Super Service

One thing that I really like about living in Japan is the customer service!  The way that customers are treated here in comparison with Canada is night and day.  Even as a stupid foreigner that doesn't speak the language or know how anything is supposed to work people still bend over backwards to help you here.  Japanese employers are not afraid to err on the side of having too many employees on staff, just in case it gets busy.   To show my point right away, I have never been more than third in line at any point when waiting in line to buy something at a store in Japan, and generally if someone notices that there is more than 1 other person in line, there is employees tripping over themselves to open another till and apologizing profusely for you having to wait in line for a minute, this includes in a grocery store � Extra Foods could learn a thing or two.  Speaking of grocery stores, if you ever need help finding something or confirming that something is in fact octopus tentacle and not squid, all you have to do is stand in place and say sumimasen, and with in a very short order of time you will have a very helpful staff member engaged in a confused but generally helpful "dialogue" about their products.

Another example is at the train station, they usually have one or two staff dedicated to saying good morning and thanking you for your patronage. They also seem to be there to jump to the aid of a feeble old woman (which there are lots of in this country) or a confused, white guy who doesn't know how to work the ticket machine.

There is a person at the bank whose job is to stand and help anyone that has questions about the ATMs

The service goes beyond the private sector; I get to see my tax dollars at use providing me services every morning.  On my bike ride to work I am assisted by a crossing guard who is there to make sure the confused white guy and small school children make it safely across the road that probably averages 15 cars per hour.  Once I get to where I park my bike, there is a man whose job is to make sure the bikes are parked in an orderly fashion so that everyone gets a spot. 

What prompted this little expose on the Japanese service is a phone call that Tessa and I received at 930 last night from our travel agent.  He was very concerned about our flights that we had booked with him to Thailand. Tessa and I were not so concerned, and were just going to go with the flow. Our travel agent was having none of this and was proactively calling us (and all of his customers, hence the 930 at night) to make sure that we had a holiday as close to the holiday that we wanted. (Backgound: he had already pro-actively managed to get us on cheaper more convenient flights then the ones we originally booked with him).  Anyway after 45 mins of patiently explaining to us how the Japanese travel booking system worked, he managed to extend our trip by 3 days, get us flights directly to Angkor Wat, Cambodia (where we were planning to go via Thailand, in a very inconvenient way) and turn a pain in the ass transfer in Taiwan, into a leisurely 2 day sightseeing stop over.  I definitely don't think he did it to get a commission increase, because the price ended up being about the same as what we had committed to paying when we made our original bookings.