Service with a smile

The title here is of course enough to bring a smile to my lips because, in Russia, service most definitely never takes place with a smile. This is a leftover from the Soviet regime when just living was difficult enough and though everybody worked, no one smiled.

Now it is even worse. There is real pressure to survive on your wits, no social safety net and no concept of connecting one's job with the customer.

I was at a supermarket called Patterson's (yes, I know, their website makes them look like they rival Waitrose but believe me Neto looks great by comparison). In Russia plastic bags cost. You pay for them. Fair enough, Lidl uses the same system. At Patterson's plastic bags are free. They are hair thin and awful and prone to bursting at the wrong moment so much that if you have anything heavy the assistants give you two bags at a time to try and strengthen them, but at least you do not have to pay for them.

Except on this day they did not have any. At this point you have to suspend your disbelief and accept that it is perfectly normal for a busy supermarket, part of a large chain, situated in a prime position near a very busy underground in Russia's second largest cityt to run out of plastic bags at 11.00am.

It happens. Plastic bags have this tendency to run out without warning. So any jokes about piss-ups, breweries and planning you may have in your head right now, just forget about them. It happened.

Bear in mind people are buying cans, fruit, vegetables, all the little things you buy in a supermarket. Kinda hard to carry home if you haven't got a bag.

I was in the queue at the checkout when I realised what was happening. I was next in line to pay. The guy in front of me had just paid and was looking for something to put the dozen cans and tins he had, the bread, the tomatoes and some odds and ends.

There was an unsmiling checkout girl who sat there looking at him floundering.

'Have you no plastic bags?' he asked.

'No,'

'Why not? How can you have no plastic bags?'

Bearing in mind that our custom there was making this assistant's job possible the reply stunned even me and I have become used to the madness here.

'Just go out and buy one. Why are you complaining?'

The supermarket is in a shopping centre complex and I guess it is true that you could go and buy a plastic bag elsewhere. But seeing how there had been no warning that they had ran out, the guy had already paid for what he had bought and he had no real way of carrying it, it was all fast becoming just another impossibility people here have to learn to cope with.

Eventually the checkout girl whipped up some non-descript transparent, ultra-thin, plastic bags and gave the guy two and because by now I was so overwhelmed by this that the expletives about this ******ing country were coming thick and fast, in English, she gave me two too so I could get my shopping home.

And though on the way back I could not help but laugh at all this because it really beggars belief and stretches credulity to breaking point, I also realised that throughout all this she had never even smiled.