Why Finland is Fantastic – Reason #5,177: Respect on a budget
One of the millions of reasons why I love Finland is the respect you receive when entering a store, talking to a sales clerk and explaining that your on a budget. For example, I went into a downtown music store, Musakauppa, to get some equipment for Radio Free Finland. I explained right away that I was on a budget, I didn’t need anything fancy, just whatever is cheapest. Often in the U.S., you’d get a disgusted look on the sales clerk’s face – they’d point at the cheap stuff, use adjectives like “crap” and “sucks” to describe the products, then leave you to find a more worthy customer. But in Finland, I experience the same respect and attention from sales clerks if I’m buying the most expensive stuff or the cheapest.
I guess part of the reason for the poor service in the U.S. is the sales clerk’s commission. Salesmen make a bigger salary if they sell more expensive stuff. I know this first hand, during university I sold computers at “CompUSA” – I got paid $7.50/hour plus commission, and the bulk of the commission I received came from “Extended Service Plans” (AKA, the warranty). I’d make the same commission if I sold a $500 computer or a $3,000 computer, but if I sold a $3,000 computer with a 5-year extended service plan, I made another $25 or so. After working there for a week, you can quickly figure out which kinds of people will buy 5-year warranties and which one want the “special” that was pictured on the front of the newspaper advertisement. I was working there during the initial release of the iMac – Apple paid us even more money to sell Macs…I sold a LOT of iMacs. After a couple years I left that job to work for Epson, I had trouble sleeping at night once I realized that “extended service plans” were a real sham.
