Gimme gimme

Was going through my journal from Munich, and found some interesting and, in my opinion at least, blogworthy rantings on consumerism in Germany and in the US:

In Germany, the customer is not always right. I admit it: to the unpracticed (read: US-American) eye, the German commerce system can be, well… downright annoying. Offices have what I have been known to describe in a frustrated voice as “ridiculous” office hours. For example, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve decided to run into town to buy something somewhere, only to be met with a closed door and a sign proudly displaying “our convenient office hours,” which I would label anything but. Silly me, expecting the post office to be open at 2 PM on Tuesday, or anything at all to be open at any time on Sunday. This wild goose chase becomes even more exasperating when you consider the fact that it’s a half-hour trek to get into town in the first place. For the protection of my own sanity I have started to keep a list of the opening hours of any establishment whose service I regularly consume (Germans business establishments tend to be open somewhere in the range of 9-5, Monday through Friday, but not necessarily that whole time).

If I am applying to have my visa extended, or registering for classes at the University, I am supposed to know everything, have every form filled out before I get there. The excuse “but I didn’t know that” carries absolutely no worth in Germany. The offices are not self-help sessions; they are processing centers and if you don’t have your papers in order, well, better luck next time. If I am shopping in a store whose opening hours are from 12-5 on that given day, I had better be checked out and gone by 4:59, because at 5:00 PM on the dot, the doors close and the employees go home. No exceptions. None of this waiting around patiently for the last customers to straggle to through the check-out lane. You snooze, you lose. If an employee is sick or on vacation, he or she is not replaced by a substitute. The work just waits, and simply doesn’t get done. I miss the casual friendliness of the Midwest and the US standard of customer service (even if it is motivated by the purely consumerist mentality of keeping the customer happy at all costs). Some days I long to hear a polite request of “Can I help you?” when I step into a store arranged according to a confusing logic familiar only to the local populace or perhaps no one at all. But I have stopped holding my breath. That doesn’t happen here in Munich.

For an embarrassingly long time I felt myself a victim of this uncultured, unfair system. I complained about having to do so much work beforehand in order to go spend money at a store, about no one being willing to make an exception for me. I had this instinctive feeling that the employees should be groveling at my feet a little more and ignoring me a little less. After all, I was The Customer. All they did was ring up purchases, for Pete’s sake, when I was standing here in the aisle, clearly unable to locate vacuum cleaner bags of the proper size.

Eventually, thank heavens, I realized that I was importing a customer service mentality from an entirely inappropriate place (somewhere else) into this German cultural situation. So I decided to keep my eyes and ears wide open and try to decipher the logic of the system for myself. With a shock, I realized that it is indeed of relatively little importance in Germany to protect the customer’s right to spend money as comfortably and expediently as possible. Instead the emphasis is placed on protecting the worker’s right to decent pay, fair treatment, good working conditions and a generous amount of vacation time (the legal standard is 25 work days per year, plus the 15-odd national work holidays). Shops close for the noon hour so workers can go home and have lunch with their families, run errands and tank up for the afternoon’s work. Vacationing workers or women on maternity leave are not replaced with temps, a practice that perhaps slows down the work pace but also keeps costs down and job stability up. The standard work week clocks in at about 37.5 hours for full-time employees.

This is a huge paradigm shift for me: from the consumer-centered universe, where purchasing power measures worth, to this worker-centered universe where the great emphasis is placed upon getting, enjoying and keeping a steady, well-paid job. In its pure form, this system would have absolutely no success in the US. A company that paid fair wages, gave generous benefits and vacation time, expected only a 40-hour workweek (or less), didn’t substitute for its vacationing workers and (oh heavens!) closed for lunch would go belly-up faster than you can say “slaves to consumerism.” But those are our ideals: higher, faster, better, stronger, more. In Germany, moderation is key. So you wait in line a little longer, pay a little less, linger over that afternoon cup of coffee and rest assured that your tax dollars are being used to assure proper care and attention to the society’s most vulnerable: children, elderly, those with disabilities and workers.

Even if the German bureaucracy remains a little baffling (my health insurance company sent me a letter the other day regarding my request to terminate my health insurance when I leave Germany. The letter said I should call a representative at my earliest possible convenience to discuss my request. I called, just to be told that everything was fine, they were sending the official termination papers and they should arrive in my mailbox the next day. The whole letter-telephone exchange seemed utterly pointless to me, and guess who was charged for the stamp?), I can treasure it a bit more when I remember that it is this very bureaucracy that allows me to live in this country where every full-time worker receives health benefits and about five weeks’ vacation, where I feel safe alone on the streets of the country’s third-largest city, and where no one has to work two or three jobs to feed their kids. I guess I’ll pay for the postage stamp.