I am always amazed by large stores in Shanghai. There are always twice as many employees working there as is necessary. They stand in their bright orange or green or whatever uniforms, chatting. I approach them with a question and they are always nervous. "I'm not paid for this shit!" they are probably saying to themselves, in Shanghainese.
They are usually not helpful, like they never actually went to the orientation after they were hired and have never really bothered to look over the merchandise in the store. "Soymilk, I don't think we have it," they say, and then a few minutes later I find it myself.
"You want a book on chengyu (traditional Chinese proverbs) for kids? Okay, follow me," says an employee in the largest bookstore in Shanghai, and he picks up one from a display table and hurries away. "There's one chengyu book for kids in this whole bookstore?" I think to myself.
(Unbelievable. Not to compare, but even in the smallest of bookstores in Taiwan, there are ten times that number. I check with another employee, and she confirms that there are actually only two in the store.)
I'm waiting in line in an upscale supermarket and suddenly I notice there's another checker who is sitting in front of a register, totally bored. I must have been waiting a few minutes, before I spot her, no doubt praying to her lucky angels that I don't see her.
China is busy catching up with the rest of the developed world after wasting sixty years of precious human life. If you're here for a few days, you wonder if this is actually a communist country, but after living here for a little while, you realize that old habits die hard.
1 comment:
Oh, yes, I remember living in Beijing. Going to the supermarket to buy noodles, or something. It doesn't matter.
I would ask one of the orange vested xiaojie where I could find the noodles. She would have a look of half boredom due to her mind killing job and half panic as a big nosed foreigner was speaking something resembling a language she could understand that could not be right.
"over there, in back", was the standard answer.
Of course, over there in back was another equally bored and soon to be panicked xiaojie as I would ask her the same question (noodles being no where in sight).
"oh, noodles huh? Over there, in front!"
It was often like this, the thing I wanted as far away from them as possible.
Later I figured it out.
They were not there to help me find stuff. They were there to make sure nobody stole stuff.
明白了！
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