Foreign Perspectives

I spent around an hour shopping in the store with both my two and five year old in the trolley, passing untold numbers of Sainsbury staff and indeed security personnel. Indeed the kids were in the trolley right beside the security guard who threw us out at least 30 minutes before he got around to doing that.

On arriving at the checkout, I was told by the checkout operator that the two couldn’t stand in the trolley. Fair enough, though difficult to enforce on two small kids. I had them sit down.

She immediately got up and went off to her supervisor. It wasn’t good enough: it was a health and safety issue and there was a sign at the front door saying that children couldn’t be in trolleys at all. They had to get out of the trolley. Well, since I had to cross a busy supermarket and then a very busy car park I figured that it wasn’t safe to do that so left after they refused to serve me.

I happened to glance at the sign on the way out. As you can see it doesn’t say that children can’t be in the trolley. In addition to that I was less than pleased at the attitude of the checkout operator.

So, I went into the store again and asked to speak to Customer Service. Pointing out that the sign didn’t say what the Customer Service staff said it did had them call security and throw me out of the store.

Even standing right in front of the sign, the security guy apparently couldn’t read as he said it says that children can’t be in trolleys which, of course, it doesn’t. OK, he went on to say that the children couldn’t have their feet in the trolley as it was a food store. Sound reasonable? Well, this is a store which sells dog food, garden pesticides, rat poison and unwrapped food. They don’t ban people having rat poison in the food trolleys which sounds like a much greater risk to health than two kids sitting in a trolley.

His suggestion? Bring your pram. Now I don’t know about you ladies out there but I for one would find it impossible to push both a trolley and pram round a supermarket. And, no, unlike Tesco they don’t provide trolleys for those with two kids. Oh, that’s not their responsibility: the centre provide the trolleys (nicely labelled “property of Sainsbury”).

If I’d the time to spare, I’d be quite tempted to spend an hour or two walking round the store with both the kids eagerly lifting the products off the shelves. I’m sure it wouldn’t take too long before they managed to drop some and tip over a few displays.

So if you’ve kids, avoid Sainsbury. In fact, if you like customer service avoid them too: shoplifters are treated better than those with the temerity to bring two kids with them.

Certainly there are the obvious differences in how the various healthcare schemes are run. So, in the UK everything is free but there are waiting lists. In France, everything costs but there aren’t any waiting lists.

Expectations of the patients are quite different too. For example, because the French like to come away from the doctor with something after their visit, the number of medicines prescribed is massive. James had bronchitus last year and in the UK he’d have had a single bottle of medicine yet in France he ended up with that bottle plus tablets plus an inhaler plus appointments at the physiotherapist. Did he get better faster though? Well, no, so there wasn’t really any point in all the additional treatments.

The doctors have no consideration of any modesty that you might have either so almost always it’s “strip off, yes, everything” which is something to bear in mind. Such differences have resulted in there being training sessions for doctors in areas with a high brit expat population.

I wonder though if Doctor Bobo realises that his potential brit clientele is a good deal smaller than it might be if he didn’t advertise himself as a clown?

Actually, I dispair of the local cafes in general. One of them refuses to serve foreigners unless the waitress hears them speaking French and another is openly hostile towards them yet both are increasingly dependent on the tourist trade.