I’m just an Average Joe...the Surprise of Customer NON-Service

In the United States, good customer service is essential for a business to do well. No one likes to be treated poorly by the employees of a particular store, company or business. After being treated poorly continuously at a place, usually the customer stops purchasing a product or service from that company and finds another place.

However, customer service and customer respect does not seem to be as important here in Brazil. I first noticed this when I arrived in Bahia, northern Brazil, where I spent my first month. I would walk into a store and three or four employees would pounce on me. While I first thought they were being EXTRA polite and available to attend to my every need, I later realized they are there to make sure I don’t steal anything.

While this is very common here in EVERY store (a employee will personally follow you around, holding anything you want to try on… so you can’t steal it), some employees are more polite than others. I went to a particularly terrible store the other day. It was a thrift store. Here, the thrift stores are not as cheap as they are in the U.S., but I am in desperate need of some dress pants since it is getting chilly here and I need them to be as cheap as possible. There, the owner personally stood next to me as I looked at each piece of clothing. I decided to try on a dress and the woman bluntly told me, “That won’t fit you.” Feeling a bit insulted, I told her I wanted to try it on anyway. It fit perfectly and I wanted to purchase it so I asked her how much it cost and she responded 30 R, which is MUCH more than it should have been. I told her no thanks and left the dress with her. She muttered to me as I left, “Guess you should have asked the price before you wasted your time and mine trying on that dress…” So rude!

Also, in many dressing rooms in stores in Brazil, the dressing rooms are just curtains. The women working the dressing rooms will just pop in and out of the rooms with no warning, seeing whatever bare part happens to be out at the moment and showing it to the world around as well. So disrespectful! Normally, she wants to see how close you are to being done if the dressing rooms are full so more customers can enter.

But the reason I wrote this blog is from an incident that happened the other day. I went to my friend Lowell’s house. Neither he nor I had eaten supper yet and it was already 21:00 so we were starving. Lowell had a coupon for buy one get one free pasta dishes at a nearby fast food Italian restaurant between 23:00 and 11:00. We decided to wait the extra two hours and go out to eat with the good deal. We arrived at 22:30 and had to wait an extra half hour before we could order so we could get the deal. Upon ordering, we presented the coupon. The woman serving us said, “That is an old sale. We won’t accept that anymore.” We argued because there was no expiration date and we had received the coupon in the mail… how were we to know it had expired? She didn’t care.

Then we asked to speak with the manager. And the same thing occurred. No matter how much we argued with them, they refused to let us use the coupon even though there was no expiration date. Whatever happened to the idea that the “Customer is always right?!?” I guess that’s more of an American concept than a global concept. Any respectable American restaurant would have accepted the coupon and apologized for the inconvenience. We were so upset by the terrible customer service that we left without ordering… more to prove a point than anything. And to be honest, I regretted that decision on my way home because I had to walk home and didn’t get back until 23:45... by which time my stomach hurt it was so hungry.

To me, at least, it seems that customer service is not as important here. Yes, there are plenty of employees to help in most stores. However, the employees aren’t as concerned with making each customer happy. My Portuguese professor said that in the United States, unlike here in Brazil, he “felt like a king” when he went shopping. With no extra smiles or friendly staff ready to bend over to assist me with my every need, I guess here in Brazil I just feel like an “Average Joe” when I go about to run my errands.