Interesting framing isn’t it? Customers also feel it’s “not so cool” to experience huge price rises, badly trained staff etc.
We had a similar thing in Europe during COVID with those #BeKind campaigns and signs everywhere to treat staff with respect etc.
The staff are caught in the middle, the face of the economic issues - and sometimes greed. Can’t be easy for them
And today we still have high prices, reduced staff (cost saving), QR codes (cost saving), reduced quality/quantity (cost saving) and rightly people are still annoyed. It feels like we helped repay them for lockdown, and now are continuing to do so.
Of course it’s a wider, systemic and economic issue but people are human.
And the great thing about the mysterious inflation is that each company/government can just blame another company/government round and round, so it’s nobody’s fault
I think the fundamental problem is that the person in charge is unreachable and wont face the personal reputation and social status hit.
The powerless employees are used as a fire wall.
I 100% agree.
My mother and her friend, both long retired, were on a vacation with their bikes, and on their way back by train, their train happened to be in Frankfurt Main Station when a man was murdered in the station. All trains were evacuated, people need to wait outside the station. The trains leave at some point. People are now stuck in Frankfurt. The local staff knows nothing and no higher-ups are passing down information or make decisions. The local staff cannot on their own give out vouchers for hotels or they'd be liable if it turns out the management didn't want to (and would management ever want to?).
I'm sure that wasn't a great day full of happy interactions for the staff at the station, and the abundance of federal police probably kept things much calmer than they'd otherwise be.
Customers are stuck with no/terrible service. Staff can't do anything about it. Management has fun somewhere and doesn't care. It's like AWS outages being acknowledged hours later but with trains.
Similar story with customer service on the railway in the UK. Too common now is for them to wash their hands of the customers, or just tell you to pay and hopefully reclaim. Nobody has authority to spend money.
They have almost brainwashed the public that no event is ever the railway's responsibility to deal with just because they aren't the root cause.
The are enough laws and contractual provisions to help the customer but they are being blatantly ignored, and the government is allowing it for cost saving purposes.
> Too common now is for them to wash their hands of the customers
"common now ?" - I don't recall there ever being a time when UK railways gave a shit about their customers. :)
British Airways however .... now that is an organisation that has fallen from grace. They used to care for customers. But after recent C-suites (Cruz, Walsh etc.) they've turned into a real horror show. Commiting to an over-ambitious schedule just to keep their precious slots at Heathrow, meanwhile everything else gets cost-cut beyond recognition.
I was particularly thinking of the open access operators such as Grand Central and Lumo who think they have zero responsibility for passengers and that getting you to your destination is a nice-to-have
Train service was never amazing but has genuinely been getting worse through reduced staff and reduced empowerment of them
I remember once paying the premium to travel British Airways non-stop from Asia to London. Nowadays I'd rather do the Abu Dhabi/Dubai/Doha layover (at a lower airfare too).
Yes this is the best course. Pay with credit card and then charge the hell back of everything for the entire vacation or trip.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/prosecutors-frankfurt-train-stati...
Perhaps the issue isn't poor customer service, but a garbage importation problem. The staff and management don't really expect a murder to happen at a train station.
You import the worst humanity has to offer, you make your bed in it. Meanwhile letting hundreds of thousands of actually legit white collar workers not obtain residency on time.
>You import the worst humanity has to offer
I can't believe this has been happening in front of our eyes and nobody took notice! What do you mean?
The rambling aside:
> The staff and management don't really expect a murder to happen at a train station.
The staff doesn't. Management has to expect major incidents and plan for them accordingly, and have those plans ready to go, and train staff how to react to them.
It could just as well have been a malfunction that leaves all trains stranded and the station unable to function. Their response would have been the same: we don't know, you're on your own.
This is a very counter productive attitude. Ask any restaurant owner and they'll tell you the cost of ingredients and labor has more than doubled in recent years. Ask any waiter or produce supplier why their prices have gone up, and they'll tell you their costs of living and business have doubled too. A big point of having a competitive economy is to make greed self-defeating. Blaming inflation on greed is like blaming hurricanes on evil spirits. It's stupid, destructive, and seductive.
Inflation happens when demand outstrips supply, plain and simple. In America, keeping inflation in check is the Fed's job. They're the only ones who could reasonably be blamed for failing to take it seriously until too late. But the only way to reduce demand is to basically make people poorer. So ya it's not surprising that people get angry. But all this anger is misplaced and counterproductive
Yes and the line-worker making $2.75/hr plus tips has no power at all to help you and is just working a job. In all likelihood they have less power than you to affect change in their workplace. Making random front-line workers economic whipping boys (https://www.smbc-comics.com/?db=comics&id=2589) is just one powerless angry customer being mad at a powerless worker while the owner laughs.
Assuming the anger will get run up the chain requires the people at the top give even one shit about how their workers are treated. And they're paying them the least they're legally allowed to and not providing benefits so… no they don't.
I dont accept the "im just a worker and powerless." Employees have more agency than any customer and also the execs are themselves just employees working a job. If it's not right for them to meekly acquiesce then we should hold the whole enterprise to the same standard.
You can't really draw an equivalence between a grocery store cashier and their director of pricing in terms of agency. It just doesn't make sense, what do you want them to do? Complain to their manager who also doesn't set the prices? The thoughts of a random rank-and-file employee fall on deafer ears than a customer. You have a better chance of getting a meeting with an executive with decision making power than the cashier. If the cashier makes noise they'll be fired and replaced, they can't fire you.
Berating literally the lowest-ranked employee at a company who if they had any agency at all wouldn't be working that job will accomplish nothing except making their day worse.
This is only going to get worse. There are a number of services in Japan that let you pick up part time jobs on short notice. These workers don’t know what they’re doing a lot of the time and their mistakes are going to frustrate customers more.
Amazon Japan transitioning from delivery via reputable companies to their own part-time driven mess is a great example of how things can get worse very quickly even in Japan. Frequently not bothering to ring the bell, packages left outside your door without updating you via e-mail, barely legible safety box passwords scribbled on a shrivelled note in your mailbox, failing to send the safety box password to you via e-mail so that they are now stuck in the box, etc.
Then don’t buy from Amazon. Haven’t used Amazon directly for at least 3 years now. 1-day shipping is very overrated and the pressures AMZN puts on the people behind the network are not worth it.
It's not only overrated, it's a blatant training of the population to overconsume. It's the supermarket checkout line candy and tabloid impulse buy behavior brought to the internet.
When I lived in an apartment in the U.S., I had a number of Amazon delivery drivers, I think they were Amazon Flex drivers i.e. they were driving their personal vehicles, who looked and sounded like it was the first time they’ve been to an apartment building. I wonder if there’s any training whatsoever.
Edit: A quick search tells me the “training” is some short videos they may or may not watch.
Delivery driver is one of those jobs that attracts people down on their luck or desperate. Long hours,low pay and the only requirement is how to drive a car.
this is a casualty of markets -- in the 1960s California, UPS delivery drivers were very well paid and held to high standards. Customer service was a selling point for UPS at that time.
I believe UPS drivers are the exception and are still best paid in industry.
"UPS says drivers to make $170,000 in pay and benefits following union deal":
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ups-drivers-170000-pay-benefits...
reading "Teamsters Local 853 - Drivers - Group 1 Class" for coastal HCL California -- it appears that the base pay rate is $35.95 per hour for a journeyman (practicing member). New hires have 3000 hours to perform before getting journeyman status (about 18 months) and other conditions apply. Trainees are paid less than full journeymen. The Teamsters may have negotiated additional pay package for UPS drivers of various kinds, especially regarding overtime.
The fact that the parent comment cites a short national news story, and crucially fails to distinguish between many specialized kinds of drivers among UPS operations, shows superficial knowledge IMHO.
> I wonder if there’s any training whatsoever.
Amazon here advertises, and this is closer to a literal quote than paraphrasing:
"Need a job? Can pass a background check? Apply today, start tomorrow, no interview required."
So I'm sure their attitude to training is probably "as little as possible".
Is Japans demographic changing? It would be such a shame to lose one of few respect oriented cultures left on the planet to the globalization scheme
I love how this is another of those ‘laws with no penalty for breaking them’ which Japan seems to be so fond of.
Well, plenty of cases in terms of prefectural laws have a surprising amount of compliance despite the lack of a penalty. Most recently, mandating bicycle helmets. Yes, far from everyone wear them, but it has not been a full year yet. However it slowly pushes people towards compliance without bogging down law enforcement.
Remember that Japan had some of the highest rate of mask compliance during COVID-19 without there being any penalties other than harsh stares. Japanese people are still human with all the ups and down, but some aspects of society truly are different here.
> that Japan had some of the highest rate of mask compliance during COVID-19
As a regular visitor to Japan for $work for many years, my impression is the reason for mask compliance during COVID is because wearing masks during cold/flu season BEFORE COVID was normal.
My understanding is that part of it is to do with the fact that Japan had "been there, done that, got the postcard" when they dealt with SARS. So COVID was "just another" SARS and the Japanese knew what they had to do.
Japan's handling of COVID was, from a western perspective, exemplary. Japan is a country with 2x the population of the UK. Japan is a country that lives and works in MUCH higher density than the UK. And yet it only had something like 1/10th of the COVID cases/deaths the UK did. Given the immense population density, COVID should have spread like wildfire in Japan, but it did not.
The other part is the Japanese cultural thing where, by and large, you understand you are part of a larger picture and coughing/spluttering/sneezing all over your fellow countrymen is very much not cool. So wearing a mask is simply understood to be the right thing to do. On this subject, see also the famous images of Japanese fans clearing up rubbish from football stadiums during world cups ... I didn't see many drunken western fans doing that.
To be clear, I am not insinuating Japan is perfect, far from it. But there is a lot the West could and should learn from Japan ... if it ever wanted to. :)
> Given the immense population density, COVID should have spread like wildfire in Japan, but it did not.
Sounds like a miracle, doesn't it?
In some parallel universe that fact could have prompted some research, because it may falsify the all-consistent theory that "unprecedentedly deadly virus jumped from random bat to human overnight at a wet market in the city with a lab studying this exact type of viruses and then started spreading rapidly through the whole world but NOT as much through that city or country or other countries in it's close geographical or trade-proximity".
Life would be very uncomfortable in such universe, as nothing would be easily dismissable as "conspiracy theory". Fortunately, we live in our Universe where warm and fuzzy "just-so story" about cultural superiority of collectively-minded Japanese over uncultured drunken western barbarians can be made out of whole cloth (mask) and easily explain anything and everything. It is a shame that those stories cannot explicitly distinguish if it is omnipotent masks or faith in infallible authorities that produces such effect. But surely only "conspiracy theorist" would dare to question these two enlightened ideas, especially when they so neatly work as a package.
What the hell is that load of rambling, incoherent, waffle @aakresearch ?
If you are trying to push the anti-mask agenda, then that boat has long sailed. Scientific evidence from multiple reputable worldwide sources is very much against you.
If you are trying to push some anti-Japanese agenda, might I suggest, to put it politely, that sort of thing is not appropriate here or anywhere else.
This does read like a conspiracy theory to me.
Actually, it has teeth. If a worker can prove their boss allowed or encouraged customer harrassment*, they can sue their company for power harassment**, and expect a decent cash payout and protection from retaliatory acts.
* I’m 40 and most people my age have a story of when they were forced by a manager to beg a customer or client for forgiveness for a “mistake” that often existed only in the customer’s head.
** IANAL but pressuring your subordinate to do something illegal sounds like a textbook case of power harassment
Japan has a culture of shaming which mostly works. Something like this wouldn’t work in USA because of our lack of respect for authority. Thus USA has developed a culture around fear instead.
Fear of jail time. Fear of fines. Fear of (unfortunately) death (ie, pretextual traffic stops).
Have read about some countries (Netherlands?) where they don’t even have turnstiles to check your ticket. You just board the train. It’s expected that you bought the ticket, why waste time checking it? Additionally, I suppose the idea here is that the cost of ticket checkers far outweighs the benefits.
The Netherlands very definitely has turnstiles to check your ticket. No getting on the train without getting through the door.
It’s true that there’s some smaller stations that just have a few ‘scan your card’ poles and no entry/exit block.
Japan is more or less the same, except that the turnstiles won’t physically block you from entering, and are open by default.
Pretty sure it's not so much trust but because there's a chance the train conductor would check tickets while you are in the train.
And that probably worked fine while they were a homogeneous group of people but after migration of so many people into the country I don’t think trust and shame culture works with many different ethnic groups
Amtrak doesn’t have turnstiles to check your tickets either. The conductor will ask to see your ticket while you are riding though. Pretty sure thats normal for trains.
Unfortunately, the law doesn't actually include any penalties for noncompliance, but one has to start somewhere I suppose.
You often see comments on articles like these trying to blame random external factors (they typically take the form of statements like "well, you see, if prices were lower, then customers wouldn't be so angry"), but that fundamentally misses the bigger picture: some people are just assholes.
That’s hardly the “bigger picture”. Few if any are born an asshole, most are jaded and warped due to external factors. Additionally, literally every person has a moment when others would view them as assholes. Attempting to hide away the minutia as something akin to “haters gonna hate” ironically misses the bigger picture. If you think “random external factors” like price have no bearing on customer-employee relations than I urge you to take a marketing course. There is so much information our brains use both consciously and unconsciously that decide what we do in a given situation.
You’re arguing that harassing customer service staff is totally okay provided that one can point to some external factor?
I understand that nothing happens in a vacuum, but you’re basically just defending the act of harassing service workers, which I find to be a completely objectionable position.
How about a law that any company raising prices must publicly post the name/photo/phone number/home address of the business owner.
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