LAST week, I witnessed a spectacular, expletive-laden diatribe by an incensed customer against the employee of a high street clothing store in Jeddah's Mall of Arabia. It was a crowd-gathering spectacle with many people siding with the female customer who seemed hell-bent on pulverizing the young man's reputation. He was accused of being a thief, a money-sucking greedy ‘foreigner' (he was an expatriate), and a liar. The wildly gesticulating teenaged accuser was eventually joined by throngs of other young girls and the men of her family. The store manager arrived, tried to calm her down and ordered his employee to offer her an unconditional apology. His crime, incidentally, was to inform her that the items she had purchased a few days back had been discounted, so she couldn't claim a cash refund for them. This part of the year sees most discount sales at stores end their two-month long run, and as the sales' fever gradually wears off, there are last-minute dashes to shopping malls in order to obtain refunds and exchanges for discount – frenzy induced shopping mistakes. Inevitably, this means that the customer service sections in stores are usually frequented by angry customers demanding to be given their ‘customer is always right' dose. It hadn't always been this instinctive for most customers to claim consumer rights for themselves. Remember the time when you would walk into high- budget stores like Zara or Mango not looking like a catwalk model and be haughtily told that the discount sales hadn't yet started? It was the same with coffee shops. When Starbucks first opened up here, there was a huge hype concerning the kind of clientele it would be accommodating. You needed to look like you could drink a Starbucks cappuccino. The shopping culture in this part of the world has traditionally been bizarrely related to the way one looked and the air of self-importance one carried. It's the same with ultra designer stores in other parts of the world. I wouldn't walk into a Louis Vuitton store in Manhattan in my scuffed sneakers, for instance, because I think they just might not let me in. To ensure a warm reception in many trendy stores, you needed to exude an air of arrogance and haughtiness as well as look like a million bucks. I normally never visited these stores if I was serious about buying until I looked sufficiently ‘fashionable'. I use the past tense for such experiences because there has been a gradual transformation in Saudi Arabia's shopping culture. Multinational brands have employed a much more consumer-oriented customer service and really do seem to put the customer first. Moreover, many of the newer shopping malls provide a much more family-oriented and friendly atmosphere, and are frequented by people from all walks of life. Designer and high-street stores have likewise, been sensible enough to employ friendly and service-oriented store employees. This, along with the sharp decline in customer discrimination has really made store employees much nicer people to contend with. However, mass consumerism has awarded shoppers at all levels of economic ability, privileges that we have already begun exploiting in earnest. My friend is a compulsive shopper and frequents most malls in Jeddah every week, and she has declared outright war on most high-street and designer store personnel. She visits high-budget stores and insists on putting store employees through the paces by meticulously examining shoes, bags and clothes. After they've reached the end of their patience, she sticks her nose up in the air, rejects every single thing she's looked at and leaves the store. Needless to say, she's a horror to shop with and isn't very popular within Jeddah's malls. ‘For years these people treated ordinary customers like second-grade citizens, based on how rich and elite they looked. Better customer service regulations and the increasing significance of common people to their profitability means that I can choose how to treat them,' she replied when I asked her why she behaves like this. The growing popularity of end-of-sale season's tantrums clearly indicates that she's not isolated in such thinking. ‘It's the managers and supervisors who are the main culprits. They don't give their employees the relevant training on customer service. They just employ anyone who is reasonably presentable-looking and bilingual,' claimed an expatriate male shopper who was a spectator at the Mall of Arabia fiasco and asks to remain unnamed. Such attitudes are alarming. Not only are outbursts often unnecessary, but the rationale that store employees ‘need to be put in their place' surely creates an unhealthy shopping environment. ‘It's horrible the way some customers treat store employees. I once saw a woman throw a pair of jeans onto the face of a salesman at Marks and Spencers simply because he was not aware that it was an exchange item,' states Amina Abdul-Rauf, a working mother who thinks such outbursts disrupt the atmosphere for everyone. In reality, far from discriminating between customers, many global brands here are now going the extra step to ensure that their customers are happy. It used to be almost impossible, for instance, to even exchange a discounted item from stores. Now, customers are usually given one to three days to bring the item back and exchange it for another of equal price. Similarly, my local Starbucks at Le Mall on Tahlia Road in Jeddah offers a free exchange if they get your order even the slightest bit wrong. The store employees are always cheerful, helpful and willing to please, and even offer free drink coupons for the really grumpy customers. ‘Of course we get some unhappy customers because everyone makes mistakes, but we are trained every single week on providing the best customer service,' said Alvin, a Starbucks' employee who hails from the Philippines and has been with the brand for more than two years. ‘We simply can't have unhappy customers,' he added. ‘Often we get customers that are dealing with some other problem and they need to shout. We just sit them down and have a word with them, and usually they feel much better and leave with a couple of free-drink coupons, ‘piped in Mohammad Rashid Khan, the Starbucks store supervisor at Le Mall. Customer service here is obviously still inferior when you compare it to the West or the UAE. However, customers would do well to remember the past and encourage any progress that is being made. Surely this is a win-win situation? Good customer service is part of a huge marketing scheme. In these days, the marketing of a brand (and therefore its likeability) is often based on the idea that a happy customer will always come back. It's an absolutely true notion. In short, I wouldn't tolerate being discriminated against when I next walk into Zara. However, I think it's just distasteful to create a ruckus about insignificant and easily resolvable matters like exchanging a discounted garment, only to prove that I have every right to.
