Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Customer Service’ Category

If you go by the signs, they are open from as early as 8am to as late as 11pm or so. However, if you try to order a meal it’s a very different story. The most common times are from about 11am to 10pm but in practice almost all such restaurants only serve food from noon to 1.30pm and from about 7.30pm to 9pm. Even the French fast-food chain Quick only serves its full menu a little bit outside the noon to 2pm period so you can’t even have a burger at 3pm if you wanted one unless you go to McDonalds.We still get caught out by those hours. A coffee-shop (salon du thé) opened recently in Estagel and we’ve been meaning to try it out for ages. We were running a little behind schedule on Sunday so thought that it would be a good time to get a sandwich or something from them as they had a sign saying that they opened from noon ’til 10pm. What happened when we turned up at 3pm? The waitress came out and said that they weren’t serving meals until the evening. The funny thing is that we were their only customers that day so the five staff will once again be sitting almost all day doing nothing. In fact, we’ve only ever seen the staff inside so perhaps we were their first ever customers.Perhaps we’ll be more lucky with the kebab shop but somehow I can’t see it.

This is one area of 21st century living where France is at best in the 20th century and quite often in the 19th, particularly if you’re a foreigner. As you drive through France, that just about every petrol station of any consequence advertises itself as 24/7. If you look at the small print, you’ll find that outside the normal hours of about 8am to noon and 2pm to about 8pm these stations are automated. Fair enough, after all France is quite rural and a lot of these stations don’t get a lot of business outside normal working hours. The snag is that when they’re automated you almost always have to have a French debit card to use them so they’re not really 24/7 if you’re a foreigner.

This sort-of 24/7 service applies to many things in France. For instance, we recently had a problem with our electricity on a Sunday afternoon. We weren’t expecting to get any help from the local electricans as it’s virtually impossible to get them to do anything as regular readers will know so we thought that we’d try calling those advertising themselves as 24/7. It turns out that the expression “24/7” in France means that they have an answering machine switched on outside normal working hours and don’t actually do any work at the weekend. One consequence of this is that there’s a bit of a backlog of work needing to be done each Monday. As a result, none of the electricians that we called at the weekend arrived ’til after the work had been done by a very competent Dutch electrician on Monday morning.