Customer care

I was leaving the FAO building in Rome a few days ago when a display of half-price books caught my eye in the international bookshop there, run, I believe, by the Lion Bookshop. The last thing I need is more books, so naturally - in the way these vices perpetuate themselves - I stopped to see what was on offer and found some nice new Penguin editions of a handful of Maigret novels marked down from €10 to €5. I'm a sucker for Simenon (I can't believe I just typed that), so I picked out four and walked into the shop to pay. There were two women behind the counter, neither of whom showed much inclination to attend to me, so I waited in my usual polite way until one of them took the books off me in a crabby, ill-humoured way, as though I'd interrupted her in some more rewarding task. I told her, in English - it was, after all, an international bookshop - that they came from the half-price box outside. Ignoring me, she asked her colleague - in Italian - who had put the books there. Pat, said the other woman. She had no right, snapped Crabby. I can get full price for these books. Well, I don't know, said the other one, you'd better ask Pat when she gets in. She can't just take books off the shelves and put them in the box when she feels like it, continued Crabby. The other woman shrugged. Well, you'll have to tell her yourself, she said, while I stood there, wallet in hand, waiting for the discussion to finish. Eventually, I asked Crabby, also in Italian, if she intended to sell me the books or not. My intention, if not my tone, was ironic. She clutched the Maigrets to her chest. I suppose I can give you a 30% discount, she said, in a tone that suggested I'd been caught in the act of extracting a tenner from her purse. Normally, if anger is a cooking technique, I'm more of a pot roast than a stir fry, but this time my temper flared and I told the woman I wouldn't have the books if she gave me them, and left. But I wish I'd made her sell them to me at the full discount, if only out of spite. What she's done, of course, is make it unlikely that an incorrigible book-buyer (me) will use the shop again; she's also responsible for this post. On the other hand, she did save €6.

Thinking about it afterwards, I realise I shouldn't have been surprised. The main branch of the Lion Bookshop is notorious for its ill-mannered staff and over-priced stock, despite its claim to be an important reference point for the English speaking community. Perhaps someone should tell them about the Almost Corner Bookshop.

One frappuccino, to go

Those of us who've read Naomi Klein's compelling account in No Logo of how Starbucks mark out, invade and conquer new territory will not be sad to hear that the caffeine empire may have outstretched its effective reach. Read more about this here, from today's Guardian.

What always strikes me when the need for coffee hits me in England (apart from the price: an espresso in Rome costs, typically, around 50p; in the UK, three times as much) is just how totally incapable the workers in these places tend to be. It's not just Starbucks, it's everywhere. Caffe Nero, Costa, they're all the same. The longer the queue, the worse the service, as though some perverse mechanism were in place to punish the customers for being legion. Half a dozen teenagers in branded tee-shirts faff around from till to coffee-machine to counter with as much sequential logic as decapitated fowl. They squabble over (dirty) trays, put coffee into the filter thingumybob then stand and think about the nature of cups, or life, or something. They wait for the coffee to fill the cup before heating the milk for cappuccino. They put plates of doughnuts on top of other plates of doughnuts. They do everything, all of them, and all of it badly, as though Adam Smith had never lived nor wrote. And the managers are no better than the trainees.

I'm now going to be an Italy bore for a sentence or two, but as I spend so much time criticising the country, it's only fair that you bear with me for a moment. In any ordinary bar in Italy, you'll find a person at the till who takes your money and gives you your receipt (in a bar that doesn't know you, obviously; otherwise, you pay as you leave). You take your receipt to the bar where a barman (rarely a woman) glances at the receipt and puts the appropriate saucer and spoon on the counter. This tells him at a glance how many espressos and cappuccinos he needs to make. He puts the coffee into the filter, slams it home, takes advantage of the time it takes for the coffee to descend to straighten the spoons in the sugar bowl or load the dishwasher or chat about football. When the cup's full (as in half-full; no espresso fills the cup), he puts it instantly on its saucer. You drink it, smile, say Grazie, buon giorno, and off you go. It's taken five minutes at the most. Of course, if you want to, you can dawdle, read the newspaper that's lying around on one of the tables. But what you came in for is a coffee, piping hot, fragrant, and fast. From a clean cup. It isn't difficult. If a country that's famous for not being able to organise can do it, it can't be that hard.

What it says on the packet

Suffering from what is almost certainly post-party flu, I've been a recent visitor to our local chemist's and I've been struck, as always, by the subtle, and not so subtle, cultural differences between the UK and Italy. In England, medicines are stocked and shelved, named and labelled, in much the same way as any other consumer good might be. The packages are designed to catch the eye, the names to suggest what good the medicine is designed to do. In England, I'd probably have wandered around the colds and flu section of my local Boots and ended up buying a box of Lemsip. Lemsip. Sounds good, Tastes of lemon, made to be sipped. The box has a tick to emphasise positivity, rich, cosy colours, a gleaming yellow mug with some warming steam rising from it and a human hand around its tummy. In the TV commercial, arms and legs spring out of the box's corners and, before you know it, the medicine is not only making you feel better, it's physically caring for you. It actually makes itself.

In Italy, an almost identical product in terms of active ingredients (paracetamol) is called, wait for it, Tachifludec. Apart from the middle syllable, the name tells you nothing except that the stuff inside the box is medicinal. It doesn't coax or comfort; it doesn't do anything but distinguish what's in this box from what might be in the one next to it. It is not, in other words, a publicist's dream. Granted, there's a silhouette of a mug on the front and a picture of half a lemon, but the general look is 1960s clinical; you can see that, whoever designed the box, their heart wasn't in it. Interestingly, neither the box nor the sachets inside have any information on how to use the stuff. For that you need to read the closely printed four-paged sheet of information inside, which I no longer seem to have. Even there, the how is lost in columns of what that might mean something to a specialist, but leave an everyday flu sufferer woefully uninformed.

And that's the other difference. Chemists' in England are, essentially, supermarkets. In Italy they're more like designer boutiques. No other kind of Italian retail outlet has quite the same aura of wealth. My local chemist's, until recently lined in sumptuous prestige hardwoods with satin glass shelves in eau-de-nil and touches of burnished aluminium here and there, has just been made over. All surfaces are now protected by heavyweight slabs of marble, it has a multi-layered false ceiling Borromini might have designed, and bullet-proof automatic doors that slide open with an affluent hiss the minute you approach them. Money's been thrown at it, and thrown again, until it won't stick any more. In the heart of this shrine to conspicuous expenditure, like serving vestals, are the chemists in their starched white coats, their voices low, their origami skills exquisitely honed as they take the box of Tachifludec and wrap it in a pre-cut rectangle of paper, and fold in both ends, and apply just a touch of sellotape. Voilà.

It pays to advertise

But it also pays to find someone who knows how to do it. I may be more sensitive to language than many people, but the sheer concentration of howlers in this flyer for the Bear Hotel, Hodnet, is pretty glaring. I'm particularly fond of the free-form third sentence, which isn't a sentence at all, and the juxtaposition within it of 'Medieval Banqueting Hall' and 'disco facilities'. Unique backdrop, indeed. I also like the idea of themed wedding, though I wonder what they have in mind. The Black Death? Beowulf?

But the pièce de résistance has to be the second paragraph. The semi-colon is presumably there to lend gravitas to its surroundings - it certainly serves no grammatical purpose. Unfortunately, it comes immediately after pallet, as in:

a) a narrow mattress filled with straw;
b) a hard, narrow bed;
c) a flat wooden or metal platform on which goods are stored.

How sophisticated is that? Nice one, Trevor.

Customer care 2

I was having breakfast a few weeks ago at Birmingham New Street station (I had to change trains. Honestly), in a place called something like the Covent Garden Company. I'd just finished my Greek-style yogurt with sliced strawberry and crunchy bits when a woman came over to clear the table. She wiped the surface with her cloth. We had this exchange.

- Have a nice day.
- Thank you. You too.
- Chance'd be a fucking fine thing.

I treasure this moment of sincerity.

Talking of Birmingham New Street, I once did spend a night there. I was sixteen and I was hitching down to London with my best friend, Nigel Foster, from the Potteries, a first for both of us and conceived, I seem to remember, as a dry run for the great escape. It all got a bit too much for us by the time we'd reached the Second City, so we decided to cut our losses and go to a club called Mothers, which had quite a reputation at the time. (Does anyone remember it?) We saw Soft Machine (with, I think, Robert Wyatt and Kevin Ayers), and Derek and the Deviants; we were offered, but couldn't afford, drugs. After we'd been thrown out, we caught an all-night bus - with the intention of staying on it all night - but were thrown off that as well and ended up at the station. Where we tried to sleep but were constantly moved on by police. It was exciting in a sub-Kerouac way, and then depressing and extremely cold. No one tried to pick us up. In fact, the forces of evil were pretty much absent that night; no free samples from dealers, no friendly strangers with offers of beds. We caught the first train back to Stoke-on-Trent, where my father was waiting for us in the car. He didn't ask us if we'd had a nice day.

Customer care

My mother’s local supermarket, Somerfield, has rearranged its tills, dividing them not according to how many items you might need to pay for, but the container, trolley or basket, you’ve chosen to collect them in. The trolley tills are where you’d expect tills to be; the basket tills have been siphoned off behind a barrier laden with the sort of goods some supermarket designer must have deemed the most probable impulse buys for basket carriers. I didn’t know this until today. I was emptying my basket on the belt when the woman told me her till was for trolleys only.

- Why? I said.

- Because baskets are over there.

- But why?

- Because I can only take for trolleys.

- But I’ve got enough stuff here to fill a trolley.

- But you haven’t got a trolley. I can’t do baskets. I can only do trolleys.

- But there’s no one here, I say. And there’s a queue over there.

- I’m sorry, but I’ve been told. I can’t do baskets.

- Can you change this? I said, offering her a two pound coin.

- What for?

- Because then I can go outside and get a trolley and put all these things into it and then I’ll be able to pay here.

She thought about this for a moment, apparently on the point of saying that she couldn't do change, then gave me two one pound coins. I left my basket on the floor and went outside to get a trolley. When I came back the till was closed.

This story is true. Up to the point at which I claim to have said, Why. Because I didn’t say anything. I stomped across and joined the basket queue. And I’m still angry.

McCourtesy, or Egg's Revenge

I got to Rome station yesterday morning an hour earlier than I needed, slightly hungover and hungry, with five hours of exam invigilation ahead of me. A McMuffin seemed just the thing. I went to the McDonalds by the Ricordi music shop and joined the queue.

The conversation went like this (but in Italian).
- A McMuffin and orange juice, please.
- That's €4.15.
- But it's only €3.90 if I have a menu with hash browns.
- So?
- So why should I pay more for less?
- You should have ordered a menu.
- I didn't want any hash browns. I didn't expect to pay more without them.
- You should learn to read.
- You should learn to be polite, signorina.
- Yeah, right.

After this exchange, the girl gave me change for a menu and stalked off into the rear of the place. A moment later, my McMuffin slid down the chute, the girl reappeared with a smug little grin, picked the thing up and gave it to me. I walked away, still fuming, sat down and ate it.

It wasn't until I'd finished that it occurred to me she'd spit on it.