Tesco is the Britain’s largest retailer and mostly known in the UK for it’s supermarkets. It is a huge corporation and I have heard it stated numerous times that over £1 in every £7 spent at retailers in the UK is spent at Tesco. The scale of that is hard for me to comprehend! They have an international presence but haven’t tried to break into the US market till this past autumn when Tesco opened a small number of Fresh & Easy stores in California and the Southwest United States. ( I haven’t heard any recent reports about how these stores are doing, though I do know that their refrigerated pizza dough is a big hit with my sister-in-love.)
At the time of their US launch I listened with interest to several news stories. One interview on Radio 4 (for you Americans, this is BBC talk radio similar to NPR) was with an American business expert who lives in London working as a consultant for businesses trying to bridge the cultural divide between the UK and the US. Apparently, the business practices between the two countries are not as similar as one might assume. One thing this expert said was that Tesco, and any other business trying to make that leap, would have to work hard to meet Americans much higher customer service expectations. For example, in the US in the grocery sector the expectation would generally be that someone else bags your groceries for you, and that would be an exceptional occurrence here in the UK.
Hearing this analysis of customer service from an “expert” gave legitimacy to my vague and unformed impressions that customer service here wasn’t what I was used to. I had been here over 2 years by that point so it obviously wasn’t something I gave much thought, or was terribly bothered by. However with the confirmation of an expert, I now knew my generally poor impression of customer service in the UK wasn’t just me or random chance. Up until that point I was willing to generously give the benefit of doubt to most situations. After all, being flexible is a requirement for those living abroad. Instead of getting bent out of shape by different expectations, it is something I choose to live with and try to learn a few skills along the way. I am trying to learn patience from my interactions, but have been more successful in perfecting my grocery bag packing skills.
I adjusted my expectations and thought this was just one fact of life I would just live with while being outside the US. Really, I was OK with it (it is a rather small thing, in the giant scheme of things) until today when the humorous potential reached ridiculous proportions at Ikea.
I stopped by Ikea today for a meal and on my way out of the store decided to stop by the dented, damaged and dinged corner. I am a fan of Ikea’s dented, damaged and dinged corner, or whatever they really call it. I like a bargain and sometimes you find really interesting stuff there. Today I found a bag there which I liked but had no price on it. I (patiently?!?) waited for an employee to appear so I could ask about a price.
When an employee appeared, he told me that they were out of price tags and thus I couldn’t buy the item. WHAT!!!! I inquired how such a large enterprise could be out of price tags. He explained that they were out of the little yellow sticky price tags that fit their pricing gun. When I asked about the computer printed price tags and he explained if he printed a price tag out on the computer he could only mark this bag down a limited amount from its original price and since this bag was missing all it’s innards (which I didn’t want anyways) it should be sold for less that the lowest price he could print on the computer. He stuck with his original claim that I couldn’t buy the item and seriously advised me to come back and purchase the item on the weekend after they had gotten price tags back in. This was ridiculous advice as someone else would buy the bag first, Ikea is a madhouse I try to avoid on the weekends, and it is environmentally unfriendly make an extra and unnecessary car trip to the other side of the city.
At this point all I could hear was the voice of business consultant interviewed on Radio 4 repeating through my head, “American customer service expectations are higher.” I was stumped because I was there, happy to pay for an item and leave the store, but they didn’t seem willing to make any effort or expend any creative thought in order to make that happen. At that point I probably became a pushy American (remember I am still learning patience) when I insisted that I was sure there was something, anything, they could do to figure out this impasse.
In the end the employee did take my advice of cannibalizing a tag from another already marked item so that I could pay for the item I had selected. With this much sought after tag now attached I then walked to the checkout. On this short journey I had the curious experience of attending to the price tags, rather than the items themselves. Several of the items had bumpy surfaces which did not allow the sticky tags to adhere well and I was determined not to loose these precious price tags when victory seemed so close at hand.
I did manage to buy the items in the end, but I am still a bit surprised by my success in the face of such inflexible customer no-service. It is so ridiculous as to be funny that I almost couldn’t buy an item because they ran out of price tags. That they couldn’t come up with a solution to the problem mystifies me, after all it is in their self-interest to sell things. Needless to say, I was surprised to find out that the most precious thing they had in the dented, damaged and dinged corner today was the yellow sticky price tags. So in the above picture the most valuable things are not the items or the £.50 pence the store will collect from the buyer, but the tags themselves. This makes me reevaluate my fortunes for having managed to make it out of the store with 6 of these little yellow sticky tags. I am a rich woman, indeed.
One can only laugh! Hope you too enjoyed the humor of this.
PS I am not sure how Ikea being a Swedish company nuances this cross-cultural encounter.
Rev. Mindy's Meanderings 
