British Expatriate Network

One of the changes I've noticed living here is that I've become a better consumer.

I was a timid consumer in Britain. I still don’t shop as much as most human beings, but I’ve learnt to stand up for my rights more and not aplologise for other peoples’ mistakes IE (To waiter) “I’m sorry but my soup’s cold.”

I’ve also become better at sending things back in restaurants, if there are serious problems, rather than silently eating THEIR mistake.

I realise that modern-day Brits are also active, aggressive consumers, but I grew up in the 1960s and 70s, where Fawlty Towers service was normal.

Am I the only person who when confronted with a choice of 500 ice creams, would at one time feel irrational feelings of panic?

I can now actually walk into a Target and quite look forward to buying something, whereas only three years ago, my immediate reaction would be to feel slightly nauseous and want to walk straight out the door again.

I always remember in uk when folks would (if at all very quitly complain about service) starting with the obligatory *excuse me *
why excuse them if you have done that t why bother to complain .
here consumers are much more vocal the resuult being that whatever you may think of the prices and profits the big magacompanies make you service is better then any you could get in the old country .

Competition here unless its some govt of govt protected service is great and it reflexs on the garrantees , promises and return policies that are offered and that decides where we shop .
i can remeber when the first auto manufactorer offered 6000 miles of 3 years on there cars and less then current interest on the deal .


none of us now would even consider buying a vehicle without substancial milege warranties and some sort of discount on interest if financing though the dealer .


house builders offer more free upgrades than was never thought of years ago .

the many consumer groups here do a fine job in seaching out fraud, unfair selling practices and discrimination all because the consumer is NOT afraid to speak up and LOUDLY .

I still get that feeling whenever I go to a Subway / Quizno's type place. Too much choice makes Rude a panicky panda.

Usually, a long line appears out of nowhere, so as well as being a bumbling idiot, a line of impatient people watch you bumble away.

I've never gotten to the send stuff back at the restaurant stage, because I'm still fearful of what they'll do to it...

Sometimes the choice thing gets a little bit like a Monty Python sketch.

I was sort of in a hurry but dying for a coffee, so I stopped at a local gourmet cofeee place.


Me Could I get a - urm - uh- latte please?

Coffee Guy Will that be large medium or small?

Me Small please...

CG For here or to go?

Me To go please?

CG Do you want an Italian lattte or West Coast latte?

Me Er - what's the difference?

CG Well the Italian latte is kind of strong and the West Coast latte is kind of mild....

Me Italian please?

CG Is that will homo, 2 per cent, 1 per cent or skimmed milk?

Me (Finally blowing) Look just give me the bloody coffee!!!

[quote="adeshell @ Sat 21 Oct, 2006"

I've never gotten to the send stuff back at the restaurant stage, because I'm still fearful of what they'll do to it...[/quote]

Absolutely! It still has to be a very serious error for me to send anything back. I also hate seeing food wasted, probably because of some similar war-ration mentality.

I think I'm a better consumer than I was in the UK. Mind I hate shopping and window shopping is anathema to me. I tend to shop via the internet for anything I can, oddly enough I can usually get the same brand as locally, but if I buy out of state I don't always pay tax and even with the postage/shipping, I usually pay less than I would for local bricks and mortar service. Also i don't have to put up with the snitty attitude a lot of the locals can have or the traffic.
I regret to say I'm totally together on restaurants, I'm one of those, dressing on the side, leave out the whatever and an extra portion of something else people who drive others mad. I figure I'm paying, I'm not in the kitchen and I know what I want. I'm always nice to waiters, even dumb waiters after a few G&Ts.
I have sent food back, with no qualms, especially lamb, which oddly enough I don't like when it's bleeding all over my plate. Where the idea that rare lamb is a good thing came from is an American mystery I'll never fathom.
Oh, and I also never pay full price for anything. If there isn't a discount or coupon type thingy from the back of the catalog, an internet bargain price I keep looking until I find the cheapest price. Like the Mexican oil cloth, $25.00 a yard in local galleries, $10.50 a yard from a bunch of sisters somewhere down south, shipping included, cheaper than local.

Now I'm back in Britain my expectation of good customer service has been reduced to almost nothing. Oddly everywhere I've been in Britain has changed - there are now lots and lots of places to buy a coffee and have a night out. But it seems very strange - when visiting friends in Swansea I was struck by the fact that it was still a cack-hole but now there were 15 more theme-pub/clubs to go to at night. There seems to have been a conscious effort everywhere to create a very European cafe vibe. But now town centres are a bundle of coffee shps (fair trade and organic of course, we need to feel morally righteous now don't we?) and phone shops. Nobody talks about a fear of Americanizing anymore - now it's a nationwide campaign to save the British greasy spoon. Try buying a simple ham sandwich and you'll have to choose between focacia, pannini or an "authentic lebanese toasted Halawa." Odd how it still tastes like Mighty White but costs twice as much to give that feeling of being cosmopolitan.

Unfortunately poor service here is still seen as part of the contract - you buy something that doesn't fit or is damaged but hey, them's the breaks. Yes the chicken on my plate is trying to eat the salad but life is all swings and roundabouts. Tough titties.

Then again one of the reasons I came back to Britian is because I was sick to death of seceeding everything to someone because they were offended or complaining. In the US it seemed that because a few people think that seeing nipples on network television at 9pm will lead to little Mandy being dry-humped during Math class that all real citizens must be issued with Homeland Security tape to cover them up. Especially gay nipples - they're the most dangerous.

Yes Bungle, I was amazed last time I was in Balham High Road near my London relatives, how many coffee shops/gastro-pubs/wine bars/ paninni places etc. there were. The Devonshire Arms, once the grotty pub of the area had gone all family friendly. I don't necessarily object to these changes, but it was a surprise.

I've really been enjoying your posts with observations about going back Bungle.

I've had mixed experiences about service in Britain. The last time I was over, I bought a cheap Virgin mobile phone. I was amazed at the friendly and prompt service I got when I had questions. Of course I was also being charged 10p a minute. I was similarly astonished by good service at my UK bank (once an absolutely guaranteed source of completely crap service), especially on the phone (although I read recently those jobs were going to be outsourced to India - oh well. Thanks Santander!). On the other hand I often found I was often dealing with bored, uninterested chavs when I went shopping.

I noticed, in another thread Bungle, you complaining about a company called Talktalk, which apparently are BT's main competitor in the UK for home phone service and broadband. They offer the latter free with a home phone account.

Somebody brought me back some British newspapers recently and I read with interest in 'The Guardian' a shocking and depressing list of this company's faults, in a scathing article.

The article says that its "free" broadband offer has grabbed more than 500,000 customers, but that thousands of them are waiting - not weeks - but months - for a connection. People apparently can't get through on the lines, precisely because they are being drowned in complaints. When they do get through, or write, they are told they can't pull out without paying a 75 pound cancellation fee!!! When the newspaper finally gets the managing director to come out of hiding he offers not an apology, but bland platitudes such as "...we're in the process of taking on an extra 1500 advisers, but unfortunately these things can't be done overnight."

I'm afraid it does bring back memories of similarly awful, fraudulent service.

What I found faintly surprising was that the tone of the article was more 'here-we-go-again' world-weary, than it was shocked.

I don't know about the States, but in Canada, this would be, I'm sure, completely unacceptable. The broadband providers here, the major telephone and cable companies may be loathed, mainly for their prices, but actually offer a reasonable service and it is quasi-competitive.

But another thing I notice in Britain is that because most things are national, rather than regional and the country is so populous, these companies just get drowned by their own consumers. Wheras here in Toronto, our cable company for example, Rogers, with whom we have our hi-speed Internet with has most of its presence in central eastern Canada. My father's Internet and cable service on the west coast, on the other hand comes from a company I've never heard of called Shaw.

Has BT got any better? They were on my top 3 list of most hated companies when I left Britain.

TalkTalk are, clearly, part of some nefarious Satanist sect trying to destroy everyone's sanity in Britain. I signed up in late July and as of last 2 weeks ago still had no service. Then they billed me. So I cancelled and then had to call up to cancel again after getting a letter (finally!) stating my service would "go live" some time at the end of October. So I wrote a letter and called again. The fart-knocker on the phone told me that I did have a service but it just wasn't operable at the moment. The company is the reason the phrase "a shower of wankers" was thought up.

BT are saintly in comparison. Nevertheless they still aren't exactly a good service. Expensive, slow and painful - sort of like a sumu-wrestler-prostitute.

But you are right - people are doing the usual "take-it-on-the-chin" thing with crap service. It is, apparently, part of the bargain. A real example of shoddiness is the Post Office - there is a rallying cry around the UK at the moment to Save Your Post Office which is a laugh a minute. The company I'm working for runs a banking service for the Post Office that is so dreadfully run it is painful. After happily announcing to the staff that we'd achieved a financial target we were then told half of that target had "gone missing" in various ways. Worst of all is that local Post Offices have absolutely no clue what they are doing - opening credit card accounts for 4 year olds, or utterly screwing up applications because they couldn't be bothered to learn how or what the application process is. Tossers the lot of them.

Interesting, Annie shops like a man. I have the same problem as others regarding too many choices, I never went back Starbucks for that reason, when "Small black regular coffee", brought an interrogation. When I walk into Border's Books!. I have learned to divide and conquer, I don't know why it took so long, it's what we do with engineering projects.

The main area for improvement has been in taking care of my health. I knew through a couple of screw-ups in the UK that doctors and surgeons were not the gods they purported to be. The trouble there was that everybody else seemed determind to treat them like gods, they didn't feel any need to consult you, about your diagnosis or treatment, and complaining to hospital administrations got nowhere. Now, here, they advise and I decide.

A conjecture The American spirit that makes possible, the complaining and returning of goods and services, is the same one that brings many of the facets that British Expats complain about, the "me first", the "I am entitled" facets. Are they not extensions of the culture that allows us to be effective consumers?

Yes I think so. Some see this is a giant community of Me's operating selfishly for the greater whole (most conservatives and libertarians I know of do anyway) whereas they may view the European model of individual second as a prelude to Communism.

But it also creates a culture wherein everything is also everybody elses concern. I like to tell people that the statement to "democratize" the Middle East doesn't mean some grand scheme in the same manner the US was created, but rather to run it like a school. The idea that every responsible person (in American society this really means a "parent") in the town has a say on how much money the school gets, if it should build a football stadium, whether the grades really were fair, and just what should be mandated as offensive or not. Not defining principals of liberty or individual rights but that if you all go vote Yes on the school budget ballot your voice is really heard. In other words, we don't want to write you a constitution, we want you to build a football field. Spend money and be free!

I agree. I actually go to the doctor here, take my health quite seriously and have been quite an aggressive consumer in finding the right doctor and being unafraid to get second and third opinions from specialists.

Canada's system is a government one, but it's run far more along U.S lines than the NHS. Instead of billing insurance companies, doctors bill the government instead. Ironically, I ended up choosing oe of the very few salaried doctors here, because I was sick of getting processed in five minutes by greedy doctors. But again, at least I have the choice.

In Britain I had a rather deferential, expert knows best attitude to doctors – an attitude they cultivate too. I sometimes felt the attitude I got from British doctors was that my health was none of my business! Neither should the contents of anything prescribed to me concern me, after all, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Sitting in depressing NHS surgeries in London also actively encouraged me to stay away.

I also go regularly to the dentist now which has been a rather novel experience for me. And much to my own astonishment I even floss now!

How funny, I have found the opposite to be true here.

I just can't wait to become a consumer back home again.

1) The automated voice interactive menu will understand my accent.
2) When I say something people don't understand and I annunciate it clearly, people won't think I'm a stroppy git.

Well the first may be true but the second, who knows.

I have always been a picky consumer. If it's not what it says on the tin, I don't buy it, or if they take my money it's the last time they do.

I dropped DirecTV this week after 4 years of service because they wouldn't budge on some stupid little rule that meant I had to pay the past due balance before they ran the Mover's package. Funny, I thought that deal would assist them more than me. Sorry, folks, I have two and a half months' rent to pay in the space of two pay periods, I can't afford to pay you for your TV now.

Hello, Dish Network.