As you, loyal reader, might already know, traffic conditions in and around Luxembourg can be pretty bad. We do have radio stations that on a regular basis list a few issues, but they’re not always “up-to-speed”…
Same goes for those apps that use the public network of highway cameras – what good are they if you don’t take the highway?
And then it hit me. The only way to have this working out for everyone, is if it is all of these at the same time: free of charge, quick to update, easy to use, rewarding and useful (of course). Now imagine you’re on the highway stuck in a traffic jam, you take your iPhone® or other Twitter®-capable device, switch on your preferred Twitter®-app, and tell this to your followers: “hey guys, am stuck in traffic, again…”. Now imagine your followers could also recognize the geo-tag of where you’ve written this, and they would know exactly where not to drive without you needing to explain it to anyone.

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In my recent posts on Batiself, I got into poor customer service of a “home-depot-style” shop. My posts on Cultural Distance touched on the difference between cultures and how they affect perceptions, and my post on Paradigm Shifts tried to highlight a change in attitude I have been noticing. These 3 somehow connected last week, when I visited another home-improvement supershop in Bertrange from the Hornbach group. I had gone there as I had a few moments to spend, and required some simple products.

My journey began looking for “gluey-stuff-removers” in the paint section, and as I needed to remove this stuff from my car, I wanted to make sure the remover wouldn’t scrape the paint off the car. After quite some time, the laid-back lady behind the counter took a customer enquiry over the phone and after a few mumblings replied: “Vous parlez français aussi?” (Do you also speak French?). This being a common point of discussion in Luxembourg with 3 official languages, but not everyone speaking all of them, I didn’t catch the drift right away. She then said in a rather assertive tone “Je vous passe mon collègue!” (I’ll pass you over to my colleague) and actually slammed the phone so hard onto the counter I thought it must be broken – my eyes shut instinctively as I was afraid there might be some flying pieces of plastic! She finished it off by telling her colleague smugly: “Il a bien compris ce que je lui disais en français hein!” (He had no issues understanding my French).

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For years, I have been advocating self-checkouts in all kinds of places, yet everyone always told me it wasn’t going to catch on. Then back in my London-time, I saw a Tesco in the Bank area that had nearly only self-checkouts and I tried to grasp all the (dis)advantages of the change: less staff – less training – quicker checkouts?… But was it really that? Does it really take less staff and less training, or does it take less staff sitting in tills all day and just a more advanced training to fewer people? Are checkouts really quicker, or does it feel quicker as you are busy checking out?

Then came the era in Luxembourg (finally) where you could buy tickets at cinema online or at small self-checkouts, and along came IKEA and Auchan and more organisations such as Quick. Whilst the first 3 really do seem to make it a quicker experience for me, the 4th was still dependent on the speed of the person serving my order as that process could not be transferred to me.

But the most pressing thought that just popped to my mind is that even if it is not really quicker or more convenient, I’d still have a tendency to just use the machines anyways, as it removes in most cases a variable that is a potentially bigger burden than a potential improvement: customer service!

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This week was marked by a development that was somewhat unexpected to me. A place that I’ve been going to for a very long time now, a place that I’ve tremendously enjoyed, has been holding my lesser visits against me. Don’t get me wrong, the relationship has developed to a very casual and joking setting, and indeed, I’ve been going there a lot less than say a year ago, but this has nothing to do with them. I just do it less.

Now when I try to extrapolate, I can understand that in other circumstances (read: other cultures), this may be a common approach: joking about guilting customers in increasing their custom, but to me and quite a few of my local peers, this has been and still is very strenuous as I (we) do care a lot about what people think about me (us). It has now gone as far as to make me consider choosing another place for the time being where I can just go to, not befriend and just transact with at a superficial level where quality/price ratio is the only important variable.

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In order to simplify my parents’ lives, I decided to investigate options for locks to the house that required only 1 key, rather than several different ones. That is when I decided to call several shops I thought would be able to help, one of them being a chain of shops named Batiself. A very friendly man on the phone “explained it all” to me, but said it would probably take him two working days to get an exact quote, and that he’d get back to me latest on Wednesday (my call was on Saturday).

So a week later (yay), not really happy anymore with the promise of the friendly man, I called them again, and I was told he’d call back. A few days still later, I decided to go to the competition’s shop, and purchased what I needed there, and though the security levels were lower, it also came at a very low price. However, another week later, the man finally called me back with a quote that was twice as high as what I’d already paid, but still a low price, considering that the security was almost twice as strong; he told me he couldn’t order it without a deposit, so I decided to check it out.

That is when I thought I’d traveled to another, “lonely”, planet. In the whole shop, there must have been about 5 employees, and about 50 customers, each looking for answers to their questions, and none of the employees seeming all to be happy to be working. They were happy to chat to each other, but as soon as they were “interupted”  by customers with questions, I thought I’d recognized a couple of looks from old Westerns.

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