That was written only semi-seriously but there is an undercurrent of a point there. I don’t believe people should be deliberately rude, but if they are it’s no skin off my nose. I don’t go into a shop to have a chat, I go in to buy something and by and large I want to be left to my own devices. You have to strike the right balance. I mean I’ve been to America a couple of times and when shopping I was not comfortable, as I found the customer service a little overbearing and disingenuous.

I also have to laugh a little at the people complaining about waiters and hotel staff letting people get on with it. British people want to be left alone. It’s cultural, I found it odd in the US with people offering to carry my bags for 20 feet and asking me every ten minutes during a meal if everything was OK.

As for the people who had a bad time with the letting agency, well letting agents are notoriously bad here. This I do take exception to because with property we are talking about significant sums of money and something people should have confidence in, namely their living arrangements. Letting agents aren’t regulated and consequently are not accountable to anyone which is why they behave so badly. My parents got quite badly burned by a cowboy letting agency which is why it is a bit of a sore spot for me personally.

I agree with the criticisms that have been made about standards of service here in the UK. I’m often struck by the rudeness of owners of small business. A recent example is when I bought bread and cakes from a market stall, she just said ‘£2.20′ so I gave her £3.00 and she just chucked the 80p into my hand. I didn’t thank her and she didn’t thank me. I take the view that shop assistants should thank first so I thought ‘f..k you’.

I think it’s cultural in many respects – we simply don’t like to cause a fuss and staff being too friendly can come across as patronising. I would be scared off if three staff asked if I needed help in a shop, as a user above mentioned in their example. Also, customer service vacancies offer the lowest pay and insecure conditions, meaning you can be sacked very easily – So why care?

Sorry I’ve gone on too long!

From Sheffield in South Yorkshire – We’re a bit more welcoming here!!!

Thanks for posting your link. Yes, it’s all in that cold look…. they could be saying the most polite things, but their facial expression and body language are saying the complete opposite!

When I lived in Cambridge, England, several years ago, I had some great experiences in the shops. I remember returning a pair of black trousers to Marks and Spencers, and then realizing that my white cat had left a lot of her fur on the trousers! I knew that my chance of being able to return this item was zero. No American return department would accept this return! But the sales clerk happily accepted it, and actually stood there for a good five minutes while she and I chatted and picked off the white fur together! I also remember getting very detailed instructions from a check-out woman in a Waitrose in Cambridge on how to cook our Thanksgiving turkey (I’m a vegetarian, and am clueless about cooking meat).

But every once in a while, and this gets to Meg’s experience, I think that a store clerk was rude to me because of my American accent. There’s a love/hate thing with Britons towards Americans–they love a lot of what America represents, they love Disney and New York and Los Angeles, but they despise part of our culture–the loudness, the arrogance, the guns, the ostentatious wealth of some Americans, the never saying “please may I have a Coke,” but instead saying “Give me a Coke.” And I do think that sometimes these things come into play as soon as they hear our accent.

If you want to read more, here’s my post on several sterling examples of rudeness from Brits which, I do believe, came from Ameri-phobia more than anything else!
https://theyearoflivingenglishly.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/us-vs-uk-how-the-british-do-rude/

Something a bit funny – there is a lady who works in our local corner shop (one of the chain ‘express’ grocery stores) and she seems like a nice lady but the scowl on her face day in and day out makes me think she hates her job. She’s quite rude to customers and I always feel I’m being a nuisance when I go in to buy something. Although I have seen her chat and laugh with some customers on occasion. It does make me not want to go into that shop to buy things and I avoid it whenever I can. I just don’t get the whole ‘rude to customers’ attitude.

Anyway, I hope you don’t have any more bad experiences like this. It’s such a shame and for no good reason. This is why I think companies here need mandatory customer service training.

The agent refused to admit to any mistakes and then proceeded to act in a presumptuous way and then she proceeded to mock me! I was truly shocked.

Those who work in the service industry (rentals/property management) seem to respond with contempt when you point out to them that ‘hey, I am uncomfortable with what you are doing, and it is presumptuous for you to describe my question as an ‘offer’ to the property owners.’ You would think that someone with any business sense would try to salvage what they can of the deal/transaction, back-pedal by apologizing and saying in a sincere way: ‘I am terribly sorry, I hope that if this property is still of interest to you, that we could continue to work this out in a mutually agreeable manner.’ Instead, what we got in response was contempt and sass from someone who sounded like she was in her twenties. I am in my forties by the way.

When we called back to complain to the manager, I got the ‘oh, I am sorry that *you feel* this way,’ which is not an apology for her rude behavior of mocking.

The feeling that I got was that both the agent and the assistant manager were drinking buddies and that neither one of them cared much about the company that they worked for and that there was no point in complaining further.

But this is also something that I have encountered before: sometimes I am made to feel that the expectation is that the staff are doing me a big favor. I truly don’t understand this attitude toward work. Having come from America and having worked many jobs myself (some of which were not my dream job!), I have always seen my job to be something that I was expected to do and that I did to the best of my ability in the interests of the company and people whom I worked for, I conducted myself in a professional way. I never seen the sullen attitude toward work and the unprofessional and argumentative contempt that I have seen in spades here in the northeast by people who are so loathe to simply focus on the business at hand and to just do their job without injecting whatever baggage or problem they have with Americans into the mix.

It was a truly miserable experience with the locals.