taikoo wrote:saidean
I don't understand why you need to bring races into picture here....
Perhaps if you were in my position with my two grown up sons and this happens outside your country, you will understand my humiliation....believe me this would not have happened to me in my country as we don't have rogues like the one I encountered in Royal Plus in SLS
In any case, if I take my story to the press, please understand that I am not looking for a written apology, but to inform the general public (foreigners) like me to avoid such shops in SLS and not to get humiliated
It's not 'race' per se but cultural differences that's the point here. As you pointed out, you never had this happen to you before in your country before. There's 2 possibilities to this :
1. Your country is full of extremely courteous and knowledgeable sales staff.
2. Your country is full of people similar to you, and all of them have certain cultural expectations of what counts as a sale encounter.
I've lived in the West and the Far East for equal lengths of my life, so I'm very familiar with cross-cultural encounters, racism and even the subject of bigotry. In the UK for example, (1) is not true for all places (try going to PC World where you have a range of staff from the very helpful to staff who just couldn't be arsed to help you at all because it's their ciggie break). However, the sales staff have expectations of a sale encounter - you can ask them many questions which they may or may not be able to answer for you. In other words, you assume that the sale staff is more knowledgeable than you. Staff are trained in technical aspects of their products (well, some are), and are socialised into being patient and courteous when a chap comes to you with a ton of queries about a product. Try going to Tottenham Court Rd's electronic shops in London and do that, and you'll get a very cold (and rude) treatment.
Sales staff here are not expected to be knowledgeable; that's a value added service. Go to John 3:16 camera shop in Funan and you'll encounter camera staff who are themselves shutterbugs and familiar with the different camera types, pros/cons etc. Their prices are higher than other places, but people go there especially if they don't know which cameras to get and want an informed opinion. Local people who are into cameras know of this shop. Not all camera shops are like this and some shutterbugs go to a shop in Ang Mo Kio where the prices are VERY cheap but the customer service is crap (don't expect to get any technical queries answered). The point is in most cases, in a sale encounter, a local person is EXPECTED to be more knowledgeable than the sales staff.
What happened in your case, is you did the foreigner thing where you enter a shop looking for a product, but are not sure with the technical or sometimes basic stuff, and need help in making your decision. You then asked more questions than usual, which infuriated a sale person who has his priority in the following decreasing order: (a) secure sale (b) answer questions from someone who may or may not buy product. In other words, if two customers are in front of a sales chap, with one ready to buy a product and one asking away a number of questions, you can be assured the chap will ignore the latter person. Locals know this priority in a typical sale encounter, but foreigners often don't.
When foreigners expect to be treated similarly like in their own country, that's cultural difference naivety in action. One should not impose their expectations on a foreign culture. Neither should they expect that customer service is a universal right or value. Neither should they demand a form of apology that is not culturally acceptable. It works both ways - Chinese people behaving like they're in their own country when they're in a foreign one, going into shops, behaving 'rudely' to shop staff (ie not being polite, displacing clothes inappropriately, opening up sealed products etc).
I think you need to consider why you're going all out to exact a pound of flesh from this shop. If it is public awareness, as you say, to alert the general community of its bad service, your original posting has done that. Reporting them to CASE will do that. But you seem to go beyond that by rejecting a written apology and demanding instead a humiliating act, one which is locally rarely practiced and often unheard of. The tabloids here might pick it up but do you really trust them not to twist your tale into one which portrays you as the ugly foreigner? (Bearing in mind that unlike countries like the UK, interviewees rarely get to see the draft before it goes into print, which opens up all sorts of misinterpretation.)
