Servicewüste Deutschland

The one thing in Germany that would spark a fifteen minute tirade from me--and snickers from my German students--is any mention at the service at Burger King and Mc Donalds.

I come from a place where a large bag of fries costs .50 euro cents. 50 freaking cents. You want ketchup? Sure! Here, have three packets! Do you want more? Better yet, the nice lady behind the counter will give you an empty plastic cup, and you can pump as much ketchup as you want from the ketchup pump in the condiments section. I come from a place where Mc Donalds still fry their fries in Beef Tallow.

In Germany, I don't mind the veggie fries, but what bugs me is that they charge fifteen fucking cents for every packet of ketchup. Fifteen cents! That's a jeepney ride back where I come from. You can buy a 200 g tube of tomato paste at the supermarket for 35 cents! What's the logic of charging 15 cents for a 15 ml packet of ketchup?

It angered me so much that I actually wrote a letter of indignation to the Mc Donalds Germany headquarters. (I tried searching for the letter in my inbox but suspiciously, the email has disappeared, even the copy of the letter I sent isn't in my sent inbox. hmmm...) They said something about the cost of production being too expensive.

And it's not just the service at Mc Donalds and Burger King. A co-teacher at Berlitz bought a pair of shoes at a store in Erfurt, whose name I will not mention. The shoes fell apart after a week. The store only refunded the shoes after he brought in another German-speaking teacher to referee the fight between him vs. the manager.

Besides that, the Zara store in Erfurt is a far cry from the Zara stores that I saw in France. There were dustbunnies making babies in the corners of the dressing rooms, contrary to the German alles ist in Ordnung mentality. Not only that, the overworked teenaged salesperson was quite rude and snapped at us, saying that a particular dressing room is not available.

Come to think of it, there are a lot of very unfriendly salespeople in Germany. I understand that they don't really need the money, but geez, would it kill them to be nice?