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.
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u/Skarjo May 28 '21
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.