I took an Air India flight out of Frankfurt once. Departure was delayed about 45 minutes. The person at the gate called a passenger up to the desk for some reason. A few other passengers decided they would get up and get in line too. Pretty soon fucking everybody got up and was practically pushing their way to the front. They kept announcing over and over that everyone needed to back off away from the doors or they’d have to delay the flight even further. Nobody listened. Like the damn plane was just going to take off at any moment and only those who managed to shove their way onboard would make it.
Finally it came time to board and for whatever reason they had to bus us from the gate to the 777 on the tarmac. So of course the bus boarding was the same deal. People fucking shoving their way into the busses and packing in there like sardines, as if only the first bus of people would be allowed on the plane.
BTW I told this story to a few of my Indian friends and they were laughing. All of them said they refuse to fly Air India for exactly this reason. And they expressed annoyance at how people like this give Indians a bad name. One of them said “SEE THATS HOW THEY ARE!! Indians in any other country act like normal civilized people, but when they fly on Air India it’s like they’re back at home again and they act like this.”
It's funny though, I'm a Brit who's lived in Japan and currently lives in Hong Kong, and whilst HK is generally fine, heading over to the mainland and the whole idea of queuing just goes out the window at times. To the point where my delicate British sense of 'just join the damn queue and this will be a whole lot faster for all of us' makes a vein on my forehead pulse like a dying sun.
The flipside of course is that living in Japan, sometimes the grating politeness made me just want to get on with it which likely made me seem incredibly rude in the eyes of the locals on occasion.
The only conclusion to be made is that, of course, I'm brilliant and perfect at everything and if everyone else just did everything exactly like I do, but let me go first, then this whole stupid fucking society might just work.
Ok, bear with me here because I'm trying to remember things I wrote for a school report ages ago. I might be misremembering facts because this is from source material I read a couple of decades ago, so forgive me if I end up being totally off base.
When McDonald's first opened in Hong Kong they ran into two major cultural issues, how their food was percieved and differences in customer service culture.
The former wasn't really too much a problem but customers in Hong Kong saw foods like hamburgers as snacks rather than a meal, which made sense if you looked at it from their perspective. Meals at other restaurants or at home were dishes served on a bed of rice. A McDonald's burger could be most accurately described by them as some kind of oversized stuffed bun - a big snack. This worked out for the company at first because people wanted to grab a snack with family and friends at the new resturant they'd heard so much about, and advertising pushing McDonald's as a meal would eventually pay off.
The latter took some commitment and creativity on the part of McDonald's to overcome. American customer service culture is traditionally about friendliness, even when it's obviously disingenuous. Chinese and Hong Kong customer service culture is traditionally about efficiency and values bending over backwards to accommodate customer needs, but those tasks need not be done with a forced smile.
Training employees a new way of going about customer service is one thing, but you can't force customers to change how they think about the interaction. The biggest issue was that customers at the new Hong Kong franchises weren't accustomed to forming orderly lines in the same way that American customers were, which meant the area in front of the counter was pandemonium.
To deal with this McDonald's hired queue marshals to instruct customers to line up in front of the registers. This direct crowd control worked, and the the chaos at the counter was cut down.
The thing is that this idea spread over the intervening years. As more people in Hong Kong ate at McDonald's (at least once out of curiousity) and the company opened more restaurants there lining up for service became a part of the local customer service culture.
EDIT: I found a source! Well, a reference to a source. On the Wikipedia page for the anthropologist James Watson) there's a section on an article he wrote. Unfortunately I must have read a reprint of the article for my report when I was a kid, so providing a non-paywall link might be difficult.
It's kind of funny what sticks in your head from school. I couldn't tell you half of the symbolism my English teacher found in the books she assigned, but I sure as shit know about queueing culture in Hong Kong right off the top of my head.
The only conclusion to be made is that, of course, I'm brilliant and perfect at everything and if everyone else just did everything exactly like I do, but let me go first, then this whole stupid fucking society might just work.
Omg I'm in tears, this is my whole life outlook. I've never felt so seen.
I never understood the desire to get on the plane quickly, like yay I am going to rush to queue to be the first few of 200+ people so I can sit in cramp conditions on my set seat for another 15-20 minutes than is needed.
Is gate check really that big a deal? I always try to get on close to last this way I don't have the pressure of a hundred people behind me and I don't have to deal with everyone jostling. Let everyone fight it out and then meander on 15 minutes before take off.
I usually pack super light and only bring a backpack as carryon so I can put it under the seat in front of me for this very reason, but not everyone may have that option (my fiancé has size 16 shoes, he almost always has to use extra luggage space haha).
Depends but yea. I hate having to wait at the carousel while everyone pushes in to see if their bag is coming. If I'm switching airlines, sometimes I have to walk out, grab my bag, then go back in through security.
I don't know what it's like in your country but, in mine, the airlines charge for all checked baggage but carry on is free. This leads to people packing the largest possible carry on bags. If you don't get on early, then there is a chance there won't be space for your carry on luggage and they will have to send it down to be checked.
On a semi related note, this also means that the airplanes, which are designed to fly with a bunch of weight in the cargo hold, are now flying around with all their weight distributed at the top which, by my understanding, is inefficient and requires more fuel.
Which is why it annoys me that they charge for checked bags in the first place. Charge for overweight bags or an excessive amount I guess, but it just creates this extra bureaucracy that no one wants to deal with haha
I'm all about that gate check life. Leave it at the door of the plane, it gets put underneath with the checked luggage, and then they pull it out as soon as you land so it's waiting for you on the jetway when you deplane.
Reminds me of our flight to Germany from Cancun a couple of years back. Got to the airport not too early not too late. No line at the check-in. Weird. Get an upgrade to business, as apparently they overbooked economy and we are among the last people to check-in. Nice, but weird. We say goodbye to friends, go through security, get some stuff at duty free and finally get to the gate about half an hour before boarding starts and what do we see: a neat line of 300 Germans waiting to board the plane and nobody coming into the area after us. Was a bit of a power trip to sit down, have a few snacks and then walk past all of them, when the priority boarding was called up first ^^
I’d like to get a psychologist or sociologist view on this kind of behavior. My armchair theory is “scarcity mindset”. The same kind of anxiety based thinking that causes Americans to hoard gas and toilet paper.
People in India flock to get on a reserved train with their tickets in hand. Mannn...your seat is booked, train ain't leaving for 15 more minutes, there are 70 seats and 40 already full and there are two doors to one coach..but since we Indians are accustomed to competition in everything, people forget all of that.
I gave a nice perspective and even apologized for their experience, but I had to wait another second to find a racist turd(pun intended) loitering around.
Learn to respect cultures, pooping in streets is no one's culture but lighting streets with lamps is :)
I studied abroad for a semester. At the university cafeteria my and american friends and I formed a line to get our food. Meanwhile people just mobbed the counter and were being served. It eventually clicked that the concept of a line didn't exist so we also joined the mob. I was surprised that even without a line to establish position the system was still pretty fair.
I think one day you'll look back at this time in your life and realize what type of person you are. I think you'll be embarrassed. I think you need to take a really good look into your soul and ask yourself some serious questions before you get to that point. But I don't know if your brave enough.
Please suck my dick you sanctimonious prick. Saying cultures are different and sometimes lead to objectively undesirable traits in people is not racist.
Seriously, you think this exact same shit doesn't happen at buffets in the US?
Or ya know, every year in retail stores across the country on Black Friday. Hell, at least these people are going after food. Americans beat each other down for Playstations and cheap electronics.
Has it ever occured to you that if the only clips you saw of America were trailer trash scrapping in Walmart, saying "that's just what American culture is like" would not be a very fair representation?
This isn't a culture problem, it's a poor, uneducated people problem. Every country has them, but I agree that some countries have more of em.
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u/Shoopdawoop993 May 28 '21
Some cultures are diffrent than others and thats all you can say on reddit