The Worker Is King

This morning, the check-out cashier at the Carrefour hypermart made a mistake while scanning the very last item in my trolley.

Not unusual. I pointed out the error to her, thinking that all she needed to do was to reverse the item and rectify the error. But nope, she asked me to pay first, and seek the refund of about RM6 from the Return Counter.

Now, why should I do that? It would be a waste of my time. The Return Counter was at the other end of the store, was frequently understaffed and I did not know whether there was a queue there. I insisted that the cashier reversed the item on the spot - it was after all quite a simple task.

And so the cashier reluctantly tried to reverse it. But, alamak, try as she would, she couldn't do it. She just did not know how to undo the error.

Worker incompetence is not uncommon here...so that's not the point of my story.

To continue with the story, the cashier, a young Malay girl, then called her supervisor and explained the situation to him. The supervisor was a little better in customer service - he greeted me with a smile and apologised to me - and then proceeded to show the cashier how to reverse the item.

And then, HE got stuck, lol! He was also unable to reverse the transaction. In fact, the more the both of them tried, the worse the situation became.

Well, that's also not the point of my story. As I said, worker incompetence is something that one got used to after a while.

So, to solve the problem, the supervisor told the cashier to void all the purchases - and re-scan ALL the items in my trolley.

Dismay filled the cashier's face. I can understand why. Since I was doing my weekly grocery shopping for a family of 6, including 3 growing boys, you can imagine what a load of shopping I had and how much unnecessary work that translated to - unloading and reloading.

Nevertheless, instead of being apologetic for taking up MY time, the cashier then showed a BLACK face to both me and the supervisor - although the supervisor did his best to assist her in the re-scanning process. The cashier had neatly forgotten that it was her mistake that led to all this. Well, I couldn't care less about her attitude - I just watched the digital check-out display like a hawk to make sure that she did not make any errors this time.

And THIS is the point of my story - that the Worker Is King here. Not the customer. Not the employer or supervisor. In fact, both the customer and the employer have to live with the worker's atittude.

The lower level workers, especially, often show this couldn't-care-less attitude. It is as if they have nothing to lose for poor performance and nothing to gain for good performance. So why perform? Some of the workers here work in a perpetual slow-motion mode - they talk slowly, walk slowly, react slowly, stare blankly when you talk. My mother, a true Type A personality, is so used to the super-efficiency of Singaporean workers that she never fails to grumble about the workers here each time she comes back for visits. She buay-tahan:)

The government and the law also tend to favour the workers. It is not easy to fire a worker - many employers have been brought to court on the grounds of unfair dismissal and it is the onus of the employer to show negligence or non-performance of the worker. This is not easy to prove in court because workers can do the bare minimum with the poorest of attitudes and still, they would be deemed to have carried out their job functions. The courts tend to favour the workers when in doubt. I can see how frustrating it can be to be an employer here.

As for me, the customer, I have gotten used to all this. Believe me, I was not agitated this morning despite being held up for 20 minutes, which caused me to be late picking Son No 3 from school. We just have to accept this is how things are. *Peace*