Suffering from allergy to the big city customer service

Once again it’s been a while after my last post but at least I have a lot to tell you now. There has been a lot going on during the last month and tons of things I could have written about but just didn’t when being too busy with enjoying life (and stressing about it). I was earlier thinking about posting a traditional travel diary about Lisbon but I didn’t because my camera was broken during the travel time and I don’t think there is any fun in writing about a lovely place like that without being able to show it in photos too. What is more, my words wouldn’t have been enough to express how charming Lisbon was! …actually that charming that I went there for two weekends in a row enjoying the sunny weather and welcoming atmosphere. In other words, I’m gonna skip the topic Lisbon just saying that go there and experience the city by yourself!

Anyway, after falling in love with Lisbon, struggling with exams and saying last goodbyes in Vigo I’ve actually managed to move to Madrid, find a room, make new friends and start my internship in the Finnish embassy. This is to say that after carrying all my seven bags and myself to Madrid and walking more than 20 kilometers in a day when looking for a place where to live, I’m now happily living here in a flat with rooftop terrace and views over the famous El Retiro -park. Most importantly, I’m not feeling like I’m all on my own in this big city anymore, thanks to my new friends! Great start for the summer and I’m little by little starting to feel like home here, however, still being a bit skeptical with the city.

Maybe some of you remember that at the very beginning of my stay in Spain I came to Madrid for one weekend in January. That weekend only made me think why the hell I chose to come to Spain and especially to Madrid, I never wanted to see this city again. Well, never say never because now I’m living here. To my surprise, it’s not actually too bad especially since it’s close to 30 degrees and sunny almost every day (except when it’s raining, like today). If one also has as interesting job as I do, I think life should be at least bearable for the next three months. Nonetheless, even though living here for a summer probably will be nice I highly doubt I will fall in love with this city like I did, for example, with Mexico City last year and there is a reason for that...

The economic situation in Spain is not the greatest at the moment as many of you know, for example, the unemployment rates being somewhere around 25 %. There are some people begging on the street and a lot more people without sufficient income trying to figure out what to do to feed their families. That would make you assume that the employers have a big variety of people to choose from when hiring their staff and that the people who have a job would then be the best for doing it. However, the service here is often so bad that it seems I’m gonna be saving a lot of money because I tend to turn around without buying anything if I get a bad vibe from the staff. 

To my experience, a good sales adviser or a waiter is rather always polite and at least is able to act like he’d be happy no matter how bad a day he’s having. What is more, the questions of the customers are answered politely no matter how weird they would be. I am not requiring anyone to be the happiest person of the world always but just basic politeness is needed when you work in customer service as well as when walking on the street. For some reason, many of the Spanish employees seem to be unaware of this which makes me wonder how those companies are still alive with this competitive situation and why they are not trying to do their best. Most importantly, I feel angry on behalf of the unemployed who actually have the skills but are not employed because the owner’s cousin without any customer service skills got the place.  

I’ve been looking for a proper gym for a week and on Tuesday I went to check one more. I was waiting in the lobby when three of the staff members were talking with each other’s with no hurry or any intention to recognize my presence. The fourth person was talking on phone and when she hung up, she served the person who arrived after me even though she had seen clearly that I was there first. When one of the guys in the end decided that maybe it would be easier to ask why I'm there, he wasn’t really even trying to convince me joining the gym or having any intention to show me the facilities or tell something without me asking first. He only showed me a paper about the prices and that was the presentation. Well, I didn’t join the gym and won’t really recommend the place to anyone. Luckily there are also a few places where you get great service and I finally got a gym membership today!

Hard Rock Cafe is one of the few chains where you get
excellent service no matter on which continent you are!

This gym example is just one of the many bad experiences I’ve had here during less than two weeks. It doesn’t matter if it’s a restaurant, tourist office or clothing store but the service seems to be bad more often than not. Madrid is supposed to be a popular place among the tourists but obviously something has been forgotten when building the brand image and unfortunately the bad experiences are spread quite rapidly with word-to-mouth marketing. No wonder that the economy is not doing so well here because only half of the potential is used. I'm not saying that this would be totally the employees' fault, there are probably a lot of issues with the company procedures too, but the employees are the face of the company and that's why they get the critique. However, you're supposed to always look on the bright side which in this case is that my expectations on service here start to be so low that getting surprised positively starts to be rather easy and the place where I get good service will easily have me as a regular customer and I'll recommend those places to my friends too. Fair game, that's how it's supposed to work!

As you maybe realized, the perspective of this post is maybe a bit different than in the previous ones which might be due to the change from me being a student to me being an employee in the Finnish embassy. Therefore the next posts will probably have something to do with my work, of course, not forgetting my nascent relationship with Madrid and my experiences around the rest of the Spain!