Tokyo looks to protect service staff from customers who are not so cool
ft.com
ft.com
We had a similar thing in Europe during COVID with those #BeKind campaigns and signs everywhere to treat staff with respect etc.
The staff are caught in the middle, the face of the economic issues - and sometimes greed. Can’t be easy for them
And today we still have high prices, reduced staff (cost saving), QR codes (cost saving), reduced quality/quantity (cost saving) and rightly people are still annoyed. It feels like we helped repay them for lockdown, and now are continuing to do so.
Of course it’s a wider, systemic and economic issue but people are human.
And the great thing about the mysterious inflation is that each company/government can just blame another company/government round and round, so it’s nobody’s fault
The powerless employees are used as a fire wall.
My mother and her friend, both long retired, were on a vacation with their bikes, and on their way back by train, their train happened to be in Frankfurt Main Station when a man was murdered in the station. All trains were evacuated, people need to wait outside the station. The trains leave at some point. People are now stuck in Frankfurt. The local staff knows nothing and no higher-ups are passing down information or make decisions. The local staff cannot on their own give out vouchers for hotels or they'd be liable if it turns out the management didn't want to (and would management ever want to?).
I'm sure that wasn't a great day full of happy interactions for the staff at the station, and the abundance of federal police probably kept things much calmer than they'd otherwise be.
Customers are stuck with no/terrible service. Staff can't do anything about it. Management has fun somewhere and doesn't care. It's like AWS outages being acknowledged hours later but with trains.
They have almost brainwashed the public that no event is ever the railway's responsibility to deal with just because they aren't the root cause.
The are enough laws and contractual provisions to help the customer but they are being blatantly ignored, and the government is allowing it for cost saving purposes.
"common now ?" - I don't recall there ever being a time when UK railways gave a shit about their customers. :)
British Airways however .... now that is an organisation that has fallen from grace. They used to care for customers. But after recent C-suites (Cruz, Walsh etc.) they've turned into a real horror show. Commiting to an over-ambitious schedule just to keep their precious slots at Heathrow, meanwhile everything else gets cost-cut beyond recognition.
Train service was never amazing but has genuinely been getting worse through reduced staff and reduced empowerment of them
Perhaps the issue isn't poor customer service, but a garbage importation problem. The staff and management don't really expect a murder to happen at a train station.
You import the worst humanity has to offer, you make your bed in it. Meanwhile letting hundreds of thousands of actually legit white collar workers not obtain residency on time.
I can't believe this has been happening in front of our eyes and nobody took notice! What do you mean?
> The staff and management don't really expect a murder to happen at a train station.
The staff doesn't. Management has to expect major incidents and plan for them accordingly, and have those plans ready to go, and train staff how to react to them.
It could just as well have been a malfunction that leaves all trains stranded and the station unable to function. Their response would have been the same: we don't know, you're on your own.
Assuming the anger will get run up the chain requires the people at the top give even one shit about how their workers are treated. And they're paying them the least they're legally allowed to and not providing benefits so… no they don't.
Berating literally the lowest-ranked employee at a company who if they had any agency at all wouldn't be working that job will accomplish nothing except making their day worse.
Inflation happens when demand outstrips supply, plain and simple. In America, keeping inflation in check is the Fed's job. They're the only ones who could reasonably be blamed for failing to take it seriously until too late. But the only way to reduce demand is to basically make people poorer. So ya it's not surprising that people get angry. But all this anger is misplaced and counterproductive
Seems like you're the angry one, not me
Edit: A quick search tells me the “training” is some short videos they may or may not watch.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ups-drivers-170000-pay-benefits...
The fact that the parent comment cites a short national news story, and crucially fails to distinguish between many specialized kinds of drivers among UPS operations, shows superficial knowledge IMHO.
Amazon here advertises, and this is closer to a literal quote than paraphrasing:
"Need a job? Can pass a background check? Apply today, start tomorrow, no interview required."
So I'm sure their attitude to training is probably "as little as possible".
Remember that Japan had some of the highest rate of mask compliance during COVID-19 without there being any penalties other than harsh stares. Japanese people are still human with all the ups and down, but some aspects of society truly are different here.
As a regular visitor to Japan for $work for many years, my impression is the reason for mask compliance during COVID is because wearing masks during cold/flu season BEFORE COVID was normal.
My understanding is that part of it is to do with the fact that Japan had "been there, done that, got the postcard" when they dealt with SARS. So COVID was "just another" SARS and the Japanese knew what they had to do.
Japan's handling of COVID was, from a western perspective, exemplary. Japan is a country with 2x the population of the UK. Japan is a country that lives and works in MUCH higher density than the UK. And yet it only had something like 1/10th of the COVID cases/deaths the UK did. Given the immense population density, COVID should have spread like wildfire in Japan, but it did not.
The other part is the Japanese cultural thing where, by and large, you understand you are part of a larger picture and coughing/spluttering/sneezing all over your fellow countrymen is very much not cool. So wearing a mask is simply understood to be the right thing to do. On this subject, see also the famous images of Japanese fans clearing up rubbish from football stadiums during world cups ... I didn't see many drunken western fans doing that.
To be clear, I am not insinuating Japan is perfect, far from it. But there is a lot the West could and should learn from Japan ... if it ever wanted to. :)
* I’m 40 and most people my age have a story of when they were forced by a manager to beg a customer or client for forgiveness for a “mistake” that often existed only in the customer’s head.
** IANAL but pressuring your subordinate to do something illegal sounds like a textbook case of power harassment
Fear of jail time. Fear of fines. Fear of (unfortunately) death (ie, pretextual traffic stops).
Have read about some countries (Netherlands?) where they don’t even have turnstiles to check your ticket. You just board the train. It’s expected that you bought the ticket, why waste time checking it? Additionally, I suppose the idea here is that the cost of ticket checkers far outweighs the benefits.
It’s true that there’s some smaller stations that just have a few ‘scan your card’ poles and no entry/exit block.
Japan is more or less the same, except that the turnstiles won’t physically block you from entering, and are open by default.
You often see comments on articles like these trying to blame random external factors (they typically take the form of statements like "well, you see, if prices were lower, then customers wouldn't be so angry"), but that fundamentally misses the bigger picture: some people are just assholes.
I understand that nothing happens in a vacuum, but you’re basically just defending the act of harassing service workers, which I find to be a completely objectionable position.