someone to open the earphones cabinet so I could choose a pair given Gome’s recent failure. The assistant kept me waiting for more than 15 minutes while he was serving someone else. Subsequently, he sat down in front of his computer to surf the Internet and refused to help me. Eventually, I found someone else to open the cabinet so I could choose some earphones. It took them another twenty minutes to find the barcode and complete the transaction. At the end, the woman tells me to wait for some unknown reason even after I had just paid for my earphones. After another ten minutes, I walk out very angry that another 45 minutes of my life had just been wasted without any apology or explanation.

Episode 3 – Kodak Photo Store in Lujiabang Lu
Me: Do you have a blank CD-R?
Man in store: Yes
Me: How much is it?
Man: It’s not for sale.

Epsiodes like these make you question your sanity. We have approximately 650 000 hours on this planet to make our mark and it often feels like 600 000 of them are being squandered on stupid things like incompetent shop staff being particularly unhelpful or inflexible. I understand where this comes from. The Chinese education system has not traditionally encouraged independent, creative thinking and it spills over into the treacle we have to wade through whenever we deal with convoluted, inhuman systems. It makes you feel that all the market reforms ane merely cosmetic and we are still saddled with all the inefficiencies of a centralised planned economy.

Here is a case in point. A friend of mine used to work as a floor manager at IKEA in Shanghai. He told me about a new Chinese employee who was trying to help a customer reserve some items that were temporarily out of stock. The only problem was that the computer system did not allow for back orders against pending stock and the helpful employee got roasted by a Chinese manager for breaking company policy when he should have been praised for using his initiative to provide excellent customer service.

Bad episodes like the ones I had yesterday make me feel like the stereotype is still alive and well, but I think more and more young people exercise initiative, are very open minded and take pride in the work they do. I’m thinking about the admin manager at my school who helped me solve a currency conversion mess that the bank inflicted on my during the Summer. I’m thinking about my wife and her friends who are pushing the envelope in new creative ideas about logos, graphics, fashion, music and marketing concepts. Even though I will continue to have ‘bad China days’, I remain hopeful that a new generation of globalised young people will become influential and give China lots of face.

PS. Happy holidays everyone

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Tags: Shangha, China